Surviving Lead Contamination

Lead poisoning is still with us.

I just took Pom in for a repeat test and his numbers are still elevated. His initial number was 13.5 (5 or below is acceptable) and then second test had him at 12 and now we are down to the third test and he's at 11. You might remember this short post back in August when I leaked that our old house, rehab project had brought lead into our life. We have old paint and that's our source, mainly through dust. I had a freak out phase but after a while of grappling I am feeling more confident and steady about the whole topic. I thought it was time to share a little more about it since its become one of the big things that I care about in the last year and I think what I found out might help some other parent out there.

The good thing is, that his contamination is steadily dropping, its so scary and annoying to have this crazy thing hanging over you. I had a short stage this past fall when I was having trouble sleeping at night because of all the terrifying stuff I had read about lead and its effects on the body. I am so relieved to tell you that I quickly realized that approach was helping nobody and focused on reading what helps, what heals and sometimes just on distraction. Not sleeping does not help the body heal from lead. That I can tell you.

I am sharing a list of stuff we have tried any or all of which may have helped. I am one of those, Try All The Things!!!! types of people.  

Here's what we've done:

• Clove oil on the skin
• Vitamin D oil on the skin
• Lots of calcium and iron in the diet
• Iron drops by mouth
• Re-painting as many of the walls as possible
• Chewable Vitamin C by mouth
• Healing prayer (no, really!)
• Added more garlic and cilantro to our diet
• Did Epsom Salt baths (meant to try clay baths but never got around to it)

There is also a hopeful study published a few years ago, about new research showing lead poisoning is not quite as irreversible as once thought. I was really excited to see that kind of information coming out. 

I want to encourage scared parents out there that you can remove lead from the body, there are things you can try, its not a death sentence for the brain, nutrition helps, you're not bad, your kid isn't doomed and nobody hates you. Having lead poisoning is kind of a closet issue, like having bed bugs or something. People think certain things about "the type of person" who deals  with lead poisoning.

Truth: People from all walks of life can have lead toxicity.
Truth: It means nothing about your parenting or your ultimate health as a family.
Truth: You can heal your child.
Truth: Lead can be in your kid and not cause brain damage.

Remember that there was a whole generation before us who used lead paints with impunity and they did not all end up brain damaged and stunted. Doctors who are well meaning can scare the living daylights out of parents. Not everyone has the money or the need to completely rip the house apart for lead remediation, we don't. Covering up the lead paint is helpful and its worth doing.

The big take-away is, hang in there! 

Getting The Lead Out

Having a little bit of a stressful brush with health and safety at our house. Baby Pom had a high lead test at a routine physical and now I am hosting visits from the city health department and painting everything manically. Tip: If you buy an old house and have room to negotiate with the sellers.....stipulate that all painted surfaces be newly painted before the sale.

Rugs Bloom In This Heat

When it is hotter than can be believed outside, I hide. While hiding I: read extra, drink inordinate amounts of seltzer with ice and re-discover all the little projects I wanted to accomplish in our house. I have been painting trim like mad and spackling little dings and holes and nail pokes in all the walls. I established a secure relationship with our drill (I can now drill in and reverse out all screws with straight confidence...no fear). I made and hung tissue flowers from the dining room ceiling and then got all inspired and re-organized the pantry. But sometimes the best projects come on you in a fit of random inspiration....

One very lazy day I began to doodle on a plain green carpet I'd picked up at a local tag sale and the paint and doodling just kept on creeping along. Pretty soon there was a long trailing bloom explosion expanding pinkly from one corner of the plain, faded green. I passed through several stages of terrified and exhilerated while painting...worrying by turns that I was destroying the rug or exulting over having really *made* the rug work. I love it. Sometimes you just have to take leaps and do crazy random things because the spirit moved you, urges can be genius.

Carpe Minutum!

Am feeling a little more in control of my life again at the moment which I realize is probably a passing fancy here, on the brink of The Holidays...but hey! Today I took the kids to their first theatrical production and left the baby for the first time...(He did great, my friend Nutmeg rocks!) and feeling thus emboldened...I decided to paint a little. There are such ugly risers on our stairs...potentially pretty but so scuffed and chipped and splotched with various colors that they are pretty uninspiring. Have been itching to paint them a nice gloss white for ages and ages. Why not now?!? Since dinner is in the crockpot, the kids are asleep and I don't have to dash out again for the afternoon doctor's appointment for another half an hour...I'm all over it. Ha! Feels so good!

Am trying to become an expert at carpe diem and even more realistically in my life carpe minutum...seize the minute. My life is a woven thatch of moments right now and so there are not often whole days but there are always moments. Must read more books and less reflexive facebook checking, must clean one little spot, sort one little box, lay out an outfit for one child and spend less time standing there wondering what I was doing, wishing I had more energy or lying in bed hitting snooze. There is a place in life for letting go and relaxing your mind and your frenetic To Do List but there's also a lot to be said for doing little things here and there to make your life more peaceful and happy and productive. Am ever inspired to do better with what I have....better than most people say I have any right to expect I can be. Thus we achieve...by trying.

