The World's Dumbest Parents

We were all excited because work finally started on replacing our old bathroom (installed in the 1950's and leaking, plus butt-ugly). Sure, it was going to be a pain in the neck to have to bathe in the kitchen sink for a couple weeks, but kind of fun too -- like camping! But with air conditioning and TV!

It wasn't until I got home from work Monday that I realized that we are the World's Dumbest Parents. Monday the old bathroom was completely gutted. The carpenter, a very tidy guy, had carefully hung plastic in doorways and had bagged and removed all of the debris. But we have an old house, a drafty house, and now a house with -- a fine layer of dust covering everything. Furniture, floors, rugs, cats, baby toys ... a layer of dust that most certainly contains lead from the many layers of paint accrued over the years.

I wouldn't be so hard on us, except that we're physicians, for god's sake, and I well know that the most common way for upper SES kids to get lead poisoning is through house renovation.

So now we're holing up in a hotel. We have to keep going back and forth to the house to get clothes and feed the cats. HellBoy thinks we've gone insane -- usually we're trying to convince him to get down and play instead of treefrogging on us all day, and now we won't let him out of our arms.

But. We're not in Louisiana or Mississippi. We're in a nice hotel. I am very, very grateful.