So...Bathtime is wild at our house. Wyatt is actually really happy in the bath and loves to splash which is really fun at his age, so I'm not really talking about him. However, having another kid to bathe has not made the daily ritual any easier to get through efficiently.
The real problems lie with the tiny females in my house. I usually have at least one of my girls totally rejecting taking a bath by running for various corners and closets to avoid the tub. Pretty standard young kid stuff-- they know the routine and after bathtime comes bedtime, so therein lies the need to flee. Usually one of them is wailing about not getting any deserrrrrrt yet! Or just repeating "NOOOOOOO" Over and over until I want to just give up. It is a wonder that I do not look like a total drown rat by 9pm every night. Or maybe I do. I'm not telling.
I had started to notice, though, that the time AFTER bathtime is quite different from before bathtime. It is actually quite Zen. The kids are quiet and calm. Then I realized that dinner is also a hot mess at our house and was reminded of a quote about raising kids that said, "When they get crabby, put them in water." I had an Ah Ha moment. Why do I insist on crazy dinner followed by crazy bathtime, followed by Zen? Delayed gratification at its best?
No. Mostly it is because I am programmed to think that this is the proper order of things. My mom did it that way, so I must also do it that way. Dinner, then bath, then bed.
In my house, however, it simply was not working to do it that way. There was exhaustion at dinner and rejection at bath time and it makes for a very long two hours between dinner and the glorious time that comes after the kids are asleep.
So I changed it. Last summer I flip flopped dinner and bathtime so that we do bathtime at 5pm when we can. The new order of things is: Bath, Zen, Dinner, bed. It makes dinner a lot more reasonable and less loud. We have fewer fights over who gets the butterfly plate and who has to settle for the ladybug. Who knew I could write my own script, people???!!! Besides, doing it like we had been doing it was the living definition of insanity.
Ella and Avery are also much more inclined to take a shower in the Big Shower in the master bath than to take a bath or shower in their own bathtub. Go figure. You know what, whatever works. Are they getting clean? Yes, AND often at the same time because there are two shower heads in there!
Sheer brilliance. Look how happy they are in the Big Shower.
So maybe this sounds normal to you and you are wondering where I am going with this. Here is the wrench-- bathtime for me as a parent of a kid with cochlear implants, no matter where and when, is the total extreme of wild and shriek-y and then complete Zen.
Ella has to take off her implants to take a shower and she knows that this is her time to 1) use sound as a weapon against us in a very echo-y place, and 2) not listen. Literally. So it is basically bedlam. She turns on her inner demon and, truthfully, I am lucky if I get all the shampoo rinsed out of her hair so that she at least smells clean for school the next day.
Today, she was standing on one damp foot on the tile bench in my shower and writing her name with her finger in the steam on the glass shower door. A horrible bloody scene waiting to happen. And every time I told her to sit down, she would close her eyes and laugh. The deaf four year old version of "I can't hear you, Mom."
When she gets soap in her eyes, she lets out the most ear piercing scream that you have ever heard in your entire life. She can't hear it, so she does not care. Plus she has no monitor for how it sounds, so she just conjures up the most awful combo of notes that you can possibly imagine. Like an out of tune cat trying to sing about getting its tail run over. Seriously, in my nightmares I hear her belting out "I NEEED a TOWELLL NOWWWWWWW!" Worst. Sound. Ever.
But then something beautiful happens when she steps onto the bath mat. She takes the towel that is wrapped around her, opens it up like Batman and falls down into a face down fetal position on the mat. It is not quite the fetal position, because she is face down. The towel almost completely covers her body with the exception of a top of the head and sometimes toes. She is like a perfect little toadstool on the mat. What's funny is that she usually says (or shouts) "Chair" right before she falls to the floor. My girls play this game that wherever they are in the house, if they yell "Chair!" to each other the other sister comes running and drops down into this modified Child Pose and the yeller sits on her back. I dunno...some kind of weird sister code that I, who only has one brother, does not get.
The after bathtime in full crouch is transformative to her, though. Avery never sits on her back because we all know to leave her alone. Even if we wanted to get her attention or make her stand up, we couldn't because she can't see and she can't hear. It is like she was in the shower to get out all the wild impulses and now she is doing yoga with meditation before she has to put her sound back on. One extreme to the other. Sometimes hair brushing will bring back the demon, but usually after this 5 minutes or so of Child Pose, she is ready to face the world. I just leave her there until she is ready to get up. Then she shrieks, "MAAAAMAAAA! I WAAANT my EEEAARS!!" and life is back on, Zen has mostly been achieved and dinner can be had.
