Silflay Hraka

There comes a point in a family’s life when the parents must draw the line on the children bathing together.

I’ve reached that point. I arrived there last night, when we put Scotty M. into his pre-bedtime bath with the Ngnat. As always, my son’s Pavlovian–and immediate–response to the warm water embrace of his lower extremities was to release the yellow hounds of bladder control and pee all over the tub, a look of beatific calm on his face. Ngnat loved it. She always does. It’s the bath time equivalent of a floor show for her. Occasionally she asks for Scotty to join her in her ablutions specifically to watch him irrigate the tiles.

Her fascination with watching her little brother pee is somewhat off-putting, but at least understandable. Children are curious beasts. Worse is her tendency to absentmindedly drink the bathwater afterwards. Scotty does the same, except it isn’t absentminded on his part and there’s nothing I can do to stop him short of taking away the toys–a move that would end in misery, howling and a surrender on my part almost Gallic in its swiftness.

Ngnat I can at least remonstrate with, for all the good it does.

“Don’t drink your bath water!” I told her last night. “There’s pee-pee in that water. Do you like drinking pee water?”

She looked at me, considering.

“Yes.”

She is one with the Ollie. Not much I can do then, save declaring a provisional and largely unenforceble end to co-ed bathing in the Hraka household for those below a certain age.

In answer to the obvious question, no, there is no ban on co-ed bathing for the older members of House Hraka, but given the presence of the younger members of House Hraka, there might as well be.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 30th, 2004 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Parental. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.