 I try to give my younger children a bath at night. But unless I
stretch bath time out for three or four hours, considering how long
it takes for the hot water heater to recover, they all can't take
one on the same night.When they were babies, I could get away
with putting them all in the tub together. Even if they would
tolerate that now, which they most emphatically would not, my
bathroom would quickly deteriorate under those circumstances.
They're much more... active... now.
I've tried using the same bath water for all of them. My daughter
loves very hot baths and she is usually the cleanest of them, so she
would go first. After that, however, I had trouble convincing my
germophobic son that the water was cleaner than he was. If I
couldn't get him in the tub after my daughter, there was no way I'd
get him in there after my 6-year-old. That one attracts dirt like a
Swiffer. Honestly, I've never seen him roll around in a pile of
loose dirt, but he always looks as though he has.
Dirt embeds itself under his fingernails, behind his ears and on
any part of his body that has been exposed to whatever he spilled on
himself that day. There are many times that I have considered hosing
him down before he came in the house.
So, anyway, the bath water is definitely unrecyclable after he's
been in it, and there is no hot water left for a shower.
We've finally decided on a staggered bath and shower schedule for
the older two and an on-demand schedule for the youngest.
Getting a hot shower for myself from day to day is a crapshoot.
It's not because of a shortage of showers -- we have three of them
in our house -- it's the shortage of hot water. What good is having
three showers if we can't use them all at once?
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The adults in my family include my 19-year-old son when he is home
from college. We all need to take a shower in the morning. If we
take one at night, it results in moderate to severe bed-head, which
no amount of gel, mousse or other industrial-strength hair care
product can make right. Since I am the only woman fighting for the
shower in the morning, I figured the easiest way to solve the issue
was for the men to shave themselves bald and shower at night.
However, they were not inclined to be reasonable.
As a result of this need for a hot shower in the morning, we are
all motivated to rise and shine much earlier than any sane person.
However, regardless of my diligence where rising and shining is
concerned, sometimes I am still the last person to take a shower.
Thinking that I've waited long enough for the hot water to
recover, I'll get in the shower, lather up, and only then discover
that... I was wrong.
No matter how much I adjust the cold water to allow more warm
water, I know that I'm eventually going to be freezing my butt off
under a stream of frigid, arctic water. At that moment, my mind-set
changes very quickly from "How long can I stay in this shower?" to
"How fast can I get out?"
Some people say that taking a cold shower is "exhilarating."
Those are the same people who jog 20 miles every morning, climb
Mount Everest for fun and jump out of airplanes with nothing but a
backpack with a large handkerchief inside.
[By LAURA SNYDER]
You can reach the writer at
lsnyder@lauraonlife.com. Or visit
www.lauraonlife.com for
more columns and info about her new book.
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