Pickled Baby Carrots

Waiting….

Waiting….

You might not realize this but I am a wisp of a person. I hit 5 foot 3 only on days humid enough to give my hair extra lift. I am the sort of gal who can shop in Gap Kids. But husband on the other hand is a bit shy of 6 feet and has the build of someone who played football in high school. (He didn’t—he was an art nerd.)

With each pregnancy, I take on the appearance of a young sapling taken over by an enormous gall. People see me walking around and wonder how I can keep all that baby up. Luckily, pregnancy turns me into a weeble-wobble—I can’t fall down.

With my last pregnancy there was the fear that my body wouldn’t make it 40 weeks as an incubator. Everyone said, oh you will go early; you will never make it your due date; you are having THAT baby early. With Belle, I was a couple weeks early. Not scary early, just early enough to rescue me from the terrible nausea and illness that typifies pregnancy for me.



But as one of those wonderful aphorisms goes, “Every pregnancy is different.” While people are still amazed by my girth—many woman at work have kindly told me that you are HUGE!, this baby shows no sign of budging. I am now just a few days before my due date and after ages of Braxton hicks, I am still just waiting. After weeks of being careful to conserve calories to help the baby, I am imagining taking long walks, eating spicy food and doing jumping jacks to help get things going. But frankly, I am still too nauseous to walk or to do any of those things.

There is another old wives tale about nesting—as soon as you start nesting and are in the middle of things getting settled you go into labor. You basically run to the hospital with the house half cleaned, the mop still in the water bucket.

While I am not one to mop the floors ever (my husband is much neater than I), I thought pickling might be a sort of nesting thing. I don’t mean to say I went through the whole 9 yards and pickled 17 gallons of anything, but I did make a small batch of pickled carrots. Putting things by seems like an age-old form of nesting.



We have plenty of baby carrots from Snake Hill Farm and some homegrown spicy peppers. I wasn’t organized enough to write down the recipe—but basically equal parts water and vinegar, salt, sugar, cumin seeds, homegrown dill weed, and mustard seeds.

This is my entry to One Local Summer for this week and for Grow Your Own hosted by Amy of Playing and started by Andrea of Andrea's Recipes.

It didn’t seem to help budge the baby at all—so I spent the rest of the day standing up cooking. Maybe a fridge full of cheesecake bites will start labor… well, if she doesn’t come I will post those next.