“Well,” she told me, “you’re the one that decided to have kids.”
Touché, I thought as I sopped up water from around the toilet which had gathered there from being splashed out of the tub while Olivia was ‘diving’ for the plastic eggs she’d taken in to play with while bathing.
She’s right; I’m the one who decided to have kids. I went into it know it would be work, that it would change my life forever.
In fact, as my pregnancy with Alyssa wound down, I started to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. I was thirty-two years old, which is plenty old to understand the changes coming my way. I loved the pregnancy (except those twelve weeks of daily puking…) and I loved having her with me at all times. I loved that she was actually very little work for me while I was pregnant.
The work began immediately after birth, of course. And it hasn’t stopped in the past twelve plus years.
Most days, it’s all good. My girls are sweet, loving girls who are probably more than a little spoiled and that’s my fault, which means I must be pretty okay with it.
But damn is bath time a lot of work.
Each bath starts with me reminding Olivia not to splash water out of the tub. She will smile her angelic smile and say, “Okay, I won’t.”
Then I’ll check on her ten minutes later (Relax, I was in the very next room folding laundry, listening to each and every splash.) there will be a small pond of water outside the tub. I’ll ask her how it happened.
Her first response is always, “I didn’t mean to!”
My answer to that is, “Even if you don’t mean to, it still means work for me.”
Yeah, not my finest moments but we get through them and she usually falls asleep feeling loved. And hey, bonus, she’s clean. So is the floor in the bathroom because it tends to get mopped every other night.
Look at me, looking at the bright side.
She’s awfully cute when she sleeps, isn’t she?
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