As a young mother, living in Wisconsin with two young children, I loved bath time. It was more than making sure my kids’ hair was washed – bath time was an event. It was something we looked forward to, it stretched to an hour or two. There were toys, and bubbles and games. My kids loved this time to splash around in the tub and I loved that we had an indoor activity that didn’t require bundling up and shoveling snow off the car.
And then we moved to Arizona and I didn’t feel so cooped up in the house. And we had another kid. And another. And even one more.
I’m not entirely sure when it happened but somewhere along the way, bath time was no longer an event. It became a sprint to see how fast we could get those dirty feed scrubbed so their sheets didn’t end up filthy.
My younger kids have very little experience with bath toys and bubbles and I’m not even sure how that happened!
I was talking with a friend about this last week so its been on my mind. But there was one night last week where Briggs had an hour before bed time and he was kind of roaming the house not really playing with anything. I asked if he wanted a bubble bath with toys and his eyes lit up as if he was given a bonus scoop of ice cream.
He sat in that tub for almost 45 minutes and just played. He sang, he splashed, he talked to himself. By the time he realized the water was cold, he was done.
The younger kids in our family may go to bed later than any of my other kids did at that age (which my older kids think is a serious injustice) but they’ve also been deprived of the simpleness my older kids had. The days of bubble baths, children’s museum memberships and roaming around the zoo.
You do your best to raise your kids the same and yet even at this stage I see just how hard that can be. Bottom line – everyone needs more bubble baths in their lives.
