Work Text:
Being pregnant sucked. At least, Eddie assumed it did, based on his observations during the first four months of Chrissy’s pregnancy.
The first three months, when they’d been under the assumption Chrissy’s constant flu was just that— the flu— Eddie wasn’t exactly keeping track of things like he was after their eleven week scan. After telling everyone their news, Chrissy didn’t feel the need to hide things anymore, and the perils of pregnancy became all too clear to Eddie.
“ Eddie!”
“Oh shit,” Eddie groans, practically throwing his acoustic at Gareth as he launched himself out of the sunken garage couch and through the side door. Chrissy was alone in the house, practically pushing Eddie into the garage when the boys showed up, begging Jeff and Grant to tie him down if they had to. She wanted to clean and Eddie wanted to get in her way. She told him to go practice, so he slinked out to do as his wife demanded. He was just worried she’d overwork herself, that was all. And he liked kissing her. So sue him.
Leaving his pregnant wife all alone and then being summoned by a screech— his heart was beating out of his chest by the time he made it to their bedroom. Half expecting her to be on the floor, Eddie slid to a stop when she was lying flat (as flat as she could with a pillow wedged under her back) on the bed. Her cute little belly was pushed out, creating a little bunny hill under her sweater.
She looked over at him, calm as anything when he showed up, “Oh good, I just got comfy but the babies want peanut butter. Could you grab some for me please?”
Her big blue eyes seemed to grow ten sizes as she pouted at him. Were he a lesser man (jury’s still out), he’d go and bite into that lower lip. As it stood, she wanted peanut butter, and he was the one who had to break some potentially terrible news to her.
“Baby… we ran out a few days ago. When you made cookies with Max and El?”
Chrissy’s eyes seemed to water instantly. Eddie rushed to fix it.
“But I’ll go grab some! Right now! I can be back in ten… fifteen minutes?”
The lower lips were sucked back in a bit and those tears seemed to dry up as she blinked at him.
“You can?” oh Jesus H. Christ , he was a goner.
“Of course, Princess. The boys’ll stay here so call if you need anything while I’m out, okay?”
Chrissy perks up, “Do you think they’d be okay with me sitting with them?”
Eddie blinks dumbly. She’d never gone to hang out during a jam session before. A few practices, when they had actual songs to perform for her.
“Uh,” he hedged, “you might be a bit bored today, sweetheart. It’s more a writing sesh.”
That damned lower lip came back and Eddie folded like a god damn lawn chair, “They’ll be terrible company, but they’re not going to kick you out, Chris.”
Lighting up like a Christmas tree, Chrissy heaved herself up and off the bed faster than Eddie had seen her move all day.
👑🎸
“Eddie?”
Not expecting to hear his name in Melvald’s of all places, Eddie looked up and around to suss out who was getting in the way of his quest for peanut butter and his lady’s love and gratitude.
Joyce popped her head around the short aisle, “Phone’s for you, hon. It’s Chrissy.”
His second heart attack of the day. Dropping the basket he’d been using where he stood, Eddie practically jumped the front counter to reach the store’s phone, not bothering to wait for Joyce to hand it to him.
“Chrissy, honey, are you all right?” Eddie rushed out, “What’s wrong? You okay? Babies okay?”
“I’m fine Eddie, babies are fine,” his wife’s peachy sweet voice comes through the tinny receiver, “I thought of something else. You didn’t leave already, did you?”
Heaving a sigh and taking a breath, Eddie allowed his head to land with a solid thunk on the countertop, the receiver still pressed to his ear, “No baby, I just started. What else you dreaming of, sugar?”
He wanted so badly to ignore Joyce slapping her hand against her mouth when she figured out the reason for the emergency call to the store and that Chrissy just wanted to add to her list of demands.
She did helpfully lend him a pen when the list grew to more than three items, and his exhausted little pea brain couldn’t keep up.
Joyce also managed to keep her laughter to herself when a now emotionally exhausted Eddie returned to the counter with a very full basket and a disgusted sneer on his face.
“What’s with the pout?” Joyce asks as she rings through the larger jar of peanut butter, the strawberry jam and orange marmalade, the jar of pickles, the salt and vinegar chips, and a myriad of other items. Including pickled onions , of all fucking things. And marshmallows, which he thought was a bit out of the gate compared to the rest.
Eddie wrinkles his nose, “I just know half of this stuff is getting dipped into the other half and I’m anticipating being told to ‘Try this one, Eddie! It’s good, I promise!’. Joyce, if you don’t see me after this, can you call poison control?”
Joyce snorts as she hands Eddie his groceries, “You got it, kiddo. Give Chrissy a kiss for me.”
“I sure the hell will not if she’s got pickle/jam breath.”
👑🎸
Steve watched curiously as Eddie slapped together lunch— but didn’t add most of the ingredients for Chrissy’s plate to her sandwich.
