Every parent who has a healthy child has something to be happy about, but there are some new parents who really had a reason to cheer when their son was delivered: This child was born covered in mushrooms, some of which are quite valuable.
Score! Talk about hitting the jackpot.
When Cincinnati couple Richard and Louise Behrington got pregnant after months of trying, they didn’t expect much more than a run-of-the-mill, standard baby, which would have been perfectly fine with them. But when Louise made that final push and gave birth to her son, Linus, the couple made the type of score that every parent dreams of.
“I heard the OB doctor say, ‘We’ve got mushrooms! He’s covered in mushrooms!’ and my heart just jumped,” said Richard, still beaming with joy after the remarkable occasion. “I’m thinking, ‘Okay, great, we’ve got some mushrooms, probably some standard oyster mushrooms or maybe some portabellas, a little bonus for dinner tonight.’ But then I heard one of the nurses yell, ‘Morels! Some of them are morels!’ Immediately, I started hearing cash registers dinging in my mind.”
Morel mushrooms can fetch up to $150 a pound, and while there was nowhere near a pound of morels growing out of Linus (his total weight, mushrooms included, was 6.7 pounds), that’s still a serious little bonus on an otherwise worthless baby.
Louise explained, “The rest of the mushrooms weren’t worth much, and a few were poisonous, but it was still pretty cool to know that we could head straight to the food co-op after leaving the hospital and make enough to at least cover our gas money for the trip to the hospital and pick up a couple of cans of Ollipop, all on our newborn son’s dime.”
Cha-ching! Now that’s a helluva bonus.
While it’s too early for Louis and Richard to start discussing having another baby, it’s got to be at the back of their minds that, if they did, he or she could be covered in even more valuable mushrooms than Linus was. While a few couple hundred bucks worth of gourmet mushrooms probably isn’t reason in and of itself to have a second kid, the hope that they might score big again could definitely help tip the scales if they’re on the fence. Here’s hoping that if they do go for it, they strike gold a second time!
