Pics

Jackson is trying out his new art wall.
Kickin' back in the carseat.
Sweet repose. I took him out for a walk hoping he'd crash.
The 24 hour fascination with the new potty. Jackson took it to bed with him. We had to take it away though, he was too distracted opening and closing the compartments.

Boots--check, Hat--check, pirate shirt--check.

25 things...

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about those about me lists that circulate periodically. I had the idea that "25 things rattling around in the bottom of my bag would be more interesting than "25 things I wrote prose on as a 9 year old". I'd been planning to document the removal of 15 lbs of coin and rubbish from my purse. Then I went ahead and cleaned it out to find a Dr's appt card--opportunity missed.

A new opportunity has arisen. I offer you "25 things rattling around in the bottom of Jackson's bag".

1-cardboard center from the paper towels. We call it a "Doot-do-dooo" since that's what we shout into one end.
2-plastic jar repurposed to hold 3-4.
3-the velcro wooden food and
4-wooden knife. A gift from Nana for Jackson to chop. Current fruit pairs are lemon-lemon, pear top-orange bottom, orange top-mushroom stem, mushroom top-lime bottom.
5-gift bag from Beth & AJ. holding items 6-8
6-sand toys sans pail
7-scented jar candle. holds item 8
8-penny
9-black CD case. contains item 10.
10-red and black child sized sunglasses.
11-three gum containers. Opens 3 ways. (Jess, Jackson was thrilled when I brought these home!)
12-two more sand tools. funnel on a stick and corner castle mold
13-fork
14-cup without the sippy top
15-two pens
16-large plastic egg. holding smaller plastic egg.
17-lego 1/2 arch
18-clear plastic bra strap
19-another penny
20-post-it pad
21-screw
22-three more legos



And removed from the bag before this post:

23-two child's plates. One containing 24
24-a fried egg, cut into bite sized pieces
25-tiny green Vera Bradley bag. (Jack wore this for days on his shoulder, packing it with odds and ends and calling it his "Purrr". He was even sleeping with it on his arm.)

Hoy I Come!

I think I mentioned Jackson's love of the park. It's time we brought a little piece of it home. I need to get some lumber and build a frame, and I planned to buy a slide. After slide shopping a bit, I changed my mind. I can't bring myself to shell out $200-$500 for a piece of plastic. Instead I turned to my local freecyclers. I hope you all know about freecycle.com. It's an online user group, actually hundreds of local groups, hosted by yahoo. You can send out 2 types of ads "wanted" and "offer". I placed the following: Wanted, slide. Offered, slate tile remnants (left over from doing our floors, and cluttering the space under the deck where we did the cutting), dishes. And I responded to a request for scrap metal (goodbye environmental hazard of a wood stove). It's a great way to exchange stuff, keeping it out of landfills, and get stuff you need, and like the name suggests, its all completely free!!
Overnight, I was offered a slide with 2 swings and a chin up bar, and a sidewinder slide with 2 swings and a climbing rope. More offers trickled in after that, but I didn't want to get greedy. Thursday, I brought home the first slide, when we got to the gifthouse, I told Jackson what we were doing there, and he started begging to get out of the car. I loaded in the slide and told him what it was. The whole way home, he pointed at it and said slide. When we got home, he followed closely as I got it out of the car and looked for a place to keep it while making plans for the structure. I propped it up on some bags of soil we have.



Here are a few other playground slides to demonstrate Jack's enthusiasm.

Two

This post will probably be a mishmash of what life is like right now. I'm posting from the bathroom. We have recently become the household of baths every night. We had been the household of baths "every other night" which I'm a little ashamed to say turned into the house of "Hey, when's the last time Jackson had a bath?!" Times have changed for two reasons. First, its warmed up. By that I mean its been near 90 degree weather! We are enjoying it, Jackson has been to the park frequently, and he keeps sneaking out the back door and down the stairs to dig in the sand. So he's become an extra dirty kid. The other reason for the baths is that Jackson has some kind of a rash. It started on his thigh, spread to his belly, then slowly crept across his whole body. It started 3 weeks ago. Jackson doesn't seem sick in anyway, so we weren't overly concerned in the beginning. We mentioned it to the pediatrician at Jack's 2 year appointment last week, when the rash covered 1/2 of his body. The doctor wasn't concerned at all either.
Even though the rash doesn't itch, we got some hydro cortisone cream to try to clear it up. Since its an all over rash, I slathered it on kinda heavy. Last night, I noticed red dots all over Jack's cheeks and neck, little broken capillary dots. My online searched turned up options like Meningococcea and bleeding problems. So we headed back to the pediatrician today. He said the rash still doesn't look like anything, but we are trying to get an appointment with a dermatologist sometime this quarter (getting a doctor's appt in Connecticut is impossible!) and we had to have blood drawn for a platelet count. Cross your fingers that the broken capillaries were caused by the cream and we don't have something more serious on our hands.