“Chrissy get the special treatment or something?” Steve jokes, nodding to the empty pieces of bread hanging out at the end of the assembly line, while the rest had piles of ham, tomato and lettuce.
Eddie snorts as he adds mustard to his and Steve’s, but not Robin’s. It does go on Chrissy’s though, interestingly enough. Steve is further piqued.
“If this is the special treatment husbands give their wives while they grow their spawn, then pregnant ladies are dropping the fucking ball on what they should be asking for.”
Steve’s nose wrinkles, “What do you mean?”
Eddie, deadpan and with absolutely no humour on his face, opens the mysterious bucket Steve hadn’t seen open yet and plucks something out only to put it on the mustard side of Chrissy’s sandwich. Steve goes a bit green when he figures out what it is.
“Dude is that…”
“Pickled herring? Why yes, yes it is, Harrington. I’m gonna give you three guesses on what needs to go next. I guaren-fucking-tee you will not get it.”
Steve sunk in his chair, “I’m so afraid right now.”
Eddie didn’t even flinch when he spread orange marmalade across the fish, topped that off with more mustard, and slapped the bread on top.
“...Is she human?”
“I’ve asked myself that every night, Steven.”
👑🎸
Five month Chrissy was worse. Because five month Chrissy decided one day that she abhorred any and all favourite foods that four month Chrissy adored and nearly blew Eddie any time he came home from the grocery store. Except for peanut butter and jams. Marmalade did not count as a jam. Eddie missed the marmalade— it had been surprisingly tasty. But apparently, it reeked to high heaven and couldn’t be in the house anymore.
So long, strange and delicious orangey substance.
He perked up again when Chrissy bestowed a hand job for all his hard work and effort in ridding their castle of the nefarious foodstuffs. He could live without marmalade, honestly. Strawberry jam was where it was at.
That was all right though, Eddie was quick to pick up on her new favourites. And they were a lot more normal and less eye catching compared to the items he’d been taking home for the last month. Some of those old ladies at the store probably thought he was storing pickles and marshmallows for the winter.
Now he came home with apples, more peanut butter (thank Satan that was still allowed), plain potato chips, chocolate, spaghetti (but no sauce), vanilla pudding, lime Jello, and root beer.
Honestly, his wife sort of had the taste buds of a thirteen year old boy. Which he should know; having been one and now having multiple around his house and work place nearly every day. Never mind they were nearly sixteen now. According to the math in Eddie’s head, those kids were going to be thirteen their entire lives. Cause Eddie was firmly twenty-four, thank you.
It was a gleeful Chrissy who dug through the bags once he was home with her loot, pulling everything out and lining it all up. Eddie smiled, watching to see what concoctions she was going to come up with this time (and bracing himself for becoming a taste test dummy).
Only for Chrissy to slap a PB&J sandwich together with a filthy-sounding moan, and stuff the first bite into her face.
And then her eyes got really sad as she darted to the trash can and spit it out.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” Eddie rushes to help, not sure what was happening, “Is something off?”
“No,” Chrissy moans, tears gathering on her cheeks, “...I don’t like bread!”
“...Bread? Really?” Eddie asks, grabbing the sandwich from Chrissy before she chucks it in the trash too. This one at least he can finish off.
Chrissy whines, “I liked bread. I wanted to marry bread. Now I’ll have to call off the wedding.”
Eddie snorted into his leftover sandwich so hard, he’s pretty sure a chunk of it was stuck in his nose for the rest of the day.
👑🎸
The official list was put up on the fridge. After changing her mind so often, discovering new favourites or new banished foods and Eddie getting it wrong enough times— he drew a line down the centre of a notebook page, labelled one side ‘Yum’ and the other side ‘Yuck’ and stuck it up with the little Eiffel Tower magnet El had found for Chrissy.
Chrissy started crying when he’d first labelled it ‘Favourites’ and ‘Not Favourite’. She was upset that the food would feel bad if it saw it wasn’t her favourite and felt like it couldn’t be someone else’s favourite. Eddie didn’t even fathom bringing up that maybe she was projecting some hidden emotions and just made a new list. And later, asked if she felt up to visiting Ms. Kelley sometime soon.
The yuck and yum list was working a lot better for both of them. It was handy for visitors as well, when Wayne would offer to make them lunch or their friends came over to hang out in the evenings. Nancy learned pretty quickly not to bring anything as a surprise after the fiasco of the seven layer nacho dip.
Robin found the list hilarious and decided it was a good public forum and liked adding her own additions to the list. That is she did, until Chrissy started crying when Eddie made fruit salad as a little midnight treat during their movie night, and Robin had added a bunch of fruit to the yum side. Chrissy, in fact, did not like oranges or bananas. As penance, Eddie made Robin pick out all the evil fruits from the salad, which she did without question, while Eddie helped keep Chrissy’s hair back while she hurled. The list was left alone after that.
