Vamped out

Over the last nine months, food has been Lunchboy's way of contributing to my pregnancy. It's been his way of making sure I and and baby are taken care of. He's relished the unpredictable donut cravings, the 11pm PB&J requests, the desperate need for cheeseburgers at completely random moments. He bought and read books about eating for a healthy pregnancy and cooked dinners even when I wasn't hungry just because he wanted to make sure I'd have good food in case I changed my mind.

So as we've started revving up for the baby's imminent arrival (though to be honest, right now I think this kid is happily camped out with no plans of leaving the premises anytime soon), Lunchboy found this meal plan online that is supposed to keep us in frozen dinners for a few weeks after we bring the baby home. Yesterday he embarked on a 9-hour food preparation and cooking spree that involved every dish in the kitchen and what seemed like a metric ton of Ziploc bags. While he cooked, he watched a couple of movies on the DVR that he'd been dying to watch but hadn't had a chance yet. For some reason half of the movies were horror movies and one of them was 30 Days of Night. Thinking that I was a grownup on the verge of becoming a parent (and parents are supposed to scare away the monsters under the bed), I made the gigantic mistake of parking myself on the couch and watching half of the movie.

Other than zombies and aliens, vampires are my great childhood fear. I can't explain it. They terrified me to the point that, when I was 10, I sprinkled garlic powder on the carpet in my bedroom. My parents had the rug cleaned but the smell never really came out and I was totally ok with that because it meant that the vampires would never make it all the way to my bed. Anyway, the problem is that even though I know they're not real, the fear sticks in my head for weeks. So last night, when I woke up at 5am as usual in need of chocolate milk, I started down the stairs and found myself face to face with a vision of the vampires from the movie, and turned right around and went back upstairs to bed. The idea of shrieking, toothy creatures lurking around every dark corner was just too much. Parking downstairs in the garage after yoga tonight? Also not good. Being home alone? I have all the lights and the TV on. I am my 13-year-old self. But at least the kitchen smells like the 40 cloves of garlic that Lunchboy used to cook his phalanx of food. That has to count for something, right?