Who knew MSDS sheets could be so helpful?

A couple of nights ago, DH was putting the kids to bed and AJ asked him if nail polish was poisonous, why people made it and put it on their fingernails. She showed him in the poison safety coloring book she got from the fire station that nail polish was one of the things listed as a "poison."

She hasn't been believing our reassurances based on our own authority, so instead of reassuring her immediately, he got online and did a search for "poison nail polish."

He found a page explaining emergency procedures if someone ingests nail polish, and let her read it. It said that if a person had only drunk one bottle of nail polish, the ER staff probably wouldn't be too concerned, but if they'd ingested about 5 bottles of it then there would be cause for worry. This vastly relieved AJ. She and DH talked about how unlikely it was that anyone would actually drink 5 bottles of nail polish, and how silly that would be.

Then AJ started running her finger across the picture in the book, giggling and saying, "Look! I'm touching poison!" and giggling again.

Yesterday I had a chat with AJ, explaining to her how the 3 rules about germs, with very little tweaking, also applied to poison. Then we spent quite a bit of time in the evening going through the poison safety coloring book, looking up the MSDS (material safety data sheets) on the various substances.

AJ was surprised and pleased that information on the contents, toxicity, effects and treatment for all those substances were readily available. She loved reading them, kept wanting to look up more and more substances, and didn't want to stop at bedtime.

Of course, not one of the items was something so toxic that a trace amount touching something which touches something else which touches someone's hand or lips would be a big issue. I think learning that even for highly toxic items, there are actually established treatments for what to do if someone ingests them was comforting to AJ, too.

After I finally told her it was time to stop and go to bed, she said she felt "mildly relieved."

Then she said, "Mom, if I get up in the middle of the night worrying about poison, can you remind me about this?"

She didn't wake in the middle of the night, and for maybe the first time in weeks she didn't wake us first thing in the morning crying and worrying.

It's too early to tell for sure how much it helped, but so far today we haven't heard a single mention of poison, and AJ seems quite a bit more relaxed.