Friday, June 20, 2008

Chew on This

What does the FTS have in common with the telephone in our house? They’re both cordless! That’s right, our boy’s umbilical cord has finally fallen off. Woohoo! That thing was freaking me out. It was like a factory defect.

Of course, I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do with it. Does it get pressed like a flower or a butterfly and immortalized in a baby book? Do we bring it to the pediatrician? Do we just throw it out? I’ve actually heard that in some cultures, the placenta and cord are nutrient rich delicacies. I throw up in my mouth just a little bit every time I think about that. Thankfully those cultures are far enough from my daily existence that the thought seems unreal.

Or are they? This from the Mirror in the UK:

Tom Cruise yesterday revealed his latest bizarre mission..to eat his new baby's placenta. Cruise vowed he would tuck in straight after girlfriend Katie Holmes gives birth, saying he thought it would be "very nutritious". The Mission Impossible star, 43, said: "I'm gonna eat the placenta. I thought that would be good. Very nutritious. I'm gonna eat the cord and the placenta right there." It is the latest in a series of increasingly strange outbursts from Cruise in the run-up to the birth.

You can read the full article here.

That's just so weird that I can't write any more tonight. Later this weekend a longer post on how becoming a dad might be turning me into a bit of an dill hole.

1 comment:

Kristine said...

Oh dude, come on, placenta-eating is so 10 years ago! I wrote an article about this in college; I will post it at Fancy Pancakes soon bc it is not online.
Basically, I found out by chance that people- not just animals!- do eat placentas and I wrote about the cultural/nutrition stuff with some humor. The reactions of my fellow students were HILARIOUS.

Placentas are an interesting subject. I've seen two in my lifetime. I wouldn't want to eat one, especially.

In my article I called them "the only unkilled meat." Isn't that disgusting? Is it really meat though? No... it's not muscle, is it? Sorry to get so graphic, but whatever. It's just life.