Placenta Goes to Guinda

Whether you eat it, bury it, or let the hospital dispose of it, more and more mothers today take one more thing into consideration when planning their births: "What will I do with my placenta?"

When considering ours, we decided to encapsulate it and that I would ingest during the post partum period. Gross? Maybe. But pills are like fried food, it doesn't really matter what's in the middle....it all tastes the same ;)

Some mothers and midwives believe that the placenta offers benefits that help recovery after birth -- increase in energy, reduction in bleeding, increase in milk production and mood stabilizer for the "baby blues". Doctors, tend to be more skeptical. I had decided to go with the midwives' side of things and give it a shot.

However, sometime during the last 3 hours of my labor, my temperature spiked to 101.7˚ and the nurses concluded there was an infection in my uterus. (Caused by one of them during one of the "checkings", of course.) I wasn't sure if this created an issue for ingestion, so I let my cousin know, who would be processing the placenta. It wasn't until after she had made the 3 hour trip down to the Bay Area to steam, dehydrate, grind and encapsulate Yaelle's placenta, that she received a response from a Placenta Encapsulation Specialist that the pills were NOT safe to ingest. Well, there goes that.

So we did the next best thing and decided to bury it, in pill form.

At 2 weeks old, we took Yaelle on a little road trip to Shobab's Family Ranch in Guinda, CA. The ranch is of particular significance in that we (Shobab and I) were legally married there...and in general, has a wealth of family history and memories.

We found a recently planted tree in the front of the property, buried it at the trunk base, snapped a few pics, and wished the tree a life of good growth and happiness. As Yaelle grows, so will the tree, and it'll be fun to keep a photo journal of the two every time we go back to visit. Another memory to add to the books :)