Bath Saga Continued…

As mentioned in my last post, Maya has been afraid of the bathtub for over a month. In particular, she is scared of the drain. I was over at my neighbour’s house yesterday while the kids were playing in the sprinklers and my wonderful, wise neighbour offered for her children (who Maya adores!) to come and join Maya for a bath. So, Maya’s two friends (both quite a bit older–aged 3 and 5) came over with many of their own bath toys in tow and they helped to convince Maya that having a bath was a fun endeavor. Maya cried a lot at first and she insisted that her friends get out of the bath so that she could play with them on dry ground, but they just ignored her and eventually she got in the bath, although she would only stand up–no sitting. By the end, everyone was out of the bath and she was reluctant to get out. That said, she only got her ankles wet, but she had fun–this was progress.

So today, in an attempt to build upon this success, I bought a bunch of new bath toys, and (at the recommendation of friends and family) I picked up some bathtub crayons at Michael’s. I also bought a new container of bubbles and bubble blower. I was determined to make bath time into the event of the century! The result was pretty good. Maya got in the bath, wouldn’t sit down but was crouching down with her new and exciting bath crayons. But wait, she wasn’t just crouching, she was also kind of grunting… and yes, you guessed it, she was going number TWO while she was drawing with her crayons in the tub! In an effort not to make this a big deal out of this and ruin her experience (she usually freaks out if there’s even a bit of sock lint floating in the tub), I whisked Maya into the other bathtub in the house where my wonderful husband took over and finished bathing her there, while I got down to the fun job of cleaning up the contaminated tub and toys.

Regardless of the fact that this was kind of a disaster, since she’s only pooped in the bath two other times EVER (and one of them was when my mom was bathing her–thank god!), Maya didn’t seem to notice any of the chaos and she enjoyed her time so immensely that she was complaining that she wanted to go back in the bath after we took her out. She even sat down for my husband and she did so RIGHT NEXT TO THE DRAIN!

I declare the bathtub fear officially conquered.