Lead Balloon

What is wrong with me people? Seriously, I'm sure you guys come here to listen to me freak out, and I haven't really been filling your needs in my last couple posts. Far be it from me to deprive you, so here goes.

The lead poisoning thing has be FREAKED. Seriously. Our house was built in 1962, pre-lead paint ban. KayTar is never unsupervised, unless she is safely in her crib, so she doesn't have the opportunity to have a nice paint chip smorgasbord. I know she's not eating paint chips…because HELLO! KayTar eating? No. And eating something called a "chip"? Definitely not. If it was paint chip puree in a stage 2 jar, maybe...but otherwise, no. My initial thought was that in all likelihood, it is not lead poisoning. But when I mentioned it to a family member, the least alarmist family member I have, no less, she substantiated it. Wow. Of course I then hop on to Google, because you never find anything but good news on the internet (right?) and start reading. Turns out you can get lead poisoning from all sorts of innocuous things....dust, water from pipes soldered with lead, soil from areas with houses painted with lead paint.

We've lived here for KayTar's entire existence. Conception to this very day have all taken place in this house. Now I think, have we been poisoning her? When I was drinking tap water while pregnant and nursing, was I hurting her? When we made formula with tap water, were we hurting her? Dear Lord, when we boiled her bottles in water were we poisoning her? (Heating water actually causes lead levels to RISE) What about bathing? When we track dirt from outside into the house on our shoes, and she touches the ground and later sucks on her hands, are we poisoning her?!? Do you see how this is going? Now I feel like the house is killing us all, and I have absolutely NO evidence to support that, except the year the house was built. We haven't even done the blood work yet. While we are waiting on the testing and results, I'm wondering if we are harming her by being here, does that even make sense? If the tests come back positive, I'm going to kick myself for staying here...even though, as of right now, there is no actual reason not to stay here. I doubt it is lead poisoning, logically, I doubt it...but in a world of uncontrollable reasons for KayTar's various difficulties, this is the only possibility out there that I feel that could have been controlled. And that fact alone will provide me with endless guilt if it ends up being our diagnosis. Ah, the joys of parenthood. ;)