The Monster hates showers.

I don’t know what it is, actually, about showers that he hates, since he does love the water so much.  It could be the sound – all that noise that’s reverberating off the tiled surfaces in our bathroom – or it could be the sensation of the water and its pressure on his skin, or the fact that we tend to give him one in the morning before school/synagogue, or it could be something entirely different.  All I do know is that he always puts up these huge fights about taking a shower and getting clean, to the point that he tends to get one once a week (unless he’s dirty/smelly enough to require an additional one).

I know it’s nothing to do with water, though.  He loves the water.  After we went to one of the recent birthday parties that involved swimming, he spent two weeks insisting that he wanted to go swimming again.  (The JCC pool opens in a week or so for the summer, so we’ll go more often then.)

Yesterday evening, the Monster started on about a bath.  This came out of the blue, the request, though it was after the wife had taken him in the back yard to play and he’d wanted to dive into the (very dirty) inflatable pool.  Because she’s recently cleaned that bathroom from top to bottom, including the tub, we relented and agreed to let him have a bath.

Now, not a lot of washing got done while he was in the tub – the wife’s trying to teach him to clean himself so that he’s more independent – but he definitely seemed like he had a good time in the water.  This also resulted in two new problems:

• He didn’t want to go to bed afterwards.  I know a lot of kids have bath time as part of their going-to-bed rituals and it calms them down, but the bath seemed to really just rile him up.  We ended up just deciding that being in his room was enough (there’s a gate in front of his door so he can’t leave), and he proceeded to live up to his nickname in his room for a bit.
• He started insisting again this morning that he wanted a bath, to the point that we had to put the baby gate across the stairs to keep him from going up there before school, since there’s just not enough time for such.

We did offer to him that if he’s good today – if he behaves at school and at gymnastics – we’ll let him have a bath this evening… now if it was more than just glorified soaking, we’d be getting somewhere…