Rub-a-dub-dub....

Bath night.

I love and hate, at the same time, bath night. I’m not a parent who (and I imagine I’ll get some flames for this--) bathes her children every night. I just don’t see the point. It is a waste of water (given that the majority of the world is in such desperate need of clean, potable water), and kids, generally speaking, don’t get dirty enough to warrant a bath every night. They just don’t. (Pubertal humanoid forms, that I’ll someday call my children, on the other hand, definitely need a daily bath—with soap. However, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.) Bath night, for the kids, is a whole lot of fun. I find it boring and tedious. Therefore I love and hate it—I love that the kids have so much fun, I hate that I have anything but fun.

Sunday, the bath scene went like this:

It is about 5:45pm, the children have been fed, and they’re winding down from running around in the front yard. I look over at my beautiful little girl, and I realize, with dismay, I can no longer ignore the spattering of mud on her legs and feet nor the streaks of bright blue Tempera paint that is tattooed up her arms, and across her face. It is inevitable: she is in desperate need of a bath. I groan inwardly, not because I know how much she loves splashing in the tub, but about the pitch and frequency of the howls that will emit from her rosy little mouth when we do the deed she dreads most in life (more so than getting immunizations, if you can believe it): washing her hair. Ugh. This is one of those tasks where I wish for Harry Potter’s magic wand to materialize and ‘magic’ the trouble away.

I resign myself to the task at hand. I gently round up my little chicks, put their containers of magic bubble soap on the garage shelves, and we head inside to remove shoes, clothes, and other mysterious pre-school paraphernalia en route to the tub.

Then I smell it.

My mommy olfactory sensors don’t lie: it is the nostril-curling aroma of a misplaced bowel movement. I ask the Peanut, “Did you poop in your panties?”

“Yes.” She at least has the grace to look sheepish as she informs me of her accident.

We move our production to the bathroom to clean up her mess. Accidents happen, I remind myself. I’m just looking forward to when they happen a little less frequently.

Then, as if to show solidarity with his sister, Chubber decides that it is imperative, at that exact moment, to have a big, poopy blowout in his diaper. What a mess. As it is his custom to drop a messy bomb in his pants, and then 5 minutes after I change him, make another equally messy b.m., I decide to let him marinate (forgive me, I’ve earned yet another ‘bad mommy’ award) for the 5 minutes it will take me to fill the tub, so that I can change him and then immediately get him squeaky clean.

Life is going along good—well as good as it gets with two kids with poopy pants at the same time, anyway. The tub is filling; both kids are happily running around the house half-naked, squealing with glee (what is it that nothing makes little kids as happy as when they are free to run around the house indecently?), and then CRASH!

I stick my head into the bathroom to see the tub-toy net that is generally suction-cupped to the walls of the bathtub has crashed into the tub. This is inconvenient to me because I like to wash and shampoo the kids then I let them have their toys to splash around with (otherwise I’d wind up more soapy and wet than the bathing beauties in the tub, and they’d end their bath without ever having wound up washed). I heave a big sigh and begin to stick the net back to the side of the wall and reach down into the tub to pick up a rubber squirty-frog just in time to see a very large, a very nasty, and not to mention poisonous, aggressive house spider thrashing madly about in the water.

It must have been hiding in the ‘dark’ of the toys. I’m happy this happened before the kids were in the tub, but I’m also mortified.

I. Do. Not. Like. Spiders. I loathe spiders. I am a big baby around spiders and my instant, gut-reaction, is to prance around the bathroom on my tippy toes shaking my hands and arms having arachnoleptic fits. That is how much I like spiders.

Now, my issue has become plural, as in, issues: 1. I have one nearly naked girl running about the house tearing toys out of their bins and merrily strewing them across the living room as if they’re pixie dust; 2. A nearly two-year old boy who is easily found wherever he goes by the putrid skunk-trail that follows him about like a fog, and lastly 3. I have an icky spider in the tub that I have to figure out how to get rid of before it climbs up on a toy and jumps on me, or it climbs on me as I’m trying to get rid of it. Fun.

Can we stop having so much fun yet? Please? I’m all fun-ed out.

Oh, yeah, I nearly forgot: My plan of arachnid attack (to scoop up the spider and toss it into the warmly waiting jaws of the porcelain god for flushing away to Kingdom Come) won’t work, because I have nasty, dirty, My Little Pony poopy panties soaking in the toilet in my feeble attempt to get some of the poop off with as little scrubbing as possible.

Can it get any ickier?

So, I do the arachnoleptic fit thing a few more times, finally resign myself to saying “screw it!” and scoop the panties out of the toilet and fling them into the trash can in the garage (with hopes that Peanut doesn’t see a favored pair of pony panties in the trash—because then I’ll have to rescue them…. shuddering just thinking of that episode). Then, I try to scoop the spider (whom I think, at this point has mercifully drowned in the tub) out with the bathroom cup (think little, bitty) and the arachnid comes frighteningly back to life—the bathtub resurrection, Lord have Mercy! I run to the kitchen to get one of my tall drinking glasses.

I am utterly creeped out at this point, and have the heebie-jeebies, but I screw up my courage and scoop up the spider in one Swan Lake-graceful move, and slam down the toilet seat lid and flush my uninvited guest away.

Oh, how I do love bath night.

Whoever Murphy was, he had me in mind when he coined his famous phrase. In the end, the kids wound up washed, and ‘factory-fresh’. After all the fun, I slipped them into their little beds, snug and safe, blowing them kisses for sweet dreams and collapsed into my favorite arm chair. As I did so, B.J. walks in from his motorcycle ride and asks, “So, how was your evening?”
I certainly had a tale to tell this evening.