Murdoch’s Farm and Ranch Supply is a store on Colorado’s rural Western Slope that sells Carhartt coveralls, a large selection of work boots and gloves, most of the farm tools you can think of, and, stacked by the entrance, a wide variety of salt and mineral blocks for everything from horses to deer.
Guess what Murdoch’s Farm and Ranch Supply and the Lufthansa Airport Lounge have in common?
They both have diaper changing tables in the men’s bathroom. Wahoo! Hey, Lily Ledbetter, things are looking up!
Guess what IKEA doesn’t have? Replacement lightbulbs for their horrifically poorly wired inset kitchen lights. They are also out of stock (permanently) in the GRUNDL drying rack that I want for storing baby bottles, and, oh, yeah, they don’t have a changing table in the men’s room.
And that is how I wound up with a kilo of frozen IKEA meatballs. There’s no such thing as a quick trip to IKEA, and damned if I was going to burn three hours going to IKEA just to leave empty-handed.
How did I end up with two boxes of imported-from-the-U.S. macaroni and cheese mix and one small can of Clamato? Same story, but this time at the huge downtown Kartstadt department store: they, too, were out of drying racks, and they don’t carry replacement lightbulbs, but they do have an Amerikan aisle in the grocery department on the second floor.
After this processed food influx, I’m going to go on the baby diet for a while (no, not the pregnancy diet. As discussed, I’ve been on that pretty much continuously for the last year and a half.) Rather, I’m going to eat like Frida: she doesn’t eat salt yet, and she doesn’t eat sugar, so she thinks that getting to chew on an artichoke leaf is about the biggest treat there is. She loves plain yoghurt, she lights up when it’s time to eat some kiwi, and she can eat fifteen spoonfuls of plain oatmeal in a row without complaining.
As I was microwaving some factory-frozen meatballs for lunch the other day, I made Frida some steamed fish with fennel, sweet potato, and a squeeze of tangerine juice. As I was microwaving some more factory-frozen meatballs for my dinner, I made a quick apple-and-Gouda sauce for Frida’s broccoli and cauliflower snack. Frida’s eating squash, I’m eating mystery meat from a store famous for its wafer-board furniture. It ain’t right.
The same goes for sweet treats: I feel guilty when Frida eats a whole banana, because it has a lot of natural sugar and now she might not be hungry enough to eat the right amount of protein and calcium, but somehow it’s just fine for me to eat four cookies? As though I can route the sugar to my legs and arms and route only cottage cheese and leafy greens to my uterus/placenta?
(Quick question: whose placenta is it, anyway? Is it the fetus’? Or is it mine? Finders keepers?)
Anyhoodle, here goes a weekend where I eat only the foods that the baby eats. I’ll report back!