Baths

I took a bath with the two younger girls tonight. Highlights included Beatrix grabbing the support bar with both hands and jumping up and down on my stomach, Elspeth dumping cold water on me, and Beatrix making surprise lunges for num-nums. Gone are the days when a bath meant a magazine and sweat pouring blissfully from every pore, candles flickering and a cup of herbal tea. No more, no more.

I insist on my baths without the Crayola dye tablet (see above) and without excessive amounts of Dora the Explorer bubbles. The girls are pretty flexible--they seem to be perfectly content with luke-warm to cool water. Maybe it's my Finnish heritage, but I like to look as close to a lobster as possible when I emerge from the bath. So I kept on warming the water until the little ones were sitting on the ceramic edge of the tub and grinning at me. "Sit down!" I said for the hundredth time, "In the bath!" Elspeth looked a little sheepish: "It's a little warm," she said, and then I realized that indeed the steam was rising from the surface. I remembered years ago climbing into my mother's bath after she was out. The water should have cooled by then, but it never had. I sat there, head bowed, overwhelmed by the heat and not enjoying myself at all. What was up with my mom? How could she stand it?

But I had no idea how relatively peaceful our bath actually was until something happened. Let me give you a little background: we used to have a mouse problem at our house. It was horrible--the little creatures ate through everything they could get their paws on, including the Christmas chocolate stashed in my bedroom closet. But then we noticed the mice were gone, and it was not due to our persistent efforts to trap them--no, it was because several enormous cats of indeterminate breed had taken over our garden. Occasionally I watch them from the windows as they follow their habitual routes down our garden paths, but they never approach any of us, preferring instead to streak off down the hill to who-knows-where.

I did not know that the cats had also taken over our roof, but even if I had, I still would have been surprised when, during a quiet moment of splashing, the ceiling above us ruptured, light dappled the crowns of our heads, and a humongous ginger cat, claws outstretched, wailing, crashed down into the bathtub. You can imagine what happened then; I grabbed both children and streaked out of the bathroom, water pooling beneath us, slammed our pocket door shut, and listened to the racket in our bathroom while the girls shrieked--Elspeth because she was scared, and Bea because she loves animals. "Meow-meow!" she announced, pointing to the door. "He like Bath?"

And now I know that the three pieces of advice my mother, the hot-bath-taker, always gave me were right on the money. When trouble or stress bothers you, you have choices:

a. take a hot bath
b. drink a cup of hot tea
c. go to bed and sleep
or d: all three.

I am endlessly and ridiculously grateful for any of the three. They all produce a long sigh of oh-finally-this-is-SO-good. I never, ever take them for granted.

I'm not sure the hot bath does the trick with two little imps crawling on your back, jumping in and out of the tub and poking your stomach fat, but it won't be long until only one of us will fit in the bath at a time. So a tub of three is a happy thing, too. A tub of three WITH a cat is NOT a happy thing, neither for us or for the cat, who finally tumbled out of the bathroom and down our stairs, straight out the open door Martin held for him. The girls and I watched from our perch on a desk, and after the cat was gone we turned to the wrecked bathroom, singing a hymn of thanks that it is April and the first after all, and the cat had never actually come except in the world of fools.

Ha! Thus spoke my good friend, Zarathustra. Ha!