week 18

potato baby!

average size: 5.6 inches, 6.7 oz.

what's going on with baby: "Your fetus has become amazingly mobile (at least compared to you), passing the hours yawning, hiccuping, rolling, twisting, kicking, punching, sucking and swallowing. And, baby's finally big enough that you'll be able to feel those movements soon."

i might, miiiiight be starting to feel baby. maybe. i feel little taps here and there, but sometimes i wonder if i'm just digesting something hahaha...could be baby though, i guess! still nothing definite though. and no "flutters" that i've heard people talk about. some say it feels like you swallowed a butterfly, and i definitely have not had that yet hahaha...

this week was sort of stressful towards the ends of it. we just found out on friday that there is lead paint on every single window in the house we are renting (there are about 20 windows), and they are all cracking/peeling terribly. this has me MORE than freaked out since we've been living here for a year and a half already.

i'm pretty worried because i've read so many things how this can be terrible for baby growing inside me if my levels are bad (and i guess us too, but mostly for unborn babies and children), and i just feel so terrible and guilty that i didnt think of this earlier! but mid last week, it crossed my mind, so i ordered some lead testers online, and bam. lead windows in every single room of the house, and they're all peeling. 

we even found lead dust upstairs in the baby room on the window sill, and what's strange is that we re-painted those windows when we re-did the room! so i'm not sure how lead dust is still happening (maybe from friction or something on the windows?), but it is, and i'm so upset by this.

we've told our landlords about this, and they feel absolutely awful about it. they are a married couple in their 60's, and this house has been in their family since it was built in 1832, so it's not your typical "rental home" where there is a property manager who owns a few properties. but, they feel SO bad, and they said they are ordering a lead inspector or something to come out here and test the whole house for lead, so that's good. i'm still worried about baby once it's born though since it will be on the ground crawling around, etc. 

also, the landlords said they re-did the house in 1956 with copper piping instead of lead piping for the water (thank goodness), and they re-painted everything in the 80's, but i guess they didnt do the windows? or, maybe they did, and they are just peeling badly again. either way, it's frustrating, and has me worried, so i've been researching things all weekend (probably not the BEST idea...some things just freak me out more) but i like to know what we're dealing with. 

on friday when we found out about all the lead paint, i immediately called the doctor's office to get blood work done. there is a blood test you can take to see your levels of lead in your blood, and i wanted to see how much damage (if any) this has taken on my body since we've been living here so long, and because i'm 4.5 months pregnant. well, after a long weekend of waiting to hear back, i called this morning, and my midwife says the blood test is not needed. she said i would have to be actually ingesting it for it to be a problem. "what about the dust though?" i asked. and i guess it's not a big deal (unless we are sanding and doing renovations, which we're not). i even asked, "what if it's in the water somehow?" and again, apparently not a big deal. 

erik said, "that's great news!!!" but i'm still weirded out by the whole thing because everything online says differently. and i know, i shouldn't just trust the internet, but i find it weird that the dust wouldn't be an issue for me, but i guess it's not. when we see my midwife in 2 weeks, i'll probably ask her about it in person to hear her explain it better because i only talked to the nurse today who was relaying the message. but yeah, really, my midwife's only concern was if we had kids already because she would want to get them tested for lead levels (to see if they ate any of the chips i guess). 

so, i guess what would be best is to re-paint all the windows so they have a nice, sturdy new coat of paint on them to keep all the lead paint from chipping because once our little one DOES come around, i don't want it to be a problem for them. we don't want to sand and re-paint because that would be much worse. gotta keep the dust to a minimum, and i don't want to create more of a problem by agitating the lead paint. another idea would be to put that plastic shrink wrap stuff on all the windows so all the dust and paint is contained.

so that was our "excitement" for this past week! haha...at least i do feel better now than i did over the weekend. anyone else happen to have experience with lead paint? let me know :)