What, you don't have one in your fridge?

While cleaning out the fridge today I spotted an unidentifiable object that piqued my interest. There have been many surprises in the fridge lately because I was bedridden for 3 weeks after Arden's birth, and we've been blessed with friends bringing us yummy meals on a regular basis ever since.

This particular item was a gallon ziploc bag within another gallon ziploc bag, the solid contents concealed in about a quart of red liquid. At first I thought it was leftovers of a vegetable soup somebody had made for us, but it was a slightly different shade of red and I soon spotted the aforementioned soup on a different shelf. I picked up the bag and squeezed it while turning it over and over in my hands. "What is this?" I wondered, trying to see through the red.

I finally caught a glimpse of something and suddenly realized what it was, or at least what I thought it was. "Is this our placenta?" I wondered. I remembered my friend Susan telling me that she had put it in the freezer the morning of the birth, so that made me wonder what it was doing in the fridge. Later on I asked Mark if it was our placenta that I had found in the fridge.

"No, it's a steak I'm thawing out," he replied.

"A steak with an umbilical cord?" I asked.

We both headed to the fridge and I pulled out the mystery bag. I could tell by the look on his face that it was much soup-ier than he expected, and we both knew immediately that he had just accidentally thawed our placenta. I can actually see how this mistake could be made - in its frozen state it must have looked solid and very much like a steak. But not so much once it thawed

"Who keeps the placenta, anyway?" Mark asked incredulously, trying to defend himself.

"Who throws them away?" I countered, "They're rich in vitamins and nutrients. I thought we could plant something over it in the yard."

In traditional cultures placentas are buried underneath fruit trees to commemorate the birth and fertilize the tree. Some people eat them ground up in a smoothie or lasagna (not my particular cup of tea, but to each her own), and some people have them encapsulated (which I considered, but I never got around to finding somebody to do it for me.) It has been shown that ingesting the placenta can help combat baby blues/postpartum depression, insufficient milk supply, anemia, insomnia and postpartum hemorrhage, and in general help the mother recover from the birth more quickly. And it makes sense that something designed to nourish the baby could also nourish other living things. So that is why I, and many other women, decide to keep the placenta. I just haven't decided exactly what to do with ours yet and, if this is any indication of how hectic things have been around here, hadn't explicitly told Mark to expect seeing ours in the freezer (although I could have sworn I mentioned it to him several times offhandedly while I was pregnant...)

So, who wants to come over for dinner? (ha, ha)