Projects and paranoia

I've been working on a new project at our casa recently - repainting all the window and door mouldings, as well as the doors themselves. As with many things, it seemed easy enough when I started and now I realize that it's going to take forever to finish! Add that I can only paint when M is sleeping to the fact that we have about a jillion windows/doors and you get a very slow-moving project. Doing things little by little makes me crazy, so I guess this is good practice.

The reason I'm repainting is that we've finally come to terms with the fact that our lovely house is filled with not-so-lovely lead paint. Knowing that it was 100 years old, we had a fancy paint test done on it before M was conceived and it came out negative. Whew, we thought. And that was the last time we thought about it, until M turned one and we got his blood lead levels checked at the doctor. It's standard if you live in an old house, at least in these parts.

(Not really related, but the blood draw for the test was awful. I don't know if M just hates needles or if they didn't get the needle in right, but he totally freaked out. He screamed through the test and then kept on crying for the next couple of hours. Very unusual for him. Poor guy.)

So, the results came back and showed that he does have lead in his system. It's not a crazy amount, but slightly over the national average. The doctor said not to worry about it, and so we didn't...until a lead safety guy came to talk to our baby playgroup. Knowing me and my always-searching-for-something-to-obsessively-worry-about personality, I told Sacha that I would probably be upset when she got home. And I was right - the lead guy freaked me the f**k out. His basic message was that any lead in the blood is bad news and the next thing you know, your kid will have lost IQ points and will be doomed for the rest of their life. Or something like that. That, combined with the fact that we did more tests on our paint (this time on the cracked parts so we could get at all the different layers) and several came up bright pink for lead paint, sent me right into a bit meltdown.

I've mentioned before that I had a tough time with anxiety during pregnancy, and that I've struggled with it on and off for a long time. I've been doing really well recently and again thought naively that I must have finally conquered it. Apparently I'm not quite there yet. This lead thing has thrown me. I can't get past the feeling that our house is poisoning our child and that we should panic. I even dragged Sacha to go look at houses this weekend because of the intensity of my feeling that we must. get. out. now!

I know I'm being irrational. No one else seems overly concerned about all this and M is, from what we can see, doing great. And, our environment is full of all kinds of stuff that we wouldn't escape just by jumping ship in this house for another one. So, I'm trying to channel my worries into something productive. We've established that our paint issue is in the window and door frames and that it would probably solve most of the problem if they were painted over. Enter my new painting project. I've actually felt a lot better about things since I started working on repainting everything. I've even been using zero-VOC paint! Hopefully this will make our home safer and give it a makeover to boot. And maybe one of these days I'll learn how to calm down a little.