Party of Five: Look Up. Or Down. Whatever.

I seem to have a mental block with regard to how I got my first two children to behave in the bathtub.

I CAN NOT get Sophie to follow my rules.

a) I can't get her to look up. This is my biggest problem. I'm just trying to get the soap out of her hair for goodness sake. Somehow I was always able to get the boys to look up enough that I could pour water in their hair and avoid their eyes. Not so for Sophie. It is to the point that when I ask her to look up, she immediately and defiantly shoots her head downward.

"I'm not going to look up, mom. See, in fact, I'm looking DOWN. What do you intend to do about it?"

Of course, this just makes it worse for her when I do try to get the soap out of her hair; she invariably ends up with water streaming down her face, in her eyes and mouth, and she's sputtering and spitting and gasping and making quite the production.

b) Standing up. I can control this one a little better.... she does sit when I tell her to. She just doesn't remain seated. I'm ordering her to plop her little bottom down about fifteen times in any given bath. The boys never did this.... I was able to get them to understand that tubs are for sitting, end of story.

c) Keeping water in the tub. Noah was a little tougher to teach this lesson, but he did get it. Water stays in the tub. Sophie's pretty subtle about her disregard for this rule. She starts off by picking up some sort of vessel, be it a toy pirate ship boat, or a plastic cup, whatever bath toy we have that will hold water. She'll fill it, and dump it, over and over. Her first attempt to dump it outside the tub results in me snatching it away from her and reminding her that water stays in the tub. So then she dumps the water down the side of the tub, but still inside. ("See mom, I'm following the rules....") She does that a few more times until she works up the courage to dump it on the edge of the tub, so some falls in and some falls out. I don't always notice this until its too late; there are three kids in the tub for heavens sake, and I can't spend all my time policing Sophie. Then she inevitably gets the toy taken away from her, which results in some pitiful whining, until she's distracted by the rubber duck or the squirty frog and then she forgets all about it, until next bathtime.

d) Staying out of the tub when bathtime is over. There's been more than one occasion where I have lotioned and pajama'd Sophie, am working on getting the boys dried and in their pjs, only to find Sophie has climbed back into the half-drained bathtub, ruining her nice clean pjs and dry diaper. Or perhaps, as was the case tonight, just a nice dry diaper.

Sophie loves being in the bathtub. If she even gets a hint that its almost bathtime, she darts around the house saying "bath? bath? bath? BATH?" until I give in and finally shuttle the kids upstairs just to get her to shut up.

Ah, well, I suppose she'll learn eventually.