The family left for their morning workout today and I roused myself from the morning couch, picking a few things up off the floor. As I held the kid's bib I glanced at the TV and, LO AND BEHOLD! The same bib was being recalled for lead paint content!
Lame lead paint article in New York Times
I'd been pooh-poohing the rash of toy recalls lately, writing them off to hyper-sensitive, over-attentive parenting, but when you're actually holding the bib in your hand! The very same on the screen! My god! The child just had breakfast with this! After we get back from the hospital I'll have to incinerate it, and do it six blocks away so the toxic smoke doesn't waft up the street asphyxiating every family in the neighborhood!
Of course, no one reads the paragraph hidden deep in the article that pretty much negates the entire article itself. And, of course, it wasn't mentioned on TV:
"Officials from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates children’s products, said that they would prefer that there be no elevated levels of lead in bibs. But their own recent tests of baby bibs on the market in the United States found that the lead, when present, was at levels low enough that a child chewing on or rubbing the bib would not get an unhealthy dose."
Most days we can't get the child to eat the food, much less anything else.
The article also mentions that the lead paint is generally found in recycled bib material. Attention China: you're recycling the wrong things. POISON shouldn't be one of them.
NOTE: I got a photo in! The trick is not to use Safari, the Mac web browser, which all Mac users agree is inferior to Firefox. Of course, Firefox won't show my YouTube videos. Go figure.
