Upper Hand

For the last year or so, bath and bedtime in our house has been a carefully orchestrated and choreographed affair, like kabuki or hula dancing. First there is the ceremonial Declaration of Bathtime that takes place at the dinner table, followed by the Inquisition in which She Who Must Be Bathed demands to know who will be given the honor of overseeing her ablutions.

She says: “You give my bath, Mama?” in an encouraging, friendly way, as though we are conspirators against the inferior child bathing abilities of her father.

There follows the discussion of Her Hair, which deserves many commentaries of its own. “No hair wet?” she asks, hopefully.

Once we’ve established that the Who is me, and Hair Washing is no, we move on fairly uneventfully, through our evening routine.

But, as she has shown a small but noticeable willingness of late to allow her father more involvement in these proceedings, she barely protested one night last week when he got the job. As it happens, we usually route our path to the bath through the living room and her bedroom, restoring order to the chaos as we go, with me reminding her it’s her job to pick up her toys.

On this recent evening, she skipped off to the bathroom with Daddy in tow, but quickly shooed him out into the hall so that she could have a wee-tee before bath. From the kitchen, I heard her shoes hit the tile as she came running into the hallway, so excited by her own conniving brilliance that she didn’t even stop to pull her pants and underwear up from her ankles.

She: “Daddy! I have a job you can do!”

He: “What’s that?”

She: “You go pick up my room!”

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