lead is dangerous, people

With all the kitchen remodeling and re doing the guest room this past April, we have been doing a lot of trim board sanding. and by we, I mean Mike. Poor guy...he works so hard to make this house the home of my dreams. He's been doing it the safest way we knew how - take everything out in the detached garage, scrape and sand, fill and prime. We then brought it back into the house, nailed it up and 2 coats of our favorite "dove white" finished it off.

Well....

The one step we didn't think about and it was apparently a doosey, was when Mike came in from working, he came in with "contaminated" clothes and shoes on, walked around and sat on our clothes couches. UGH... why didn't we think about this....

So, back in April we had just finished our mini remodel on the guest room, just in time for 1st birthday guests. This was also the same time as Jack's 12 month doctor's appointment. They do a blood test (for a lot of things) and it came back that he had an elevated lead count in his blood. Normal is anything below 5 and Jack's came back at an 8. They had us check it again in a couple weeks and we was down to a 7. No one was really worried at this point. But we knew it would probably have to be checked again at his 15 month appointment at the beginning of August.

And then we started the Kitchen remodel and took our all of the old trim and refinished it....and you guessed it - came in with contaminated clothes and shoes. Jack had his 15 month appointment at the beginning of August, just when we were in the heat of the final touches aka trim sanding and his numbers skyrocketed to 17!!! (FYI, it doesn't get harmful until around 45.) We were told, my heart just sunk...what did we do??? Mike and I then immediately put two and two together. April's numbers made sense all of a sudden. And we just felt like we failed as parents - we put Jack's health in danger and it was all our faults.

And just FYI, if your lead number is above a 15 in the state of Missouri, the doctors office must call the health dept....lovely. We still aren't completely done with the health department, but after meeting with them, it made us feel a lot better and we knew they weren't going to take Jack away. I know that may sound silly, but that was what immediately went through our minds. It scared me to death that the heath department was called.

We have since got rid of all construction dust in the house and we are working on repainting all of our doors. This is actually what Mike is doing on this LOOONNNNGGGG Columbus Day weekend - and what made me think of writing this post.

Also, once we cleaned the house from top to bottom, Jack's lead levels dropped from a 17 to a 7.5!!! This was amazing news we got around labor day. Everyone was so happy with his progress. We were told this may be a slow process - lead lives in your red blood cells and red blood cells live 120 days, so we really weren't expecting a number that low. I just hope at he 18 month appointment in early November, it keeps going down. It makes me nervous trying to fix it, because you have to disrupt the paint a bit to sand it, before you paint it.

Fingers crossed for little Jack, he is what matters in this whole drawn out story. We would do anything to make him the healthiest little boy ever.