1 Mother 2 Another

When we moved to Texas a couple years ago,
we moved into a much bigger space than our New York apartment had
been. Everything about the house is bigger than NYC, and the master
bathroom is no exception – I think our bathroom and closet
combined equal roughly the square footage of our first New York
apartment. Sadly, I’m not exaggerating.


Last year, we discovered wood rot in our bathroom and had to re-do
most of it, and took advantage of the tear-down to build it exactly
the way we’d want it. Our shower is, um, really nice- not
Donald Trump nice, but roomy - and with the little bench space and
such, our walk-in shower is the size of our New York bathroom.
Sadly, I’m not exaggerating.


I have a point here, I promise, and it’s not to brag. My
point is that we’ve got a really nice shower with a really
big shower head, and though I’ve been trying for years to get
the girls to enjoy showers instead of baths, it’s been only
in the last month or so that they’ve discovered the beauty of
our shower.

Pretty much their whole lives the girls
have had baths. I fill the tub – not every day, they
don’t get that stinky – and they play and get clean.
Over the years I’ve tried taking the girls in the shower,
mostly because it was faster and easier for me, and they’d
both scream bloody murder when I tried to wash their hair in the
shower. So I gave up trying and looked on the bright side –
at least I had ONE child-free haven in the house.


And then Cora’s separation anxiety took a turn for the worse.


Sometimes my girl would simply stand outside the shower and watch
me through the glass door. Yeah, that did wonders for the ego and
the post-partum body. But a few months ago that simply wasn’t
good enough, and she began coming in with me. At first she limited
herself to the shower bench, playing with a couple bath toys and
telling stories on the edge of the spray zone. But as time went on,
she began to realize it was actually warmer in the water than out,
and she started venturing further and further into the wet zone.
Six weeks ago I had the brilliant idea to play “car
wash”, and shook Cora’s hiney like a car getting
scrubbed while I backed her into the shower spray. Laughing with
delight, she barely realized she went all the way through until she
discovered she was dripping wet.


Of course, Maddie had to come see what the commotion was about, and
soon she was hooked as well. I now have two girls who jump up every
time Mommy announces she’s going to take a shower, and who
sob desolately when they catch me with wet hair.
“Mommy,” they’ll say in disbelief, “You
took a shower WITHOUT us?”


Fortunately, as I said, it’s a big shower, and the two will
play happily in separate corners with different toys. My favorite
time of every shower is the very beginning, when they stand with
their backs to the spray and delicately stick their hineys in the
water like some sort of temperature sensor, gradually inching back
until the water’s running down their whole bodies.


It’s not completely a bad deal for me, either: now that
they’re in the water, they’re not staring at me and I
can shampoo in peace, though I do have to jockey for prime spray
position occasionally. The best part? I’ve taught them a new
game – “Window Cleaning”. They fight over who
gets to use the squeegee to clean all the windows when we’re
through.


Who says kids don’t do windows?