What's cooking Wednesday - rage and a little placenta

Today should be What's Cooking Wednesday around here but today was also CHEO day for Hope and I so thinking about cooking, much less blogging about it, was put on the back burner. In fact, it was put out in the driveway somewhere. We did eat supper that was cooked in our very own kitchen and it was delicious fajitas made with leftover chicken and some shrimp thrown in but no recipe to share. However, I'm currently baking bread so I think I'll give you that recipe tomorrow as a late WCW. How's that sound?

The day at CHEO (Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario) went fine. We had an 11:00 appointment for an ultrasound and miraculously, when we arrived we were ushered right in... no waiting. Unheard of! Stephen Harper's reduction of wait times must be working. Oh, right, I guess that's not exactly what he had in mind.

She loved the ultrasound - the screen, the jelly, the wand, the radiologist. All of it good. From there, we had lunch in the cafeteria and then back up for a 1:00 appointment for some procedure with a long acronym that has a U in it. And a C I think. Anywho.

She hated it. She cried. Not blood curdling screams. Just annoyed, get me out of here, I've had enough of this and I'm naked, haven't napped, haven't eaten kind of cries. She didn't take a nap, as much as I tried, before we left the house this morning. She couldn't eat for four hours before the ultrasound and then, being Hope, was too distracted to breastfeed between the ultrasound and the long acronym procedure. Recipe for disaster. I guess it is What's Cooking Wednesday after all.

I have to say that what made that procedure better, and made the whole experience much better than it could have been, was the amazing staff at CHEO. Everyone who we encountered was great. They were, not surprisingly, great with Hope and truly love working with kids - you could see it. It is so nice to be in a place where people seem to feel that they're making a difference. It shows in how they do their jobs and how they talk to the patients and families. Refreshing to say the least.

And as the cherry on the sundae, I finally freed up some room in our freezer by dropping off my placenta for incineration while I was there.

Bet you weren't expecting me to end this post with this little tidbit, eh?

Since Hope was born at home, we were left, as is the style, of doing away with the placenta. You're given a couple of options: bury it (but it has to be 3 feet into the ground and who wants to dig a 3 foot hole right after giving birth) or take it to the hospital for incineration. We had great plans to make it a family event so as to avoid paying for parking - one of us would run in and drop off the frozen block of placenta while the other stayed in the car - but it just never happened. So, today I saw my opportunity. Only thing was that I was at CHEO and I was supposed to drop the placenta at the General - the neighbouring regular hospital - on the same grounds but a good walk away. I took matters into my own hands and wandered up to the lab floor.

The lab floor is clearly not a place where laypeople go too often. There was no reception, just a lot of busy doctor-type people working behind complicated machinery. I poked my head into the one room where I found two people who weren't examining nasty bits and told my sordid story in as few words as possible. I think my brevity may have made my story seem extra weird. Especially to the Eastern European man to whom I was blathering.

Turns out he was some head honcho up there. He kept referring to his "assistant" who would help me out. I expected a peon lab tech to retrieve my lovely gift but it was another doctor, who seemed rather senior himself - or at least pretty knowledgeable and all. After explaining my story several times (head honcho didn't get that I actually had the placenta in my car in the parking lot and that it wasn't already with his technicians waiting for incineration) and that this wasn't so odd because I had a homebirth, I got quick agreement that they would be happy to take it and burn it up for all eternity (after doing some poking and prodding just for the sake of science). I have to imagine that peon assistant is amusing his wife tonight with stories of this crazy hippie mother who kept her placenta in her freezer in a tupperwear container for seven months and then delivered it to him today in a Loeb bag to avoid walking a kilometer or so. Actually, he seemed bemused by the whole thing and kind of giddy in a science geek kind of way. It was kind of endearing.

Anyway, this house is now placenta free.