Today I went to the Fair. It's kind of a tradition that I started with a friend back in September of 2007. She and I both love rides, it's our "thang." This year was fun as usual, but there were a few ugh factors.
Ugh factor 1: A school district is on strike nearby, which means that there were far more people.
Ugh factor 2: The weather was nicer/hotter than usual, which again means more people.
Ugh factor 3: One may not want to eat a full meal (Mexican) right before riding the teacups with two strangers who kept rotating the heck out of our teacup. Puke crisis averted, but the next hour was kind of tenuous. It didn't help that I saw a pile of puke right before getting on the ride.
Ugh factor 4: All the above extra people increased the amount of claustrophobia and the length of lines; thus, we were only able to go on 12 rides, and I was ready to leave far earlier than normal.
For some strange reason, fair food really doesn't have an appeal to me. As I understand fair food, it's typically fried food (elephant ears, funnel cakes, deep fried everything, etc.). I'm just not tantalized by fried food. You know what I am tantalized by? Mexican food and cookies and ice cream. My menu of the day was tacos, a chocolate chip cookie, and a berry sundae. Not that it was great food by any means, but it wasn't downright awful. Tacos right before the teacup ride is not advised however.
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The fair in September of 2007 was a special time for me. It's coming up on the 4 year anniversary. See, 4 years ago my friend and I went to the fair, and I was blissfully unaware that I was pregnant. I saw all those "do not ride this if you're pregnant" signs everywhere, and I didn't even register any suspicion that the signs were talking to me. I had no symptoms, and it was still too early to tell (or so I thought). I blissfully rode every ride possible and was happy as could be.
That exact September we had just decided to try to get pregnant. "Try" = kind of weak attempt that I was convinced wouldn't work. Every month thereafter we could step up the attempt level, and in a year I would be to the point where there was some sort of concerted effort. You might say I had a 1 year and nine month plan.
Well...my 1 year and nine month plan became an 8 month and 1 week plan starting the next day. Had my husband not inquired about the possibility of success (thereby prompting me to buy 4 pregnancy tests just in case I got the hankering to take a test), I probably wouldn't have gotten suspicious for far longer. I was that convinced that nothing was going on.
Then there was the fact that I did take a test, didn't see anything noteworthy, threw away the test, later decided to re-look at the test, again disregarded it, waited an hour and showed my husband how non-pregnant I was, then he google imaged the test results, and then him telling me that I was pregnant. Cuz I'm smart like that and can't discern a simple pregnancy test and need someone else to read it for me (in my defense, it was a really faint line).
And then my life changed forever. It didn't change in a bad way. Life just forever changed in such a way that it will be impossible to ever go back to how it used to be. A new trajectory, a new journey that started off with quite a bit of denial on my part.
I suppose that day at the fair in 2007 will forever be memorialized to me as the last day of my journey in life without a child. After that day, everything changed. I suddenly became fixated on things like folic acid, sleeping positions, and debating the meaning behind monkey backpacks/kid leashes. (My fully developed thought on kid leashes is that I personally don't like them and will not use them, but I can see that some kids may need some physical restraints due to their ability to get themselves in harm's way.)
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