👑🎸
Eddie groaned into the kitchen counter.
“It’s not worth it, Red. I’m going to have to feed my pregnant wife ice cream and peanut butter for dinner from now on. Those are the only cohesive foods on that list.”
Max purses her lips, looking over the yums list carefully, trying valiantly to find something that could become a meal without using anything on the yuck side. Lucas was looking through their cupboards, as if staring at the ingredients would help him magically create a meal that wouldn’t upset Chrissy.
“Well, what about a salad?” Max offers, “There’s nothing on here about lettuce.”
Eddie turns his head to look at the young redhead, “Lettuce isn’t on there at all?”
“No?”
“...Is spinach on there?”
“Yeah,” Max sighs, “It’s a yuck.”
“Hmm, better not chance it then,” Eddie grumbles.
Lucas looks over his shoulder at Max, “Anything about pasta? You’ve got a few bags of pasta in here, Eddie.”
Max scours the list to make sure, “Spaghetti is a yum, but penne is a yuck,” she frowns, looking at Eddie to make sure that was right.
Eddie just nods tiredly, “Spaghetti is fun to slurp, penne is annoying to bite into because the hole is too big and sauce or butter gets stuck inside of it.”
Max blinks in shock or confusion, but definitely a bit weirded out. Lucas just groans out a laugh and grabs a bag of spaghetti.
“Dude, I think this might be your only option.”
Eddie sighs, grabbing the pasta from Lucas and grabbing a pot to start boiling the water, “I’m so sick of spaghetti.”
Max shrugs, “So why don’t you eat something else? Chrissy doesn’t get as sick anymore when she’s around food on her yuck list. Is there anything you’d like that you know you could eat around her?”
Initially, Eddie had promised himself to eat the same things as Chrissy as much as possible so she never got self-conscious about her strange appetite. That got harder and harder to keep the weirder and more benign her food preferences got (flash back to the pickle and ice cream sandwiches). But Max had a point; Chrissy certainly wouldn’t fault him for wanting meat once in a while, or eating bread around her. She wasn’t necessarily grossed out by the smells of food, just the taste or feel of them.
“Yeah,” Eddie sighs, “Lucas, can you grab some chicken from the fridge? I’m pretty sure there’s a pack hidden behind the jam jars.”
“We might have a problem with spaghetti, though,” Max points out regrettably, “Chrissy doesn’t like any sauces…”
He’d forgotten about that. Misery rushed back up his spine as he laid his head back onto the counter, “Feeding Chrissy is harder than passing O’Donnell’s class.”
Lucas huffs a laugh as he takes the list from Max’s hand to see if he can coordinate anything based on what he saw in the cupboard and fridge. He frowns the further down the list he gets, “Your wife is so weird.”
“I’m well aware, Sinclair, thank you.”
“How does she like pickles, but not pickle juice? Wouldn’t that just be a cucumber?”
Max snorts, “Close enough, I’ll bet. But she says here she doesn’t like cucumbers. Riddle that one for me.”
“How did she figure out she likes dipping animal crackers in marshmallow fluff?”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, Lucas,” Max smirks, “but I’ll admit that one sounds good.”
Eddie bursts into slightly hysterical laughter, making Max and Lucas jump and stare at him. He felt a bit broken. This whole thing was ridiculous and so funny, that Eddie seemed to finally feel the humour of the whole thing instead of stressing over getting everything right all the time. Chrissy was ridiculous. Eddie was too, and so were their kids. It was inevitable; they’d be raising a bunch of little freaks, so he might as well lean into it and forget about being normal anymore. He was going to lean into this weird fucking list.
“Sinclair, grab that jar from the top shelf. Max, can you throw the spaghetti in the pot?” Eddie grins, rubbing his hands together manicly, “I’ve got some microwave experiments to do.”
👑🎸
Chrissy got home with Nancy and Robin in tow, bringing them inside as payment for being kind enough to pick her up from the station. Hopper may like to pretend he wasn't a mother hen, but when he'd learned Chrissy's car was in the shop and Eddie wouldn't be able to pick her up, he'd called Nancy without a second thought to demand she drive Chrissy home.
She and the girls teased Hopper on the way out, but Chrissy appreciated him looking out for her. She was already stuck on desk work duty until she had the babies, no matter how much she tried to wrestle another month of work out of Dr. Albertson. Unfortunately, he was, along with Hopper and her husband, immovable when it came to Chrissy not overworking herself.
"You'll have to think of your pregnancy like having a super speed one-baby pregnancy," Dr. Albertson had tried explaining to her, "Being so small yourself, a pregnancy with one baby would have you on bedrest by your seventh month, if you were lucky. With three babies…"
"So I'm being put on bed rest already?" Chrissy had asked with a pout.
