I wish I could say that it told us there is a super obvious
culprit for all of this. Or that something tested high that wasn’t all ready on
our list of “suspects.”
But I can’t.
The window levers and door knobs that haven’t been painted
over all tested high. They’re 125 years old, so not terribly surprising, and
all ready suspects and on our “fix” list. So we shall immediately paint the
window levers and either paint the door knobs or remove the doors altogether
(we purchased doors to replace the bedrooms, just were waiting to do so as we
re-did each room).
The vent covers all tested for minor lead. This was slightly
surprising, but like the knobs and levers, also suspects due to age. J is
taking the day off tomorrow to deal with these. He’ll remove them all, power
wash them, and spray paint them. Voila!
The windows in the house that have yet to be redone (cleaned
out, storm windows put on), tested for minor lead levels. We’ve been working on
these for the past two years, but will take a precedent now and J will just
have to take time off and do them come spring.
Paint in the mudroom that is chipping, as well as our back
shed, both tested for a decent amount of lead. We all ready figured this even before B’s lead
poisoning and naturally kept the kids from those. But J will power wash the
mudroom and paint. We don’t want to put too much into it, but enough of course
to be sure it’s safe, since that whole room will need to be redone in the next
year or so. J is in the process of finding painters certified to deal with lead
paint to come scrape the shed clean. We can paint it ourselves.
None of the trim in the house tested positive for lead, but
he did suggest painting over the little dings and whatnot, which we’d planned
to do anyway. We all ready purchased replacement trim for the whole house, but
at least now we know it’s safe to just wait to replace the trim in each room as
we go, no need to worry about it immediately.
We found B’s car seat model, year, and color online at
healthystuff.org. It had been tested all ready. It’s full of lead (and other
yucky toxins). My mother graciously offered to buy him a new seat, and after a
lot of research and detective work I never thought I’d have to worry about over
a car seat - something created to keep my children safe, not harm them - we
decided on the Radian XTS. It’s lead free. And also scores awesomely low or
altogether non-existent for the other nasty toxins found in many car seats
(chlorine, bromine, etc.). And it’s awesome because it rear facing until 45lbs
and keeps the babes in a 5 point harness until 80lbs (and then becomes the booster until 120lbs and 57"), and their safety is obviously
important to me.
After a little bit of discussion, J and I decided to break into our emergency savings account and purchase the same seat for H. There really shouldn’t have been any discussion to it, but for a minute we got caught up with the numbers. But just because she isn’t having any ill-effects doesn’t mean she should have to sit in a toxic seat we deem unsuitable for her brother. When you know better, you do better. And well, we know better.
We’ll fix all these things of course, and pray that it was
one of these, or something that we’ve all ready changed (stairs, stripped
doors, toys, etc.) and it simply hadn’t taken effect when he was last tested.
The environmentalist commented on how “open and eager” I was to change and fix everything ASAP. I just kind of laughed, slightly confused, and told him, “It’s my baby. I’d do anything for him.”
To which he replied, “If more people had your attitude,
there would be a lot of kids much better off.”
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t give me warm and fuzzies. Validation,
even from strangers, is a nice feeling. Especially with how these past few
weeks have been, but I’ll blog about that later.
Over all, we didn’t learn anything surprisingly new, but
were able to plan a better (new) course of action. I'll be glad, to say the least, when this whole mess is over and I have a healthy baby again.
No comments:
Post a Comment