Bath avoidance

It’s no secret that as a child I was not a fan of the bath.  I still avoid washing my hair and have been known to only do it once a week if I can get away with it.

Since Jem was born bathing has largely been an activity for the Turk.  When he was first born it involved a baby bath (from Freecycle naturally) in our kitchen/living room which was filled with water from the kettle and jugs of cold water from the tap.  This might sound awkward but as we had only just got running water (albeit cold) upstairs rather than down 3 floors it seemed pretty sophisticated!

We then advanced onto being able to fill the bath from the shower with WARM water when we had an electric shower temporarily fitted up in the loft (literally the best feeling ever to have a warm shower after over 6 months of having no boiler) and carried the full bath from the shower room into the kitchen/living room…

You can probably imagine that having just had a baby even the preparing of the bath was a bit of a mission, so on days when the Turk wasn’t around I found myself stressed even before I got the boy wet.  He could clearly sense this as bathtime was a fun enjoyable experience when daddy did it…when mummy did it bathtime consisted of screaming and generally kicking up a massive fuss until it was over.

This theme has largely continued, we next moved onto showering him, which he hated but meant that we didn’t need to move a bath of water around.

When Jem was about 11 months old we finally started using a big bath (ok so the shower attachment still can’t be used, but generally it doesn’t leak too much if you just bath a baby in it…) and this seemed to be working well, although he still seems to hate me being anywhere near it.  Generally if I am doing bath it ends up with screams about 3 minutes after entry and is over 2 minutes later with both of us in a bad mood.  Bath time goes something like this:

• mummy runs bath;
• mummy undresses baby;
• mummy puts baby in bath with daddy;
• daddy and baby play and baby is scrubbed;
• mummy prepared bedtime clothes, shuts curtains and fetches towel;
• mummy takes baby out of bath;
• baby promptly begins screaming and trying to escape;
• mummy towel dries baby and attempts to dress slippery eel;
• daddy joins us and brushes baby’s hair whilst complaining that it hasn’t been properly dried…

We don’t bath the baby every day…

I wish it was less…