anyone keeping their placenta?

[freestyler]

We kept the placenta and are planning to plant a tree over it in the back yard. Am I crazy for doing this? Is anyone else planning to keep the placenta for anything like that? The placenta is in our separate freezer in the garage (no food in there, just ice), and it's in a semi-transparent hospital container. I have to admit, when we came home from the hospital five days after the birth, and I peeked into the freezer and saw the umbilical cord wrapped around the placenta in its container, I was like G-R-O-S-S, why did we save that?? (Could it be because I was on morphine after the c/section, when the doula suggested saving it LOL?) It is such a beautiful amazing organ, so incredible that it houses and feeds our babies, but somehow, it looked pretty darned gross in the freezer.

I need inspiration to actually deal with the thing. Anyone have any inspiring stories about beautiful things to do with the placenta? I need to do it soon, before I get too squeamish and chicken out and just toss it. Hey, we're doing our own cord blood storage the low budget way!!!

Can you tell I'm sleep deprived LOL.

[mainstreetmama]

Uh...I'm not sure how inspiring this is...

...but we have 4 placentas still in the freezer and the youngest is already in preschool. I really meant to do something someday, but...

Maybe I'll check back for some cool ideas, but right now the kids just think it's funny to have placentas next to the popsicles.

-mainstreetmama

[Worldshakerz]

We didn't save the placenta for DS or DD. We live in an apartment and don't really have a place where we could bury it and plant a tree...I always thought that was a cool thing to do.

This time around with DD I actually considered eating some of the placenta. I read so many things about how it can help prevent postpartum depression, help your hormones balance out sooner, and how it can stop bleeding if you hemmorage, etc. Once the midwife was sitting next to me on the bed showing me the different parts of the placenta, etc, I found I really didn't have the urge to do it at all. Although if there had been a bleeding concern I would have done it, I've heard its very effective to stop uterine bleeding.

Thought about freezing it but we have such a small freezer and need every inch of space in there.

[mamas2atti]

We plan on saving ours. I'm unsure yet if we will bury it or make pills out of it.

Here are instructions I got from my bradley instructor:

about the pills....its really easy to do. you get the caps from whole
foods
in the bulk section. and you cook/ bake your placenta at the lowest
setting
it will go in your stove, for about 12 hours. it should become dried
out.
then you take pieces (may turn kind of power chunks) and you put into
the
caps and into a bottle. really good for you and PPD too. I know of a
famliy
who took them all year and did not get sick once. wonder pills

[erth mama]

I am planning on burying mine in the forest near my house, near a big Grandmother cedar tree.....

[allgirls]

we buried Sophia's near a new tree we had planted in the back yard and will plant this one on the other side.

It is a birch we transplanted from the front and boy is it growing!

My first 2 were hospital births..no placentas

[buffybutt]

I plan on eating the part of the placenta that you can and then burying the rest at my dads place in the country where I grew up, so that when Otis is old enough we can take him out there and show him.

I had a really rough start to this pregnancy and I want to give my body back everything it needs. Eating the placenta sounded a bit gross to me but now that Ive done my research and talked to other mamas that have, Im gonna go with it.

Angie

[Stephane]

I'd like to bury it and plant a tree, if I can talk someone into digging a hole.

We didn't save Libby's because I just couldn't figure out what to do with it. We didn't have room in our freezer and it was the middle of August. I knew I wouldn't feel like dealing with it, and dp didn't want to/couldn't handle it. My first two were born in the hospital.

[teachinmaof3]

Matthew's is still in the freezer. I just can't bring myself to throw it away. But I have no idea what to do with it. We won't live in this house forever so I hate to plant a special tree/bush over it. *shrug* Guess it could always be transplanted huh??? I dunno....

[freestyler]

Jiminy crickets, you can EAT the placenta? OK, I guess after reading that, I doubt anyone on this forum is gonna think I'm strange for just SAVING the placenta! LOL Seriously, I didn't know about the edible stuff....not gonna do that though. I can't even stand the sight of anything resembling animal protein yet, and that would include my own! I guess a tree would be the way to go for us. And we're not planning to live here forever either, but it's OK. Nothing is permanent on this earth, so I'll just plant it for today and for the ceremony of it.

