Bath Terrors

[windinthemaples]

Graeme loves a few things: playing in the bath, drawing, and popping bubbles top the list. (So you can perhaps see just how great baths can be when I pull out the bottle of bubbles and the tub crayons.)

This week, I encouraged Daniel to give Graeme (who was covered in dinner) a bath. I stayed downstairs. This has probably only happened a handful of times in Graeme's life. Usually I give baths or our babysitter.

There was the splash of the tub filling and Graeme's happy footsteps as he raced around to pick out the toys he wanted to dump in there. (Plastic Ostara eggs and a bowl, probably.) Happy conversational tones and then blood-curdling screams. Daniel's anxious questioning, Graeme's repeated screams of "No! No! No! No!" in a sheer panicked, blubbering way.

I got upstairs and Daniel was soothing a towel-wrapped toddler who was red-faced and tear-streaked.

"Maybe the water was too hot for him", Daniel says.

I go to feel the water, that'd been sitting now for a few minutes, and it was HOT HOT HOT!

Graeme didn't have any burns, but it was obviously way hotter than any bath Graeme'd ever been in. Daniel says he'd happily climbed in and then, like a delayed reaction, started screaming.

We had no luck getting him back into that tub. I changed the water, climbed in there myself, mounded it with toys. No way. He whimpered and wailed, even when he could feel the water wasn't hot anymore.

So today, Graeme has marker all over his face, hands, feet, legs. I ask him if I can give him a bath (something he used to request daily!) and he says no. What about if there are toys? What about if Mama gets in, too? Eventually he says okay. I put a few inches of water in the tub (different tub! different apartment!) and the minute he's ankle deep in that totally tepid water, he started screaming in sheer terror. I couldn't calm him down or do anything but get him out of that tub. I tried washing him up in the sink, another of his former favorite play spots, and he acted the same way.

I know Daniel feels like a villain. I have to admit, I'm pretty upset about it, too. Not just the too-hot mistake but the parenting inequality that allowed for something that is so obvious to me to be so unknown to D. Mostly, I feel terrible for Graeme and unsure how long it will take to get him to trust water again--let alone restore it to its beloved status.

We both feel horrible. I guess Graeme does, too.

Comments

[radshaun.livejournal.com]

Awwww. Give everyone big hugs for me. Maybe if you put extra bubble bath in so that Graeme doesn't see the water?