Beautiful Mistakes

Julie's hours were cut quite a lot in working around Leigh, so come February when Flavor finally opened its doors to the public, Aaron gave Julie the position as the regular Monday and Saturday night hostess. Leigh was then able to work both of those evenings while Aaron took the morning shift before running to Flavor in the evening.

With such long work hours, the apartment hunt seemed to be put on the back burner, which suited Julie just fine.

Aaron's family didn't take as much interest as Julie had first expected them to. Considering everyone thought Aaron incapable of having children, she might have thought the news of his impending fatherhood would have prompted more excitement, but she found beyond a congratulations message left on the machine by his sister and the first phone call from his mother, no one seemed to care.

She shouldn't have been so surprised, given her experience at the wedding. Clearly the whole family favored Matt, so why should they care that Aaron was reproducing?

Julie quickly decided that she didn't like Aaron's family at all, and she was glad that he didn't seem to have much to do with them.

It was the end of March when the appointment that Julie had long been awaiting finally arrived—the appointment when they would get to find out the sex of the baby.

Aaron was so excited in the days leading up to the doctor's appointment, and the night before as she snuggled next to him and tried to go to sleep, he was the one that wanted to keep talking—asking questions about baby names and would she really rather a girl or a boy? He couldn't decide which one he wanted— he explained as she glanced over at the digital clock reading 1:38 a. m.—because there were good points and bad points for both. If it was a girl, she would probably be a daddy's girl, which would be good, but he would eventually want to shoot every teenage boy within a ten mile radius, which would be bad. If it was a boy he could do the little league games and also carry on Aaron's last name, but there would be all sorts of other things that might go wrong—he could get injured playing sports, he would be a more reckless driver as a teen, he could potentially take after Matt and—

Finally, just to shut him up at around 2:13, Julie started caressing him and then seducing him for the second time that night just to get him to shut up and go to sleep.

On that day near the end of March, Aaron's excitement was palpable even as the nurse weighed Julie, which was really the least exciting part of the appointment.

As they walked to the room, Julie complained, "I have gained 12 pounds—do you understand how much that sucks?"

"You're supposed to gain weight, that's how we know the baby's healthy. I would rather you gain 50 pounds and know the baby's healthy than have you gain 5 pounds and have to worry that something's wrong."

Gasping, she said, "Bite your tongue! I better not gain 50 pounds in this pregnancy. I'll be huge!"

"Well, I'm still pushing for those twins," he said with a wink. "It would solve all this indecision about having a boy or a girl."

"We’ve already heard the heartbeat, mister. There's only one."

As they waited for the doctor, Julie snatched her camera out of her purse and took a picture of Aaron sitting in the chair looking anxiously at the door as he waited for the doctor.

He scowled when he heard the snap of the camera and said, "Hey, you can't do that."

"I just did," she said, sticking her tongue out at him. "When I get the chance, I want to get one of those 12 by 12 scrapbook page picture frames and a baby-themed scrapbook background, and then I'm going to make a scrapbook page from the ultrasound to hang on our wall."

"Give me that then, we need a picture of Mom, too."

She handed him the camera and sat there in her hospital gown, posing with her hands on her stomach and a big smile on her face.

"Do I look fat?" she asked, trying in vain to peer over at the camera. "If I look fat,

take a different one."

Rolling his eyes as he reviewed the picture, Aaron stated, "You do not look fat."

"Before I forget again, we have an appointment to go through a place on Thursday—that's okay with you, right?"

Her eyes widened and she said, "We're going through a place?"

"Yeah, you're going to love it. I've already been through it; I think it might be the one."

"You went through it without me?" she asked, eyes widening.

"Hey, you went crib shopping without me," he accused.

"Only the preliminary round!"

"Well, it was just a preliminary look through the house. If the place was a dump, there would’ve been no point taking you through it, but I think the whole place looks like something you'll love. And if we get it, you can hang your little scrapbook picture on the wall."

"I want to take a million pictures," she said. "We only get to do this once, I want evidence of every moment of it."