Other things that are going on? Well, I mentioned Jackson is sneaking out the door. He wants to be outside all the time! It's great, except it makes it hard to keep the household functioning--can't really make dinner from outside. And the trips to the park? Well, they often start with Jackson shouting, "Park! Par Par Paaaarkkk!" At the park, Jackson mostly likes the slides. At the top, he calls out, "Hoy I come!" He hits the ground running and dashes back up the stairs to come down again, like he's all grown up or something. Monday night, I spied asparagus in the garden and sauteed them for myself, then cooked a few down further and pureed with milk to call soup. It was pretty tasty, and Jack had a bit (before Ally got to it). Next time, I'll name it "dip" and hope he consumes it faster.

Bedtime is also a bit unusual. We start with the typical routine--fresh diaper, optional pajamas, 2 stories, tuck him in bed, gate the door. Jackson usually gets back up, plays, calls for me. I'll tuck him back in once. He invariable gets up again. Lately, he's been finally going to sleep in the rocking chair. Most nights for the last few weeks. It's an adorable sight, see for yourself.






I'm off to tuck Jackson back in. I'm sure to hear him say, "Move. Hop", that's I'll move over so you can hop up into bed with me.

Lead Levels

Tuesday was Jack's birthday (Yeah--happy birthday, boy!) I'll post about that event, and the subsequent, incessant, cutting and pounding (thanks, Mom) later. For now, a few lines about what's been eating at me--that is the trip to the pediatrician. I could complain about the shortage of HIB vaccine or Jack's mysterious spreading rash which the doctor proclaimed was "contact dermatitis" (my ass). Or I could say how weird it is that Jack's head size didn't change at all, and sometimes increases or even decreases in size depending on who the nurse is. I could also rave about how well Jackson takes his pricks, staring stoically and in silence at the nurse. These topics are all of passing interest.

The thing that's eating at me is the lead test, taken by capillary. By way of background, it has been determined that there is no safe level of lead. The Dept of Health gets involved when the level is > 10 micrograms/deciliter, serious action with chelation and home remediation starts at around 50 micrograms/deciliter. Jackson's lead levels were below these thresholds at 5 micrograms/deciliter. By official lead accounting, its normal and nothing to be alarmed about. Except that the level should be nothing, zip, zero, undetectable. There are studies that show a linear relationship between even low lead levels of lead and IQ impact. 10 micrograms/deciliter has an impact of -7 IQ points. (There go the "trivial" few IQ points I pumped so much precious, time consuming, stressful breast milk to give my child.)

Historically speaking, lead levels of kids my age (born 1976-1980) had a mean value of 15 micrograms/deciliter. After lead paint was banned in 1978, the levels have gone down, and today's kids have a mean value of 2.7 micrograms/deciliter. Jackson's level is twice that.

We live in a brand new house (see previous post), with clean well water running through new lead free pipes. We don't use brightly colored foreign stoneware (as far as it can be avoided). We don't have antique tin toys or let Jackson play with the ammunition. So, where is the contamination coming from? I've been through latest list of lead based toy recalls. Nothing we own is on the list, but there are certainly similar items. It could be anything. Is it the painted spots on his bath toys? The zippers on his pants? The vinyl housed flashing light of his spider man jacket? How about his toy boxes? Or new froggy boots that he's worn all day every day since Easter? Maybe a contaminant in his daily multivitamin. Is it our dishes? They're purchased in a US big box store and light in color (typically reds are more likely to be lead based glazes). We only have 1 vinyl mini blind in the house, but that could be the source.

Point is, there is no way of knowing where the lead is coming from. This is a consequence of globalization and failure to enforce regulations. Even buying all of our consumer goods from reputable US made sources (as if that were possible) wouldn't guarantee safety, since they could just as easily get a batch of contaminated raw materials to work with.

In our home, we go through considerable effort to avoid contaminations. We buy US goods where practical, spend extra on local-ish free range meats and organic vegetables, produce our own eggs, limit high sugar content foods (corn syrup has a 20% contamination with mercury rate, by the way), eschew manufactured food items (like those pedialyte drinks they're pushing these days). We built a new house rather than remodel an old one that might be contaminated.
Despite these efforts, we're powerless against things like heavy metal contamination or food poisoning.

http://www.cdc.gov/MMWR/PDF/rr/rr5608.pdf