a question and a rant

We were recently gifted with several lovely vintage wooden toddler puzzles which Rilla and Abraham both LOVE and have been playing with every day. Unfortunately, I keep eyeing them and thinking... okay... if Fisher-Price stuff made overseas in the last ten years has repeatedly been recalled for high lead amounts... then I'm pretty sure these puzzles which were made overseas (in the same countries) for Fisher-Price and Playskool the early 1970s have no reason not to be totally contaminated with lead. Right? Somebody please give me permission to throw these things away, because as much as I love having new puzzles for my little ones, I know their safety is more important. Or does anyone know if for some reason these lovely puzzles might not have lead??

Stupid lead. Stupid always having to get rid of toys that have dangerous amounts of toxic chemicals in them! Stupid decisions by powerful people to produce toys for decades upon decades that had lead paint on them. If you've ever looked into the history of lead, it's just ridiculous; it was known in the 1920s that it was awful, and there were countries that opted not to use it, but not ours! The lead industry fought and fought to allow lead paint to continue, and leaded gas to continue, and now these awful decisions continue to plague us, and will for decades to come.

[That's really paraphrased and just off the top of my head, of course... this is a post-midnight rant, after all... but there's lots of fascinating stuff about chemicals and our stupid decisions to keep using them in the book Having Faith, which I highly recommend. It's one of the most enlightening, fascinating books I've ever read. All kinds of tragic stuff about PCBs, POPs, PBDEs, mercury, lead, etc which first lit a fire under me to be as careful as I can be regarding even little stuff like what foods, shampoos, soaps, toys, etc we let into our home, and why we keep our distance from things like flame-retardant pajamas, conventional crib mattresses, and teflon.]

Ugh, and I'm kicking myself for letting my little ones play with these puzzles for a whole week before I finally got around to doing something about them. I periodically go through and make sure that all of our toys are safe ones, chemically speaking... usually just by googling information about the toy in question or using healthystuff.org to find out specific details... but I haven't done it in a while. I guess it always makes me grumpy to have to check whether toys are safe. Because they just should be. And it makes me grumpy to not be able to get rid of ALL the toxic stuff in our home. I want to replace the nasty allergenic carpet and paint with VOC-free paint and get an organic mattress for us grown-ups too and get rid of everything foam and all the wood that's been treated with formaldehyde and on and on.

Okay, writing that out has me referencing Having Faith (barely over $4 on Amazon!) again, and so I've just gotta share a few quotes about lead. Because it's crazy...

"In 1925, an international covenant had already banned lead-based paints for interior use in much of the rest of the world. This agreement acknowledged that lead was a neurotoxin and that lead paint in the homes produced lead dust, which is easily ingested when crawling babies put their hands in their mouths or chew on toys. But the United States was not a signatory to this agreement... the manufacturers of lead pigments went on the offensive... They reassured the American public that lead fears were unfounded... The industry also fought labeling requirements that would warn buyers not not to use lead paint on children's toys, furniture, or rooms. Many a nursery was painted with lead by pregnant women eagerly awaiting the birth of their babies."

"Researchers with other opinions and other funding sources were condemned as hysterical and sometimes threatened with legal action... When the truth eventually became undeniable, the industry shifted tactics. Instead of denying lead's powers to damage children's brains, it blamed inner-city poverty and unscrupulous landlords who, the argument went, had allowed paint to peel in their tenement buildings. And the neglected children living there, with nothing better to do, ate it. At one point, recalls a leading toxicologist deeply involved in the lead wars, an industry representative actually suggested that the problem was not that eating lead paint chips made children stupid but rather that stupid children ate paint. All these arguments finally collapsed under the weight of emerging scientific evidence. But decades were wasted in denials, obfuscations, deflections of responsibility, counteraccusations, intimidation of scientists, and attempts to tranquilize a legitimate public concern."

-- from Having Faith by Sandra Steingraber

Keith bought some balloons this week for Rilla, and the lady filling them for him mentioned that there is an additive which they can put in the balloons to make them float longer. But she doesn't like to put them in the balloons that they fill up for children, she said, because one popped once on an employee and caused a burning sensation. "But I'm sure they wouldn't put anything in them that's, you know, dangerous," she added.

Keith had to laugh. Because heck yes "they" would. I highly doubt there is some grandfather-like figure at the top of the company that markets whatever they put into helium to make it last longer, and that man makes sure that the company spends lots of money making sure on their own - because it's quite doubtful that there's a regulation on it - that the additive is safe for children. Not to mention pregnant women and their vulnerable developing fetuses. And yet we all just assume that nobody would willingly do something harmful to us and our children, not in such a sneaky way like that. But there are something like 80,000 chemicals being used in our country today, and only like 8000 of them have been tested... at all? As in, not necessarily in a specially regimented way, but... at all? Seriously. Imagine if five or ten or 2000 of those 72,000 untested chemicals have the kind of long-term consequences that lead has had and continues to have.

Anyway, not to end all in a panic on ya. We can't protect our kids from everything, and yet I do want to protect them in all the little ways I can, even if it's just by (reluctantly) disposing of 40-year-old puzzles and avoiding helium additives or at very least popping the balloons outside after we're done with them so that the nasty stuff goes out there rather than in here.