Caulk, Baby and A Garden Boom

I have a new addiction. Caulking. This morning I was doing a little more work on the bathroom trim and I discovered a tube of white bathroom sealing caulk I'd stocked under the sink. It was all downhill from there! Love squeezing it out like glossy frosting and the tactile precision of smoothing it with my rubber gloved finger. I caulked everything in the room and am now on the prowl for more places in my life that need caulking! Caulk! Its fun!

The baby, Pom is growing wildly. He's trying busily to roll over although I expect he won't be successful for quite a while yet. He is completely intolerant of dirty diapers and will fuss until changed and then bloom in smiles. He loves to be held at my shoulder, surveying the world behind me and watching whatever brother is bobbing behind saying, "Hi Baby! Hi!" Pom also has the most incredibly blue eyes. I think he got my Papa's peepers. I've admired his eyes for as long as I can remember so I'm beyond thrilled to have this tiny sapphire eyed creature mirroring him. So fun! A has given up insisting that they're going to fade to brown every time I mention them. I think we may have three brown eyed boys and blue eyed caboose.

The garden is churning out so many vegetables that I am hard pressed to keep up: zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, swiss chard..etc. etc. With all the new garden space we have this year I might finally be able to let go of having a CSA in the future. We really have so much available using both that its a bit manic. I need to remember the freezer and stock things away for winter. I have been freezing herbs in ziplocs which I also remembered to do last year and love, love, loved. Small victories! All our sweet corn is in now and sitting in a bag on the counter waiting to be shucked so that ought to be my first big project.

I am feeling excited about working on the house and a bit disenchanted with the outdoors (bugs, heat..etc.) and am starting to think fondly of our autumn hikes we start taking on Sunday afternoons once it is cool enough to deter ticks. Other things on the mind: curriculum arranging for this fall (1st grade approaches!!!), plans for roasting haunches of meat in the oven on cool evenings, prepping for Christmas (I will not be blindsided!) and our newly annual Thanksgiving dinner with friends. Summer is still with us right now though as the endless tomato salads do testify. Am hoping to have a dip in the community pool before we're through and this weekend we're headed to the county fair!

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Trimming My Sails

English: Paintbrush Português: Trincha (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The radiator, segueing from old dingy white to glossy new white.

The sun is shining, the tomatoes are pouring in, the weather is finally cool enough to stand and the mosquitoes are thicker than thieves in our yard. My speckled legs bear testament. Urgh. So...I'm painting indoors for respite.

Before Trim

After Trim!

 The trim in the boy's bath is finally getting a glossy coat of white and I'm humming away. Coming along, isn't it? I'm so excited about the whole project. I think this room may really end up looking miles better. I adore the cool aqua blue on the walls and shiny white trim always makes me feel better. Have a peek!

The baby has learned to stay asleep for a reasonable amount of time and little jobs like this don't require any taping or hauling out of drop cloths. I could do picky detail work like this all day long. I love being down on my hands and knees with a bitty brush, trying to be sure to go right up to the very edge. What does that mean about me? Something important I'm sure.

The Bathroom Saga, Part Three

Oh man....time gets away. Here I am, finally...sharing what I hoped would be the third and final chapter of the story about the bathroom walls but which looks like it will actually be Bathroom Saga Chapter Three of....four? I hope just four. It will all eventually end. I believe in it.

One time I ripped down all that strange, vinyl wallpaper with the blue faux wood pattern and was left in the world of caked on old glue. Then I got inspired in this post and kismet happened and I found the-most-fabulous-wallpaper-glue-removing-spray-in-the-world. (Everyone who has old wallpaper to remove, run, don't walk to that link and order some from Amazon immediately! Chomp rocks and I'm not even sort of being paid to say that.)

So then, A pitched in and we sprayed and scraped and scraped and sprayed and swept up glue bits off the floor and washed it off our feet and daubed it off of various children and then one day we finished!Woohoo!!!There actually was a finite amount of glue on the wall and it didn't and couldn't go on forever. Hooray! After all the scraping and stripping and what-not there was a little spackle work to do and then some light sanding to wrap the whole thing up.

Tah Dah!!!!Naked walls!!!!

So very, very clean...except for a little random white paint at the top...odd, eh?

And so now the walls stand naked before us! Naked, boring walls never looked so good. Such a relief. So, now we have a manic, crazy week ahead of us and we won't get a chance to slap the two or three coats of soft tealy blue on the walls that I have all ready and waiting in a can. But I feel it...we're close.

