Bathe yourself

I promise, promise I am getting to the post about the book launch and a giveaway. Promise!

This summer has been all about growing up. My oldest spent 3 weeks with his grandparents, My daughter is wondering about all the things and suddenly is interested in good smelling bath products and bathing. The little boys... well, I think I have to force them to grow up.

It's not that I want to rush my kids into being teens or adults. But my little boys were little for so long and in so many ways. I mean, they didn't talk on time. One took longer to potty train. Cole is smaller than alot of kids his age and, frankly, they are my two youngest kids, only 16 months apart. Yeah, of course they tend to get a little more babied than the other two, who had a sibling on the way to "force" them to do "big kid" things.

They had a couple bad habits, enabled by their exhausted parents who just wanted to sleep, damn it, and were/are tired of arguing with the older kids. We didn't have the energy to argue over who sleeps where- just fall asleep in our bed already!

But we're done. They're too big and too heavy to easily move from our bed. As I type this, I am sitting in their room as they fall asleep, a big improvement from both boys laying on me in the master bed to go to sleep.

And bathing. Oh, the baths. I mean, yeah, HUGE improvement over when George wouldn't even sit down in the tub. But baths are still a 30 minute ordeal with lots of water splashing and then clean up. At five and six, I figured it was time they learned to shower on their own.

As you can imagine, they were not impressed. I began the night by saying, "Tonight you boys are going to take a shower! Yay!"

They looked at me like I had suggested nuking kittens. "I HATE SHOWERS!!!" they wailed.

I got excited, hoping they wouldn't see through my lies. "You LOVE showers," I proclaimed.

"I HATE SHOWERS!!" they screamed and ran away. I finally flushed George out from behind a door and carried him into the bathroom, stripping off his bathing suit as I went. He whimpered. I dumped him in the shower and turned it on.

He whined.

I washed his hair and handed him a bar of soap and a washcloth. "Scrub," I instructed and pulled the curtain closed.

Silence. No wailing. And then... laughter. "This is so much fun!" he crowed, scrubbing himself clean. I sighed.

And repeated the whole thing with Cole, right down to dumping him into the shower and having him love it two seconds later.

Fifteen minutes after dumping George into the shower, both boys were running down the hall, screeching, "I love showers!" to my husband.

Weird kids. And I give up.