Joel Stein Had a Baby

Why men put off having children is beyond me. Especially since it seems like comedians and journalists have so much more to say once they've experienced pregnancy, birth, and otter pops. Joel Stein is my favorite indulgence in TIME magazine. He's now on the last page, which is a good sign for the news mags. Anna Quindlen does every other week for Newsweek, and I love her columns as well. I haven't read anything about Stein's pending first baby since he wrote a hilarous article last fall about what to name the baby. So I guess it came, because last week's column was titled, Afterbirth: It's What's For Dinner. Aparently people are dehydrating their placentas and putting them in capsuls to ingest. I'm all for naturopathic medicine, and secretly think this may be a good idea, but this article is wet your pants funny, even when you're not 8 months pregnant. Here's the first few lines:

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta. But there are two things you don't argue about with a pregnant woman: what she eats and that being full of life indeed looks sexy. So when Cassandra told me that for $275, a woman would come to our house, cook Cassandra's placenta, freeze-dry it and turn it into capsules to help ward off postpartum depression and increase milk supply, I said, "$275 is a bargain compared with the $20,000 I'll have to spend to tear out our kitchen immediately afterward."