placentas and eggs

Last Sunday I went to the Portland Harbor Light (a lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth) and walked around in the beautiful rainy cold for an hour. Dinner was sausage stew and quinoa, followed by a few hours' of A&P homework (genetics).

After class on Monday, I went for a walk with K and B in the snow, and we stood looking out over Highland Lake, which is starting to freeze over.

Last Wednesday, I went to the Bridgton Town Office to register my car and get license plates. Finally - I have wheels! I went for a little joy-ride in the Subaru, then came home and made myself an omelette with spinach salad. I should've been studying for my Normal Labour and Birth test, but I did that early on Thursday morning (before class) instead.

On Friday, we had another Labour & Birth class (two in a row...) - our official Placenta Day. :) Fellow student midwives will understand precisely why Placenta Day might be so incredibly exciting. We walked into the classroom and were greeted with a dozen placentas of various shapes and sizes, all laid out on the tables atop blue chux pads for our gleeful fascination. We inspected them, touched them (learning how grainy calcifications and nubbly infarcts feel under our fingers), smelled them (ah, the earthy smell of birth...), stretched them open (to inspect membranes), palpated them (checking if any cotyledons were missing, or for any areas of accreta, etc), and generally fussed over them in the way that midwives do. Placentas are important. Without them, none of us would be here... and they give midwives lots of interesting clinical information too. :)

After the placenta festival, we watched a Belgian waterbirth video. After lunch, I started out on Route 302, headed for Portland, where dinner and a movie awaited me. On Sunday, I spent the day in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which boasts an amazing diner called The Friendly Toast. Its psychedelic, cluttered, retro decor compliments its quirky (and plentiful) menu options. I spent a good twenty minutes scanning the menu before deciding on scrambled eggs with goat cheese, asparagus and caramelised onions, with cornmeal-molasses toast and hash browns. I guess I'm just a sucker for good eggs...