The test you don't cram for

My nausea continues as does the fatigue.

Logic says its just the tail end of the stomach bug that had me clutching the toilet like a warm comforting teddy bear. This is the voice that says, "of course you're sick and tired, you haven't eaten for a week!"

This was not the voice in my head at the pharmacy yesterday. Picture the scene. I pickup my friend and his two, very sniffly, young sons who were waiting for the bus in the rain.

Half way home the dad asks, “any chance we can stop at a drug store on the way home to grab some cold meds?"

You mean the nearest source of home pregnancy tests?!?!

"Well of course... yeah that would be simply WONDERFUL" You'd think he's just offered to stop at the best coffee/cake shop in the universe, actually he probably just read it as sarcasm until I actually pulled over.

Once there I bolted ahead to the first sales lady I see and whisper frantically "pregnancy test?" hoping to get my transaction completed long before my friend even thought to ask for directions to the anti-coughing, sniffly, wheezy so that you can rest (or send your kids to school half-sick) aisle.

The sales lady asks how late I am (and really, that's one question that has always stumped me, "ummm, maybe a month, a few weeks, I don't know, I might really be half a year early") just as one son appears at my side, grabs my hand, and attempts to drag me toward the in store slide.

That is when I see that the sales lady's 7 months pregnant belly and that she is probably assuming I am the happy mother/wife of the group doing some multi-tasking shopping with my busy (and now growing) family of 4. All hope of a quick, discrete sale is lost.

I now realize that an unforeseen consequence of being open with my friends about my situation is that being caught buying a pregnancy test when they know that you are all but eggless is even more awkward. So I crawled under the plastic slide with the kids until it was time to go.