One more bath story: Right before Thanksgiving, we had strep invade our happy home. Ella, Keith and I all got it and it was not fun. The puke-y, scarlet fever kind. The put-you-in-bed-for-at-least-54-hours kind. I knew Ella had it right away when she woke me out of a deep sleep at 3am with bright red cheeks, running an obvious fever, and then proceeded to puke on my comforter. Ella also has her ears off when she goes to bed, so there is usually inappropriately loud and shriek-y tones that wake us up in the middle of the night as well. Or she just flips on all the lights to wake us up. Either/or. After the puke, I decided she was going right in the tub so there was no use in putting her implants on.
I showered her off and was putting on fresh pajamas, Ella did something amazing. She did not fall down into Child Pose this time. Instead she started singing. In tune. About the colors of the rainbow. IN SPANISH!!! There she was, completely without sound, sick and doing something she despises- taking a bath--and she started singing about colors in Spanish.
"Verde, Amarillo, Rosa...."
Perfect accent by my French-trained ears, too!
Let me repeat myself: My sick, deaf, four-year-old started singing to me in Spanish at 3 o'clock in the morning. A.MA.ZING! Talk about bright spots, huh?
I will gladly endure a million more wild, shriek-y, showers. No question.
I found my Zen.
So maybe this sounds normal to you and you are wondering where I am going with this. Here is the wrench-- bathtime for me as a parent of a kid with cochlear implants, no matter where and when, is the total extreme of wild and shriek-y and then complete Zen.
Ella has to take off her implants to take a shower and she knows that this is her time to 1) use sound as a weapon against us in a very echo-y place, and 2) not listen. Literally. So it is basically bedlam. She turns on her inner demon and, truthfully, I am lucky if I get all the shampoo rinsed out of her hair so that she at least smells clean for school the next day.
Today, she was standing on one damp foot on the tile bench in my shower and writing her name with her finger in the steam on the glass shower door. A horrible bloody scene waiting to happen. And every time I told her to sit down, she would close her eyes and laugh. The deaf four year old version of "I can't hear you, Mom."
When she gets soap in her eyes, she lets out the most ear piercing scream that you have ever heard in your entire life. She can't hear it, so she does not care. Plus she has no monitor for how it sounds, so she just conjures up the most awful combo of notes that you can possibly imagine. Like an out of tune cat trying to sing about getting its tail run over. Seriously, in my nightmares I hear her belting out "I NEEED a TOWELLL NOWWWWWWW!" Worst. Sound. Ever.
But then something beautiful happens when she steps onto the bath mat. She takes the towel that is wrapped around her, opens it up like Batman and falls down into a face down fetal position on the mat. It is not quite the fetal position, because she is face down. The towel almost completely covers her body with the exception of a top of the head and sometimes toes. She is like a perfect little toadstool on the mat. What's funny is that she usually says (or shouts) "Chair" right before she falls to the floor. My girls play this game that wherever they are in the house, if they yell "Chair!" to each other the other sister comes running and drops down into this modified Child Pose and the yeller sits on her back. I dunno...some kind of weird sister code that I, who only has one brother, does not get.
The after bathtime in full crouch is transformative to her, though. Avery never sits on her back because we all know to leave her alone. Even if we wanted to get her attention or make her stand up, we couldn't because she can't see and she can't hear. It is like she was in the shower to get out all the wild impulses and now she is doing yoga with meditation before she has to put her sound back on. One extreme to the other. Sometimes hair brushing will bring back the demon, but usually after this 5 minutes or so of Child Pose, she is ready to face the world. I just leave her there until she is ready to get up. Then she shrieks, "MAAAAMAAAA! I WAAANT my EEEAARS!!" and life is back on, Zen has mostly been achieved and dinner can be had.
One more bath story: Right before Thanksgiving, we had strep invade our happy home. Ella, Keith and I all got it and it was not fun. The puke-y, scarlet fever kind. The put-you-in-bed-for-at-least-54-hours kind. I knew Ella had it right away when she woke me out of a deep sleep at 3am with bright red cheeks, running an obvious fever, and then proceeded to puke on my comforter. Ella also has her ears off when she goes to bed, so there is usually inappropriately loud and shriek-y tones that wake us up in the middle of the night as well. Or she just flips on all the lights to wake us up. Either/or. After the puke, I decided she was going right in the tub so there was no use in putting her implants on.
I showered her off and was putting on fresh pajamas, Ella did something amazing. She did not fall down into Child Pose this time. Instead she started singing. In tune. About the colors of the rainbow. IN SPANISH!!! There she was, completely without sound, sick and doing something she despises- taking a bath--and she started singing about colors in Spanish.
"Verde, Amarillo, Rosa...."
Perfect accent by my French-trained ears, too!
Let me repeat myself: My sick, deaf, four-year-old started singing to me in Spanish at 3 o'clock in the morning. A.MA.ZING! Talk about bright spots, huh?
I will gladly endure a million more wild, shriek-y, showers. No question.
I found my Zen.
