preface: dear mom, i realize that at my behest, you came to our house on sunday, after a week of shopping and cooking, bearing 18 full delicious, healthy meals and bunches of groceries to help us get through these last (please, lord) few weeks of morning sickness-induced cooking/shopping aversion. please realize how much i appreciate this and plan to eat every morsel of the fruits of your efforts and the fruits that you bought at the store. the following story should not be taken as a slap in the face and instead should be seen as simply the psychotic whims of my pregnant stomach that is averaging 1.25 vomits per day. i love you and your food.
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here's the deal with my particular brand of morning sickness. any food that i have to see or smell before i am 100% starving and ready to eat it becomes repulsive to me almost instantly at the thought of actually eating it. this means i pretty much have to wait until i am really really hungry and then ambush my food. or more likely, this means that someone else has to prepare my food for me. i hate smelling it beforehand so that rules out jesse cooking (which he so would). and since ALL food repulses me right up until the moment where i am so hungry that judah's little leg rolls are starting to resemble plump crullers, i don't feel like going to a nice healthy restaurant and waiting 20 minutes for them to steam or de-fattify my food. essentially this means that during this dreadful period of early pregnancy i eat a lot of fast food. shame given. shame taken. moving on.
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i think jesse, my coworkers and my birth teacher would testify that i am a pretty nutritional pregnant eater. with judah the sickness stopped right on the 10 week mark, the day he went from embryo to fetus. so that left 29 weeks of produce, grains and lean meats to cancel out the 10 (really only 6 or 7) weeks of arterial purgatory. judah has glowing skin, robust nail beds and a supple coat to attest to the fact that i did a pretty good job. so i don't feel so bad about the trash i ate there at first when the blog tagline would have been "put up your dukes: just barely surviving."
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so there's my shoddy justification. moving on. all i could think about today from the moment i woke up was, "what time does krystal start serving lunch?" that's right, i had a craving. my cravings tend to be very specific and not repetitive. i don't always want pickles for the whole 9 months, but so help me if you don't give me a zaxby's chicken finger in about 30 seconds, this whole place is gonna burn! and then i won't eat that same food again for 24 weeks or something. so today was krystal.
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i must say that krystal, while also the most disgusting, nutritionally-void and least-customer-service minded restaurant chain in this great nation, is by far my favorite fast food joint.
once, when i was a freshman in college i ate there the night before a volleyball game. i got debilitating diarrhea (think hot, yellow foam) the next morning that kept me from being able to play and the trainer blamed it on the chili cheese pups (little did he know that my steel colon was MADE for all things chili-cheese and it was probably that fruit and granola i had eaten at pregame that my intestines were rebelling against). i was slapped with a lifetime ban by my coach.
luckily, i don't play under that regime any longer. not that that ever kept me away...lifetime bans are temporarily lifted when you and your BFF have had a bit too much to drink and after 3 hours of spastic undulations that we were just so sure was super hot and rhythmic dance moves you all of a sudden realize that you have never been so hungry in your entire life so you hike it over to krystal and order half the menu followed by snuggling up in a booth mumbling into our grease-laden soggy buns about how its the best food we've ever eaten in our entire lives while also pondering if that homeless person ensconced in his/her windbreaker to our left is a male, female or turtle. ah, the golden years.

homeless hair and musical talent simulated. problem skin and hess's pants are reality
have a made my point? i love krystal. today, the only thing i aspired to was eating there for lunch. so my old volvo was idling just beyond the drive thru entry when the clocked ticked over to 10:30 am. $10 later (how the fuuuuuuuuh?) i was proudly dragging my bounty back to my desk. my office is on the second floor so taking the stairs preemptively cancels it all out anyway.

dreams do come true (look away, mom!)
i got a little ahead of myself and ordered way too much. i only ate one pup and one double cheese krystal, but it was so worth it. i have a raging sodium/caffiene/saturated meat fat headache right now, but i wouldn't trade it for the world. everybody say your prayers that the end of the pregpocalypse comes this saturday at week 10!