familybabyshower-16We had our family baby shower this weekend. When Mehalia was born, Anne and Ben buried her placenta at the base of a Bay Laurel, and we really like the idea of having a tree for Bug’s placenta, so Ashley’s mom got us a beautiful Japanese Maple. People put cards in it for us at the shower. Hopefully the tree can handle living in Yakima with its cold winters.

I’ve been reading Husband-Coached Childbirth : The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth, and I just read a bit that Dr. Bradley wrote about the placenta. I had heard that animals and people sometimes eat the placenta after birth and I assumed the new mothers did so to replace some of the iron they may have lost during childbirth. While that may be partially true, Dr. Bradley also said that there may be a chemical in the placenta that helps stimulate uterine contraction after birth and that people used to take pills made from dried and ground placentas to help with bleeding after labor (uterine contraction is important to help stem the flow of blood to the uterus and heal the place where the placenta detaches from).

I’ve also heard that many people believe the placenta has healing and magical properties. While I don’t know if any of this is true, it’s clear that there’s something special about the placenta. Anyway, I love that we will have a beautiful tree to remind us of our baby’s first home.

Placemats

Another really fun thing we did at the shower was play “Placemats,” a game that works like this:

  1. Everyone takes a piece of paper and writes down a phrase.
  2. People pass their paper to the left, and then everyone draws a picture to represent the phrase on the paper that was passed to them.
  3. After folding down the paper so that the original phrase is covered and only the picture is visible, the papers are passed to the left again, and each person writes a phrase to represent the picture.
  4. Write, Draw, Pass, Repeat

We did several rounds of “interpretation,” and we ended up with some really funny phrases (things got especially funny after passing through Mehalia’s hands). A great example: one page started with “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready,” and transitioned to “I’m so unhappy when my clothes fall off.”