So, I'm getting really tired of trying to keep people from poisoning my children.  I mean, I feel like I've been doing my part to not do this for seven years.  It's sort of Baby 101:  put chemicals and cleaning products on high shelves, use baby locks, don't leave medicine out.  We've even been scaring the crap out of our kids for years about never eating a random piece of candy off of the floor because it could be a pill:  "The right medicine can help you when you're sick, but the wrong medicine can make you really, really sick -- like remember when you puked for a whole day?  Or when you fell on your face and your mouth bled all over the place?  Or when we had to dig the piece of glass out of your foot?  All that, only worse."  So we're in the zone.
And then along comes China.

I should clarify here that I'm half Chinese and half mixed-up Caucasian by ethnicity.  My dad's parents were Americans, but he was born in Hong Kong because they happened to be working there at the time (and so yes, all you crazy Birthers, he's an actual American citizen).  Anyway, Dad doesn't speak a lick of Chinese, and the only words I know are from a trip we took to China almost a decade ago (that and random episodes of Ni Hao Kai-lan).  Still, my ethnicity is something I'm proud of, especially since Lebanese only recently became the new half-Asian.  And the kids are proud of it, too.  They often lament that "poor daddy has no Chinese" (he's all German and English).

Proud heritage aside, my husband and I have been somewhat actively boycotting China for the last couple of years due to the fact that they're slowly trying to disable us all by poisoning our kids and making them stupid.  Not that I think they have any better opinion of their own people.  In fact, I think they're actually being a lot more careful with the stuff that gets shipped over here.  After all, none of our kids have died.  But that doesn't negate the fact that every time I turn around, there's some new chemical that I've never heard of in the toy trains or necklaces that my kids have been sucking on for the last seven years.

But boycotting Chinese products?  Damn near impossible.  So we're not exactly strict practitioners.  Still, I try -- the other day my daughter, Elfie, got a gift filled with a bunch of dress-up stuff made in China, and I wouldn't let her use the lip gloss.  We went out and picked through the cosmetics section until we found something made in the U.S.  But our latest hurdle has turned out to be not so simple.

Face paint.  So far, I can't find a face paint that isn't made in China.  And as long as that's the case, I'm going to be cringing every time I put it on Elfie (who just got it for her birthday because she loves, loves, loves it and wants me to poison, I mean paint, all of her friends at her upcoming party).  Because the thing is, even though the "most reputable" brands pass all of the FDA standards and are supposedly non-toxic, I'm just not convinced.  And honestly, I'm waiting for our government and our regulators and the public to grow some balls and really start looking at what's coming into our country.

Because until we care more about safe products than we do about getting six pairs of socks for a dollar ninety-nine, we're no better off than a bunch of little kids, blindly eating random candy off of the floor.

PartlySunny will be spending the rest of the week trying to scrub "washable" face paint off of her kids and apologizing to her friends for putting toxic paint on their children and lowering their IQ scores by just enough to keep them from qualifying for any legitimately helpful college scholarships.  She hopes they'll forgive her.

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