Dr. Albertson had just shrugged, not exactly denying it but also not ordering it, "If you take things easy, we may be able to hold off on it for a while longer. No pushing yourself, Chrissy. Let us help you."
Hence desk duty. Flo was all aboard with Hopper's plan to practically handcuff Chrissy to her desk but had been the one to point out it would unhinge her ability to excuse herself to the bathroom.
It didn't stop Flo from rushing around Chrissy for the littlest things during work hours; Chrissy hadn't been aware that picking up a paper clip from the ground would be too much, but Flo sure seemed to think so.
Safe to say, that seeing Nancy at the end of the day was a small blessing. Chrissy really hadn't been looking forward to the walk home, even if she had already told Hopper, Flo and even Powell that she was still fine walking home. She was stubborn— luckily, Hopper knew one of the three people who could get Chrissy to knock it off and just accept help. And he pulled out the big guns.
"Come on, Cinderella," Nancy said into the station office with a smug smile, "we'd better get you home to your Not-so-charming prince before you turn into a pumpkin."
Chrissy huffed a laugh as she heaved her growing body out of her comfy desk chair, "I think you're getting a few wires crossed, Nancy."
Nancy pretends to think, "Sorry, your frog prince? Your troll?"
Chrissy swats at her friend, who dodges easily with a laugh, "You're not allowed to read to my kids."
That changed Nancy's tune and the girls left the station with Nancy pleading for her reading rights back on the way back to the car, where Robin was waiting in the back seat.
Inviting the girls inside for food was a no brainer. That is until she caught sight of the trio working in her kitchen.
Max and Lucas were cheering behind Eddie, nearly in tears of laughter even as they cheered him on. Robin made a choked laughing noise next to Chrissy, but she was too confused by the sight in front of her to poke fun at her friend.
“Eds?” Eddie, Lucas and Max whip around at the same time, wide-eyed and a bit blindsided by the three of them staring at whatever was going on, “what… are you guys doing?”
Max pulled herself together first. She bounced over and tugged Chrissy by the arm to the kitchen table, “Come sit! It’s almost done, we just have to warm it up again. You’re gonna love this, I promise.”
Nancy gave Robin a concerned look as she went to join Chrissy, “ Warm again?” Robin just shrugs.
Eddie clambers around in the kitchen for a minute before whisking Lucas out of the way and scooting in behind Chrissy’s chair. She feels a kiss dropped onto the top of her head.
“Hi, baby. How was work?”
“It was good,” Chrissy answers, craning her head back in hopes of figuring out what Eddie is up to, “How was your day?”
“Much better once Red and Sinclair came to my aid,” Eddie waggles his brows at her, lifting the plate high enough that she can’t see it, “I’ll admit, your list is beginning to cut into the minimal recipes I know, Princess.”
“I know,” Chrissy heaves a sigh, “And I’m sorry I’m so hard to feed.”
“Never, baby,” Eddie dips to press another kiss to her forehead, “you’re fun to feed.”
Max groans as Chrissy and Nancy giggle, “Good God, quit it with the PDA in front of minors. We’re going to have to reheat that plate if you don’t put it down soon.”
Nancy looks concerned once again, “What the hell are you feeding her that requires it to be microwaved so much?”
“Ah,” Eddie grins and with a flourish, slides the elusive plate onto the table, “Bone apple teeth, or whatever.” Robin and Max snort in tandem while Nancy wrinkles her nose at the revealed plate.
Chrissy just stares.
It... looked like spaghetti… but never in any colour combination she’d ever come across before. Tentatively, Chrissy lifts her fork to poke at the swirl of pasta, watching the slightly goopy mixtures stick together.
“Is this…” she leans in to sniff it, overwhelmed by the very familiar scent, “Is this peanut butter and jelly spaghetti?!”
Eddie grins manically, while Lucas and Max burst into laughter.
“Indeed it is, my Lady.”
Chrissy stares at him, “Oh my— where did you come up with this?”
Eddie shrugs, “Desperation. And the last jar of strawberry jelly in the fridge.”
Nancy looked ready to hurl, “Oh God, that’s so gross! Eddie!”
Eddie looks hurt for a moment, so Chrissy shovels a large scoop into her mouth. The room goes deadly silent as she chews. And chews.
… And moans.
That big Eddie-smile springs up on her husband’s face, dimples and all, “It’s good, right?”
“ Sooo goo’,” Chrissy bemoans around the mouthful. It was like every flavour she’d been craving and wanting for the last month, all in one scoop, “Ba’y, you’ a gen’us!”
Eddie can’t seem to stop smiling even as he admonishes playfully, “Chew your food, babydoll. Wheeler looks like she’s gonna spew.”