A Story of Two Baths

Bathing babies is high on my list of things I'd rather not do.  Up until Katie was able to sit up on her own I did my best to avoid bathing her at all.  I'd ask Bryan to do it while pretending it was his turn.  A few months into this little ruse Bryan asked when I last bathed her.  He wasn't happy to hear that it had been more than a few days.  Of my three kids, Katie has been the toughest baby to wash for some unknown reason.

Now that she sits up very nicely, I don't mind washing her all that much.  I've got a convenient little set up going with the garden tub in my bathroom.  Katie's happy with her kiddie pool sized bath, Bryan's happy that I'm not hitting him up to wash the baby, and I'm happy that I'm not getting saturated like I was when she was in the baby tub.

This morning I was determined to get her washed as soon as we came home from dropping Ellie off at school.  My plan was to get it done and out of the way so I wouldn't have to wash her on my birthday tomorrow.  Everything went swimmingly and I spent the better portion of the day quite pleased with myself and my sweet smelling baby.

A hectic afternoon of running here and there to pick the girls up from school put an end to that nice smelling baby.  Katie napped while I spent about 45 minutes doing kid retrieval.  In that short amount of time she decided to do some multitasking.  Pooping while buckled into a car seat is apparently a recipe for  for a huge mess which ultimately required a second bath less than seven hours after the first.

I was blindsided by the mess.   I changed Katie in the family room and discovered as I was wiping her that we had one of those up the back messes.  At that point I realized that I needed to run her upstairs for a bath.  I sent Madeline outside to toss the diaper, and explicitly told Ellie to keep the dog out of the family room.  I suspected that he would be very interested in the poopy clothes.

In my haste, I placed Katie in the tub and then started the water.  As soon as the cold water hit her she freaked out and looked at me like I had lost my mind.  So I placed the wet baby on the floor and brought the water to a reasonable temperature.  The bath went well after that.

Once we got back downstairs, Ellie proudly tells me that she's keeping the dog away from the clothes.  This statement is quickly followed up by her telling me that she wasn't watching the dog at first, but decided to do so after he had licked Katie's poo-covered onesie a bit.  Eww!  This is precisely why the dog is not allowed to lick us. Ick!

It's amazing how quickly an afternoon can descend into chaos.  On the bright side, I still managed to get Madeline's dinner together in enough time for her to eat and get to her soccer tryout on time.  It's amazing what you can get done with under an hour of turnaround time.