"All right youngens, bath time. Cover up your eyes and drop your britches! Who wants wax?"

When Abbie was little, here little is defined as about 5 weeks old and younger, she hated taking a bath. Our specially designed baby bathtub came with something resembling a hammock that we used to suspend her above the collected water in the tub. I suppose the purpose of this hammock is to prevent the youngest babies from drowning by avoiding contact with standing water, but since babies at that age are basically blobs incapable of movement, much like the contestants on Celebrity Fit Club, I’m not sure the contraption was necessary. Dutiful parents like us though want the best for our babies, the most educational toys, the most nutritional formula, and of course the bathing apparatus most likely to never become a deathtrap, so we used the hammock anyway, which resulted in her screaming. Here, when I say “screaming,” I mean “cried hysterically for every bath for the entire time she dangled above the water, and for quite some time afterward until she was dry and felt reasonably sure that we would not place her back in the hammock, or until she got her bottle, either one was fine.” Of course, those were her newborn days when she cried a lot anyway, probably more than we cried at the time, and much more than she does now. I wanted to laugh every time I heard someone describe how much fun it was to bathe an infant. I used to purposely splash water in her mouth to temporarily silence her screaming. The no tears shampoo was powerless against the waterworks-inducing hammock.

After about five weeks of screaming we removed the hammock, and Abbie’s reaction to baths became something approaching enjoyment. We could elicit some smiles and giggles with some well-placed splashes, or at least we could once she was capable of smiling and giggling, but the important thing was she stopped crying through her entire bath. I think the problem was the hammock kept her constantly wet but not immersed, so water was constantly evaporating off her skin leaving her very cold. You can create this sensation at home the next time you take a shower by only running the water once every couple of minutes.

Once Abbie could stand, I decided to move her beyond the infant bathtub completely, and into the regular big-person sized bathtub. I figured standing in a flimsy plastic bathtub that’s suspended perilously over the kitchen sink was dangerous since the slightest lean could flip the tub and send her careening onto a number of uncomfortable objects (the counter, the faucet, the floor) and, contrary to popular belief, babies don’t bounce. I also figured there was no sense in trying to force her to sit considering how well she obeys my commands to stay out of the dog’s food. She finds the bathtub very enjoyable since she can stand and even wade through the water at her leisure. The water will break her fall if she stumbles, and the worst that can happen if she leans is she falls about 18 inches onto the floor, which, besides startling her and making the floor wet, is pretty harmless. Now she can wander over to the shelves where we keep her bath paraphernalia, and pull them into the water with her. Toys and washcloths are fun to grab, but she loves dragging the soap bottles into the tub so she can watch them float and chew on them, kind of like a beaver trying to build a dam with available materials on the Hudson River. This becomes a problem when I need the soap for lathering purposes, so that we now keep her soap bottles on the floor outside the tub. Now the only problem is when she leans too far over the tub and winds up soaking the bathmat.