Bathroom Grafitti or a Budding Abstractionist

Yesterday I gave Ivan a bath. Bath time is usually a daddy activity. (Why? It was just simpler to divvy up afterwork, pre-bed time tasks. We get home. Scramble to get something to eat. Andy gives Ivan a bath while I clean up. I put Ivan to sleep while Andy walks Mariposa.)

Since he wasn't too tired, he really enjoyed taking a bath. If he's too tired, then he simply cries and refuses to get into the tub. In those instances, it's skip the bath time and tuck him straight to bed, with the help of some meme.

While the bathtub was filling up with water, we "brusha, brushad" our teeth. Since he absolutely refuses to let me brush his teeth or even peak into his mouth, I've finally devised a clever scheme to get him to work with me--I plop him up on the bathroom sink so he can look at himself in the mirror. Then we brusha, brusha together so he sees that he has to brush the front teeth and all four sides. Then we brush our tongue, which he finds hilarious.

Then it was finally time to get into the tub. I love the fact that he tries helps me take his clothes off.

Instead of playing with his regular bath toys, which include squirting water onto himself with a squirty car and ducky, or dumping water from the toy boat into the toy submarine, he wanted his bathroom crayon. He saw a completely new crayon on top of the medicine cabinet (which is my only spot in the house to store out of reach items, such as detergent, etc), which I had to get for him.

When he got into the tub, I spelled Ivan, Mama, Dadda, Baka and Dida on the side of the tub. And he took the crayon from me, and wouldn't let go. By the time the bath was done, the water was cold and the tub was covered in red.

He was so focused and so intent on drawing. I've never seem him so into it before. He was like a little artist, working on his masterpiece, completely oblivious to the outside world, just focus on his artwork, because he had to draw it, had to finish it....

The tub walls and the bottom were covered in red by the time he was done.

I should've taken a photo of it, but I didn't. I was too embarrased to record for posterity the sorry state of our dilapitated bathtub with old glaze peeling off, which is in dire need of needing to be reglazed or fitted with a bath tub fitter.

Fixing the bathtub has been on our list of house projects to tackle since the moment we moved in. But I couldn't decide whether to reglaze of bathfitter it. There is also a question of cost and money. And of course, plain inertia to get cracking on such a project.

But now, it may be high time to tackle this project. After I tucked Ivan to bed, I went to clean off the doodles. In general, bathtub cleaning is at the very top of house chores I despise to do. For some reason, I find it hard, cumbersome and tedious, and one has to bend at weird angles to scrub really well. Ivan's scribbles were impossible to clean. Actually, it was much easier than I had anticipated it, but still there was some physical exertion required and scrubbing the bathtub sides did require angling my body in uncomfortable positions.

Even though I did a good job cleaning up the doodles, the white tub walls ended up with that just barely visible but definitely there reddish/pinkish tint to them. Instead of scrubbing that off, it will just be easier to update the bathtub.