The best advice I ever heard:

When it gets too hard, 

When you feel like you can't do it any longer, 

Then you know it's almost over,

You've already made it.

Thanks Mom

A Few Good Things

Just so I don't forget.

The sweetest bird is twittering outside my window, it has been for days.

The grass is greening and the sun is sunny.

One sweet friend brought me really yummy muffins last week.

  

Another decided to feed me and had us over for dinner, 

she is also wonderful at distracting the repetitive thought loops that keep playing in my mind and is so encouraging. 

The hardworking ladies that are with me in primary who make sure everything is taken care of. 

All the positive people I connect with.

(facebook friends, Holla!)

I really like my bedroom, 

(for the first time ever.)

My  Mom is going to stay with me for five days.

My torpedo belly feels pretty good. 

Tulips.

The beautiful, new to us, vehicle we were so lucky to get just in time to fit our bigering family. 

This man I get to be with who is still beyond what I imagined.

I feel so so grateful and so so blessed. 

I am going to start waxing sappy if I keep going so I'll quit while I'm ahead.

I just wanted to be able to remember this in the dark of winter so I can always feel all the goodness that is all around me. 

Eat This

If you spend any time around childbirth issues at all you've probably come across the increasingly common (though still very uncommon) practice of 'eating' your placenta after childbirth. 

Usually dehydrated and made into capsule form some people cook and eat it as food.

They do this for it's many potential benefits including being rich in nutrients to help with healing, increased lactation, reduced postpartum depression.
The Chinese have been practicing this for thousands of years while Italians and Hungarians practice aspects of it as well. 

When I first heard of it I thought it was kind of gross, in the way that liver is gross, and a little strange but I realize that people generally think ideas that are new to them,  ideas different from what they are socialized with, are weird whether they have merit or not.  

Recently I read some comments on the topic reacting to it as disgusting, which I could understand.  

However what I could not understand were the comments from males referring the placenta itself (not the ingesting of it)  is as being like a 'Safeway bag full of blood', and 'one nasty bit of flesh'.

While I will not be ingesting my placenta, in pill or any other form, I am disgusted at this attitude toward this very important organ.  

Would they feel this way about all organs outside of the body?

If so, fine.

Though when people see a heart or a kidney aren't they more likely to be fascinated and amazed than repulsed? 

What about one of their own organs?

What about an organ that didn't have to do with women's reproductive system?
Or an entire dead body?
These are treated with much respect, it follows that the individual parts receive the same treatment. 

I find it disturbing that they have this attitude toward this part of the female body.

They don't have to eat it, look at it or even think about it in anything more than an abstract way so why is it so repulsive to them?

Bodies are not repulsive, they are wonders of science and creation.

Except for women's reproductive parts I guess.
Oh!

but how about if it weren't for their 'organ' no squeamish male minds would be able to be troubled by a woman's gross placenta at all.