10 Secrets of Great Moms: Part 7

Recently I got a newsletter from WebMD with some parenting articles that they thought I might be interested in. The first was an item from Redbook called “10 Secrets of Great Moms” (published April 11, 2008). The author basically got advice from 10 moms on a variety of topics from bringing baby home to sleeping to feelings to homework. I thought it might be fun to share my advice on the same topics.

Make Bath Time a Treat
I think one of the most difficult times of the day, regardless of how old my daughter is, has always been bath time. There is just something about it that all kids seem to hate and their dislike grows the older they get so anything you can do to encourage the behavior is a good thing.

The mom in the article suggested dropping the bottles of soap and lotion into the warm bathwater to warm the liquids up. That’s a great idea, and something I never thought of intentionally doing. The bottles inevitably ended up falling in and by the time they were wrestled away from the toddler who had decided it was a surf board for their Barbie the stuff inside had a chance to warm up.

I don’t remember baths much from when I was a kid except for when my sister got the chicken pox on our way to Illinois for a family gathering. We both got to sit in oatmeal baths much of the time we were there. Understandably, she wasn’t very pleased with that turn of events. She was even less pleased when I didn’t get those itchy red spots until after we had returned home and got to miss school.

For my daughter, we always had an assortment of toys for her to play with from boats to cups and funnels to dolls and rubber ducks. She had crayons for writing on the walls, fun soaps and anything else we could think of to make getting in the tub more fun so she would actually want to take a bath.

Now that she’s nearly a teen and her body has started to change bathing has become even more important. It’s still a difficult task, especially since she thinks it as a huge time waster and takes way from things she’d much rather be doing. So we’ve been working on trying to find a time that is more ‘convenient’ for her and will, hopefully, make the process easier on both of us.