Having a home birth, the midwife told us she had put the placenta in a ziploc bag in the freezer. Apparently if anything unusual healthwise occurs in the first month of a baby's life, the placenta can be sent to a lab and analyzed for useful information. In our busy house with new baby and three siblings we didn't think much of it until the other day when I was searching in the freezer for meat. I pulled out an unusual looking bag of... you guessed it... placenta. A bit disturbing when you are looking for meat to slap on the grill and eat.
But enough of that. Now the big question is - what do we do with it? I've heard that some people plant a shrub and place the placenta in the hole to nourish the plant and commemorate the birth. A lovely idea, but with a contract on our house, I'm not sure that the new owners would appreciate our last-minute landscaping. Throw it away? That seems wrong, bad, or sad somehow. Pack it on ice, move it to Seattle, and plant a shrub/tree there? Very uplifting idea, except for the logistics of keeping a thawing placenta cold enough for the many days/weeks it may take for us to leave our home here and be in, power on, in our home there. A small problem...
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