$30 and counting

Over the past few months we have amassed quite a collection of bathtub toys, ranging from squirting fish to rubber ducks to sea creatures that suction to the bottom of the tub (supposedly to prevent slips, though Liam would rather they not be suctioned down, so that he can chew on them). And we have also developed a bathtime ritual, whereby we start filling the tub and strip Liam down, and he then makes a beeline to the bathroom and drops the toys (kept in a container on the tub ledge) into the water one by one.

I guess it is taking too long for the water to fill, as he has begun dropping other items into the tub as well in order to pass the time until his bath. Most of the Roll Arounds have been in the tub at one time or another, as have some stuffed animals and whatever socks Chad leaves lying around (none of my clothes have made it into the tub yet, and I think that speaks volumes about who throws their clothes on the floor and who doesn’t). I had gotten off easy until Sunday night, when I was talking to my sister on the phone when I started running the bathwater, and then I hung up and went to Liam’s room to get his hooded towel. That was all the time it took for him to finish adding the tub toys to the water, retrieve the phone from the table in the hall where I’d left it, and drop it in as well. Chad says I must have been downstairs in the meantime, polishing off the last of the Chunky Monkey in order for enough time to have elapsed for this to happen. I told him no, that I don’t desert Liam for the ice cream until I have actually deposited him into the tub with specific instructions to scrub-scrub-scrub behind his ears before getting out, toweling off and re-diapering himself.

Regardless, after two days of drip-drying, the phone is still dead as a Kennedy, so sometime I am going to have to make my way to Future Shop to shell out another $30 for a new phone (the thought of buying something a bit nicer crossed my mind, but considering the likelihood of it winding up underwater again – I’m thinking cheap is the way to go during these preschool years.) I’m thinking I might start an Excel file detailing all the things Liam ruins in the course of his life, so that I know how much to bill him for the day he turns 18. Though, on second thought, it may be cute when it’s a $30 phone now – not so cute when he totals the family car as a teenager.