Parenting Fail

Well, so we thought.

So I'm a paranoid mom.  I'll be the first to admit it.  Especially when it comes to my kids' health.  Being a pediatric nurse will do that to you.  You see a lot of terrible things happen to other people's kids & the irrational part of your brain takes over and assumes that all of those terrible things will happen to *your* child, completely forgetting that the population you see is only a teeny tiny fraction of the number of kids running around.
Having said that though, I feel like I've gotten better at that part.  (ie, not assuming my child has leukemia every time he gets a nosebleed).  However, I am a little extra cautious.  I'll never be able to let that go.

One downside to moving so far away from everyone & everything we know is not only not being able to see those friends & family members as often but (selfishly) a lack of childcare.  It's not so easy to hand over the kids to Pa-Pa when you need a night out or, I don't know, knock down walls in a house built in 1860!  So all three kids, especially little Natalie who is not yet in school, get schlepped to the house quite often while Matt or both of us work.  It's either that or it doesn't get done.
BUT, that bothers me.  A. LOT.  I don't like the multitude of safety hazards that that situation poses for my kids, and the biggest one that has been in the forefront of my mind has been:

Lead Based Paint.

Growing up in a post-1970's neighborhood in St. Louis and living in equally if not more-so recently built homes in Kansas City, lead based paint was never a concern for us.  But this house is old as hell & has been neglected for at least as long ago as when the whole lead-based paint concern came to light.  So it worries me.  Granted, we're knocking down plaster from walls that have never been painted, only wallpapered (about a million times), but still.  It's flaking off of doors & it's on the baseboards & it's on the windowsills where we've been disturbing paint chips to install new windows...  It's enough to make this momma nuts. 

So out of pure precaution, I called our pediatrician and asked if we could test little Natalie.  I just wanted to be super sure that we weren't exposing her & doing everything right.  (Figuring she'd be the most at risk).  No problem.  Tiny finger prick & we were sent on our way.

Well I get a call from the nurse and that's never good.  She told me to call right away.

Me: "Hi, Nancy.  This is Stacia calling back.  How are you?"

Nurse: "A lot better than you're going to be!"

(insert Stacia's pure panic here).

She said Natalie's level came back at 27!  Twenty-flippin-seven!  @$#%^&*(!!  Anything over 5 is not okay.  Up to 45 & we're talking hospitalization for chelation therapy.  @#$%^%^&**!!!!  So she asked me to get a venous test just to be sure (first time was just a drop from her finger, this time will be from a traditional blood draw).  I asked for a level on all three kids so I can be certain they're all okay.  Sure.

Thursday, they all get their blood drawn.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, & Monday, Mommy is silently panicking that I've poisoned my children!

Well I got a call from the nurse this afternoon, and by some miracle all three of the kids came back less than 5!!!!  YAHOOOOOO!!!! :)  I'm so relieved I cannot begin to tell you guys.  I have no idea why the first one came back so high, but I'm so incredibly grateful they're all okay!

But we're not going to go back to letting them run around the house anymore.  I'm entirely too paranoid now.  It's going to make things a little slower, but no more Natalie going with daddy to the house while mom's at work.  No more mom & dad cleaning up together while the kids run & play.  Matt's going to have to go solo until it's all cleaned up and no longer a potential danger.  It sucks, but we've gotta do what we've gotta do.  We're tossing around the idea of looking for a mother's day out program maybe for Nataile too.  That way we'd have a few hours a week we could get more done.  I'm not sure.  Hopefully though we'll have it all taken care of soon & it will be a non-issue. Sigh.  This home renovation thing is tough.

(And PS: 3,200 page views at the time I'm typing this post!  Thanks for the love guys! :)  Leave me a comment once in a while so I can know who's reading.  I'd love to hear from you all too! :)) 

American Pickers

Ever watched that show?  Fascinating.  How two people know so much stuff about random crap is beyond me.  And the people that hoard said random crap are equally entertaining!  Mathew watches it from time to time & sometimes I watch it too.  (And frankly, sometimes just watching the show about them digging through piles & piles of junk stresses me out too much, so sometimes I don't!  I know, I'm whacko).

Anyhoo, When we acquired this crazy house, we also acquired all of the JUNK that this elderly couple stored there over the last 30 some odd years.  Most of it truly was crap.  But some of it looked pretty cool!  Most of it not necessarily to our taste, but stuff that looked like it might have value to the right collector.  So, what did we do?  We sent an email to the American Pickers show!

No, we did not get selected to be on the show.  Don't get too excited. ;)

But, we found a guy to haul away all the scrap metal & we found an antique dealer or two to take some of the old furniture, and we unloaded truckfulls of trash to the dump & went on our merry way of tearing down the walls.  Most of the junk is long gone, but there still are a few things left hanging around that we haven't found homes for.