Bathroom Redo, Part Two

Remember when I stripped the wallpaper off the bathroom and then got stumped? I have spent months dithering about what exactly I should do next and how. Sometimes the answer was, drywall mud over the whole friggin' thing, glue residue and all and start over...sometimes the answer was old fashioned elbow grease, just a slow manual scrub of every single inch....and sometimes I convinced myself that this whole project was insane for us to be tackling at all and the real solution was to hire professionals and just outsource. I love it when a real person inspires me to suddenly believe in the impossible.

The next thing that happened was that I met Ashley. Ashley doesn't have any inkling that she turned on my lightbulb and gave me real life hope about being a home re-modeler, I'm not even sure she remembers my name...we met in passing at a women's group. She just shared quickly that she is mother of three and that their family purchased a 1929 home (the exact year of our house) that needs a lot of work and she is single-handedly renovating it piece by piece. The day she talked to me she had just finished lining and building a fireplace and installing a mantle over it! Holy moly! Forget my blues...with no training or formal qualifications. She just has an old house that she wants to see live again, she wants to be a can-do woman and she believes she is qualified to learn how to do virtually anything her house needs because she has a good mind and two sound hands. She does it all with her kids by her side with no nanny and her mother living across the country. Dude. She beats the We Can Do It woman all hollow if you ask me!

Image by The U.S. National Archives via FlickrI went home completely inspired and super motivated. I sat down and did some quick research on what was the correct thing to do with a wall covered with wallpaper glue...no short-cuts or quick fixes or cover over jobs but what was the right thing that a real pro, going the honest route would recommend. I realized that even though it will take longer and in some cases take some special equipment and education I would rather renovate our home the right way than turn it into a giant hack job. That is work that a woman can be proud of with good reason. I'd be busting my buttons if I dusted off our home and made it shine again the right, honest way, giving myself an education in the process.

After my internet digging I found out that the right way is truly to remove the glue. Any other plan might fall right through. Drywall mudding over the top can go awry because sometimes the mud doesn't stick well to the glue or it doesn't stick long-term (even worse!). Painting right over the residue could have similar results and professionals would be very pricey and maybe not even a sure bet for "the right method." The only way to do it was to clean the wall. So then I thought, "Well, then let's think outside the box. I have to get the glue off...I need clever methods of doing it." and the research took another furious bend. And eventually I found Chomp wallpaper removal spray cleaner. I read reviews and ordered it up. It came in the mail and I got right to work testing it out this week. I am happy to say that the glue removal has been vastly accelerated, I am back to dreaming about bathroom paint swatches and feeling more hopeful than ever about my own abilities as woman home renovator. It's crazy to do with a herd of children and my feet and an optimistically small budget but is not impossible. I really believe that sometimes the key is just hearing encouragement, it sure changed my tune. Share your major achievements with people, you never know who really needs to hear a success story!

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A Locket Gift

I swear, I don't live in a novel. That said, I did, indeed find a beautiful old locket this morning, tucked into the floorboards of my attic.

I can't complain. Sometimes life hands you ridiculous doses of romance even if it does amount to an absurdly little thing. This is the sort of thing dreamy girls like me want to buy old houses for. I imagine scenarios like this but I don't think I know anyone personally that this sort of thing has happened to.

First there was the long curved bladed, etched filet knife, then the mother of pearl crucifix and now beautiful old locket. A locket for crying out loud! The only way it could get better was if the inside contained the grainy black and white photos of wartime lovers and the necklace was wrapped in a love note promising undying affection. The locket is completely empty save the tiny heart-shaped frames meant to hold photos in, but it is beautiful and it's not every necklace that comes with a story like this.

It feels like personal, lavish Divine Love in tangible form sometimes for these stunning little life gifts to appear. I have to say that I sure feel like I have been beamed upon. I know that may sound trite or hokus-pokus or even vain but I mean it in a truly grateful, honest way.

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Bedroom Vision

Somehow my bedroom always seems to be where the most clutter collects. Well, besides the basement but we're not going there today. I think I often feel like I will just absorb all the questionable items into my personal space for the betterment of the rest of the house. Company's coming? Dump all this crap upstairs in my room. Not sure where to put this thingie? I guess put that upstairs in our room. Etc. Like that.

And then suddenly your room looks like this. Even though you just moved in a few months ago. It was time for soul cleansing purge. So, I de-cluttered and polished and put things away and dusted and now it looks much more breathable.

Boring but clean. Once the quilt is out of the wash and back on the bed it won't make your jaw ache with totally sad emptiness anymore. That said...I have have plans.

Not sure how much you can see here but I've been busy writing down all my ideas to make sure I don't forget anything and also to be sure that something happens. It is so easy to just think of things to do and never really get to it. Isn't the so? I feel somehow more definite, knowing that I have the wall paint in a bucket downstairs. Must find a way to get real curtain rods pronto, the ones up are the crappy kind with the little toothy metal brackets that the squarish rods click onto. If you ever move into a house with those rods and are planning hang anything more than sheers on them, take them down immediately and put up real ones.

I have real issues with interior design. Real lack. I always need help. Does anybody else have ideas or pointers for this space? What am I missing here?