People Are SO CREATIVE!

And again, I'm not being facetious.

I wish I could knit so I could make one of these for our friends who are having babies. It's Baby's First Teratoma! (Courtesy of the AntiCraft) Lookit that widdle eyeball sticking out! It's so keeeeuuuuute! According to the knitting instructions, "you cannot have a proper teratoma without at least one eyeball." I wholeheartedly agree. Reach inside! Pull out an eye, a tooth, a tiny hand and foot. Is it stuffed with crocheted hair?

Will someone PLEASE make me one? I want to cuddle up with it at night. It's only fair, since I never had a real teratoma of my own. I promise to hug it and kiss it and love it and call it George. Or Georgina. (Do teratomas have a gender?)

Note: a teratoma is a kind of tumor that contains different kinds of tissue types. (Teratoma means "monster tumor" in Greek--awesome!!) Sometimes those tissue types are identifiable-- like teeth and hair and hands (very rarely), or bits of brain and lung. Wikipedia has a decent article about them.

I have a soft spot (ha!) for teratomas, because when I was doing my OR rotation in nursing school, I got to see a surgery during which the doctors removed a tumor from the base of a young man's spine. It was full of hair and little bones and all sorts of weird fluids and stuff. It was a sacrococcygeal teratoma! It was fascinating! Ah, good times, good times...