Pass the Placenta
Here’s a post from Chow with a little video about hiring a service to dry out and grind your placenta to make pills. It’s a long-standing practice of Chinese medicine which sounds gross, but probably does new moms good.
The video is a little lame. I prefer Joel Stein’s article from Time that the video was a supplement to. It’s his wife’s placenta getting cooked in the video. He’s skeptical.
I’m maybe sort of a hippy, but I’d pass on the placenta pills. We don’t got a spare $275 for a placenta chef, and I’m not about to do it myself. I doubt we’d even bring the thing home to plant a tree over…I know it’s full of 9 months of nutrients, but I figure we’ll have other things on our minds.
People do all kinds of things with placentas. “Making prints of the placenta, using either the blood that covers it or ink and paint, are not uncommon,” I read on the Hip Chick Pregnancy Guide page. Not uncommon? Check back with me in 5 months to see if, postpartum, I have the urge to make conceptual art with our baby’s placenta. Maybe we can sell the baby’s placenta! I like that idea. Get this kid working before she’s even a few hours old.
Back in Action
We moved. It’s only 2-1/2 blocks north of our old house, but it was a move nonetheless.
We’ll be paying $995/month here, vs. $1020/month for the older place. But here we have to pay for the garbage, which we didn’t before, so I think we’re coming out even steven.
Our new house is a lot cozier. That’s code for less livable space, an odd choice considering we’re going to have more people here in 5 months or so. But we got rid of about 4 truckloads of yucky furniture we didn’t like and clothes we didn’t wear, books we won’t read. I don’t have a desk now. I use my laptop on the kitchen table and put it away when I’m done. The minimalism of this is comforting to me now.
So I was out of blogland for a bit, but now I’m back. The move was cheap. Friends and family generously helped us (easy to recruit when you’re preggers), and since we didn’t go far we just did multiple loads in our pickup–no U-Haul required.
We moved for a few reasons. Our next door neighbors were loud and trashy. This place has a better yard and better layout. And ceiling fans. And carpet in the bedrooms. A bunch of small factors that add up to a much better situation. A fresh slate for our new family to come.