Old photo from what the house looked like when we bought it.  Awesome, huh?

Soooo, Mathew is at the house yesterday, working on the porch and a few other things, and this random dude just shows up.  (He almost took the day off.  Glad he didn't!)  Says he's a "picker" and saw us working on this house, and he wondered if he could take a look around.  Ok, cool.  Whatever.  Well this guy found quite a few things that he was excited to have!  Several of which we didn't think had value at all & we were just going to get rid of!  After it was all said & done, we made about 500 bucks from the random junk that was left lying around!  Plus that was a few less things we had to worry about hauling away.  Sweet! :)  How cool is that!

Now, all of the windows are in in the whole house and it already looks SO much better.  With all of this beautiful weather we've been having, we're having this weird "construction ADD" I like to call it.  ("Ooh, we could start this project next!  Oh wait, if we do this then it will help the outside look better.  Oh, but we really need to start on this part...")  Aah!  It's hard to decide where our priorities are at this point.  We're just so excited to be getting stuff DONE!  Fireplace footings are poured & the floor is cut out, but we had a freeze after that was started & the basement still isn't thawed out, so that's on hold.  Matt tore out half the front porch, but found that the brick under the window needs to be re-mortared before we can rebuild to porch, so that's stalled.  The weather's nice enough to finish the back roof, so that's being torn out as of today.  And Mathew is attending an electrician's class tonight to make sure he knows what he's doing to wire the electricity.  A little bit of a lot of things are being started.  I'll be excited to see what gets finished next! :)

On the homefront though, Mark has some exciting news.  He got his braces taken off!  Woohoo!  Such an exciting moment for a kid. 

He'll have to get them put back on in another year or two, but for now he's enjoying the freedom.  Gavin, on the same day, had to have two teeth pulled to move along his orthodontic journey. :(  Poor dude.  But he did a great job and the tooth fairy was quite kind, so he's okay with it. ;)  And Natalie?  Well she's just busy being her cute little self.
I'll update again soon! :)

Progress!

Such a catch 22. I'm sad to see winter go because here it is just so beautiful. Plus, we've been so busy with the house stuff & work & everything else that I feel like we didn't get to enjoy it as much as I would have liked to. (Next year, mountain fun every weekend, I'm tellin ya!) Now I'm not being totally naive, I'm sure we'll probably get slammed with another snow storm soon before it's all totally said & done, but for the last several days it has been niiiiicceee... and we've taken full advantage. I'm so happy to have warm weather! (Not you midwest people's version of warm lol! But we're ecstatic with our 50 degrees! ;)) We can actually go to the house & put in several hours worth of work & not have crying, shivering, miserable kids hanging on our legs. "Can we gooooo noooooowwww??" Oy.

Of course, with just my luck, as soon as we have this gorgeous weather I have to work nights the last couple of days & miss it. Bummer. But Mathew had a pretty funny story from today. (Well, funny for me because I wasn't there to deal with it! lol) So anyway, today he took Natalie & Copper to the house to do some work to let me have quiet in the house & get some sleep. Usually we'll tie him outside to play (no fence yet to just let him roam) but Mathew planned to put in a few windows, so he let the dog play inside & keep Natalie company instead. (He's needy & gets lonely all by himself.) So Matt's in the living room doing his thing with the windows & the thought does not occur to him that he has just created this great big gaping hole in the wall by taking the old one out. Copper thought "FREEDOM!" and seriously leapt out of the window and took off! (He he he!! I can laugh because I didn't have to chase him down the busy street!) Well, Mathew's not exactly Copper's number one fan. He tolerates him because the rest of us love him so much. But this seriously pissed him off lol. He chased him for a little while, about a couple of blocks up to the grocery store, when he said "screw it. I'm not chasing you anymore. Bye bye." So he turns around & starts to walk back to the house. Copper thinks, "well that's no fun" and just followed him home. End of story. Ha ha! That dog is lucky he's cute let me tell ya. ;)

So anyway, now we have all of the windows in the living room installed! WooHoo! I'm seriously so excited to finally see something be *improved* on the house now instead of just torn apart! I drove by to see it on my way out to work & was just beaming. Yay! No more boarded up window in the front! :) Matt says he was drawing a lot of attention too as he was putting them in. Everyone's out walking on this gorgeous day and he said at least 4 people stopped to talk to him. So here's what it looks like:

Yeah yeah. It's still ugly, but those windows make such a huge improvement!! He's hoping to finish the windows in at least the front of the house tomorrow. Yay! Hopefully I will be able to stay awake & help him out. We'll see how that goes... ;)