As a lover of random facts, though, I couldn’t stop my mouth from sharing them. “Did you know that on average, fifty percent of women get hemorrhoids during pregnancy? It can be exacerbated by constipation and labor, too.”
Rose blinked at me, but Tabby leaned forward. “I didn’t have either of those. Is it common for women to get constipated? Maybe I should’ve written down what I was eating and started a blog to help women avoid getting constipation and hemorrhoids.”
Passing the unwrapped chess pieces on my lap to Dave with my non-decrepit hand, I picked up another pile and started on the first bundle.
“Roughly forty-six percent of women get constipated during pregnancy, and diet would probably have a lot to do with it. Women need to eat a lot of bran and roughage to help their bowels keep moving, and pregnancy makes it harder for them to do it.”
Looking at her husband, Tabby frowned. “Did I eat a lot of bran and roughage? I don’t even know what constitutes as roughage nowadays.”
“No,” he snorted as he put the pieces on the board. Thank God someone knew where they went. I’d made the mistake of throwing the box out after I’d bought it, and I’d used the instruction book as my emergency phone note pad, which had then been thrown in the garbage by accident when I was tidying up. “You ate a lot of shit. Donuts, cake, pies, candy—”
“I ate fruit and vegetables.”
“You ate fruit that’d been put into sweet things like cakes and pies, fireball. And I’m not sure tempura vegetables and mashed potato count.”
Shooting him a glare, she turned back to me. “That was for the first five months of the pregnancy because I had bad cravings. I also couldn’t stand the shape of fries, so I went for mashed potato, which is healthier anyway.”
“You added half a stick of butter to them, baby, and then topped them with a shit ton of grated cheese.”
“Both of which are dairy products and good for you,” she snapped.
Looking over at Rose, I caught her licking her lips at the food discussion. Yeah, someone was going home to make cheesy mashed potatoes later.
“I could totally go for creamed potatoes with cheese on top,” she sighed. “I’d put them on top of cake and then sprinkle crushed chips on top of it.”
Dave looked like he wanted to puke, but I was thinking that wasn’t such a bad recipe.
Then the perfect cake hit me. “Oh, what about one of those birthday cakes from Walmart? You know, with the frosting you can never make at home on it, little sprinkles, and…” I trailed off, imagining the taste of it like I was actually eating it.
Shaking his head with a sigh, Dave turned from awesome into demi-god for me. “Okay, fireball, you drive them to Walmart so they can get their nasty shit. We’ll continue getting the house ready.”
I felt guilty about leaving them to do all the hard work, I really did, but at the same time, I wanted that cake and potato deliciousness.
Heaving herself off the couch, Rose grinned excitedly at the two of us. “Take your pain pills before we go, Zuri, and I’ll go to the bathroom. And make sure you take the full dose and not just Tylenol like you did this morning.”
“But you just went twenty minutes ago,” Tabby called after her as she headed over to where all of our purses were sitting on the top of the counter in the kitchen.
“I’ve got two massive turkeys in my womb that don’t care where they spread their wings, Tabitha,” Rose shouted. “And my bladder is now the size of a raisin. Don’t you bladder shame me.”
Deciding to dry swallow the pills—sadly forgetting about how I’d reacted to them the night before in the cake-potato excitement I had going on—I almost choked when they got stuck in my throat.
Now I had one of those awkward pill lumps going on that wasn’t painful, but it was weird, so I nabbed what was left of my cup of coffee and almost puked when I realized it was cold as I drank it down.
Yeah, I hated cold coffee, and those iced drinks should be banned. Who in their right mind drank coffee milkshakes?
“Your wife’s a drama queen,” Tabby snickered to Raoul, who’d joined us at the entrance to the kitchen now.
“Don’t I know it,” he whispered, checking around us for something. “She made me leave our bedroom at three o’clock this morning because she needed to fart. Apparently, being pregnant makes it worse, and she couldn’t do it while I was there.”
“She made you leave the bedroom in the middle of the night so she could toot?” Tabby asked, saying the words slowly. “I’ve got to say, I can’t do it in front of Dave, but I don’t think I’d have made him leave the room while I was pregnant with Sheena.”
Leaning in closer to us, he whispered again, “She needed to pee badly, too, so she said she was afraid that if she let one go, the other one would follow. I offered to help her to the bathroom, but she said no because the two were blocking the movement of each other, and adding gravity in would cause an accident.”
In a way, this made sense to me. “So, it’s like when you’ve got air in the pipe to a faucet? You get like water spraying everywhere or a huge noisy delay when you turn the tap on.”
Nodding at me, he continued, “Yeah, if you were to take the faucet off so it was just the pipe, the air would come out, but the water would spray everywhere with it.”
Groaning, Tabby pinched the bridge of her nose. “Can we just get to the point? Did she pee-pee the bed, yes or no?”
“No, I did not make sissy on the bed,” Rose snapped, appearing from behind her husband. “I did a delicate toot,”—Raoul snorted and looked at her in disbelief—“and got up to make tinkle in the appropriate receptacle.”
More facts spewed out of me before I could stop them. “The human body produces two liters—or seventy fluid ounces—of urine a day on average. If your bladder was the size of a raisin, you’d need to sit on a toilet all day long because it would fill up every thirty seconds.”
Joining us, Garrett leaned one hip against the counter beside me. “Where do you get all of this information from, pretty girl?”
“Technically, it finds me. I open up the internet, and boom, useless facts. But the urine thing was something my biology teacher told us about one day. Unfortunately, he did it as he slowly poured seventy fluid ounces of water into a big beaker while I was praying for my own bladder not to explode. That’s probably why I remember it.”
There was silence, but then Raoul asked, “How much urine can the average bladder hold?”
Seeing as how I’d almost peed my pants during my biology teacher’s show and tell, this was another thing I remembered him saying. “About sixteen ounces.”
“I once went twenty-six hours without peeing,” Tabby announced proudly. “It was while I was moving here, and I didn’t trust any of the rest stops. I don’t need some dude sticking his dick through a glory hole while I’m trying to pee.” Unfortunately, everyone had stopped working just as she said this, so they all heard her. Looking around the room with her eyebrows raised, she asked, “What?”
“Are we getting cake and creamed potatoes or not?” Rose suddenly snapped, throwing her arms in the air.