Sunday, October 15, 2006

Progress aplenty

Sam just turned 21 months old and he's talking all the time, stringing sentences together like he was born to communicate. Today he awed us by showing off his counting skills. It brought a tear to my eye to see my smart baby boy feeling so proud of himself. All these months of counting the stairs on the way up to our third floor apartment did more than make me breathe heavy. I can't wait for the day we can count the steps as we climb up the one flight to his new bedroom.

To that end, progress on the house continues although slowly. This week, there were two remarkable milestones. First, our general contractor placed the yard sign in front of the house announcing the arrival in short order of a dumpster and plenty of workers pounding nails at 7:00am. The day that noise begins polluting my neighborhood I will listen closely to the sonata and kindly ask my neighbors for their patience as the days pass and the debris pile grows.

Although the GC hasn't started any of the remodeling work yet, our lead abatement contractor started and completed his bit this week. Admittedly I'm a bit of a lunatic about lead--ask Bob about the time I made him take me to Urgent Care because I was certain I was thinking slower as a result of poisoning myself while refinishing furniture. The doctor thought I had a screw loose but that had nothing to do with lead. Thankfully, there wasn't much of the stuff in our house compared to other similarly aged homes and we knew the deal before we bought it because we had the house professionally tested as part of our home inspection. In our real estate shopping we learned that many don't take lead seriously. We actually had one realtor tell us that lead poisoning was only a problem in the inner city where children were malnourished and relied on chipped paint to supplement their diets. Perhaps the ignorant biddy didn't know that all kids put things in their mouths regardless of hunger. Personally, I can't believe so many people would pay so much to get into the right school district and then jeopardize their children's mental development by leaving lead in their homes exposed. Perhaps they don't realize how serious it can be. To us, it was just part of the work required to make the house safe and habitable for our family. If you had a boy as smart as ours, I'm sure you'd do the same.
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