DH said we should ask the gardener/landscaper to plant it for us when he comes back to do our grass and a new tree. The gardener would probably think it was some weird animal sacrifice and call the cops LOL. By the way, is it unusual to get the placenta after a hospital birth? I guess our hospital up in LA is a very progressive one. It sure was a fabulous place to have our baby, even though she ended up being urgently c/s. The nurses there were basically assessing my labor and advising me AGAINST using pain meds...can you imagine? And I loved the hospital even more, because postpartum, the staff never said anything about me keeping the baby in bed with me 24/7. Some hospitals tell you not to sleep with the baby if you've had any pain meds, etc. These nurses were so supportive. It was a very cool hospital, very natural and family friendly. And so, they were happy to give us the placenta.

[Rach]

I made placenta prints, though they didn't look as good as others I've seen online.
I am going to eat it, by blending it up in v8 juice. And I'll bury the rest.

[3for3hb]

Planning on making the powder pills, I think... really don't want PPD this time. I don't think I could survive if i got it as bad as last time.

We still have willem's in the freezer. There is nothing I'd rather do than plant it but for the time being we are still renting so... unless we make it into powder and then fertilize a potted tree with it (slowly so it doesn't die) it'll remain in the freezer.

There's a post about burying it under plants/trees in Diggin in the Earth...

[lovnbnhome]

You can always donate it to a childbirth instructor...they always like to show their students the different parts. My mw uses the ones that parents don't keep to teach her students. I think I'll keep mine to show my students too. DH was a little freaked out by that though...we don't have another freezer so, we'll have to see how it goes with the very full freezer that we have right now (I've been cooking and stock-piling food for after the baby )

[scatterbrainedmom]

my son was born on 8/31 and my anniversary is 9/9. i had been asking for a magnolia tree for years, so dh bought me a magnolia and an oak tree for my anniversary and buried my placenta under the magnolia tree .

i wanted to do placenta prints, but we had to emergency transport my ds for resp problems and the placenta set out too long to make prints. i had planned on framing the prints with pictures of ds surrounding it. like black and whites of his hands, feet etc..

[freestyler]

What in the world is a placenta print? ??? wow, there sure is a lot I don't know.

V-8 with placenta, huh? Hmmm.... How about placenta bloody mary? Then you KNOW it's not a virgin mary! LOL

[*green*faery*]

:LOL

We are going to bury it under a cherry tree. Were going tomorrow to buy the tree We picked cherry because I craved them a lot in early pregnancy...

[freestyler]

Green Faery, I like that idea! Thanks!! I also went wild for cherries throught the first and second trimesters, and then (sniff) cherry season ended and frozen just didn't cut it. Then I loved on to plums, so we should plant a plum tree too. I'm still in the plum stage! Our new tree out front is dying---the landscaper put in a real crappy tree---so I'll have him replace it with cherry. How long do they take to make fruit?

Also, does anyone have tips for actually burying the thing? How deep, which part facing up, and so on? Is there a website? I couldn't find Diggin in the Earth on the net.

[IfMamaAintHappy]

we have kept ours this time and intend to plant a tree over it.

[Awaken]

Just curious- why wouldn't you be able to keep your placenta if you have a hospital birth? It's part of your body, isn't it?

I plan on keeping mine...didn't know what I'd do with it though beyond freezing it. Drying it out and making capsules sounds like a great idea- need to research that! What an awesomely rich source of nutrients.

We could bury it under a tree but none of ours is that special to me to want to give it my placenta for fertilizer, and we aren't planning on planting any more trees anytime soon!

[mamabeth]

Mine is in the freezer right now, and we plan on getting a dogwood tree to plant in our yard over it. If you are having a hospital birth just FYI, they aren't really supposed to release it to you bc it's an organ or some such. But my nurses were great and slipped it to dh (calling it "your souvenir" :LOL ), but they did make him take it out to the car immediately after we got into recovery.

My dh thought I was a bit nutty but thinks it will probably make great fertilizer.