You know how life seems to speed up around the second half of the year, as if now that summer is over, it’s picking up speed down the slope, moving gleefully away from those long slow sunny days (oh ho ho ho) and into the stretch? School starts, vacation is over, activities begin again. Festivals and fairs bop and jive, the circus comes to town. In Flyinge, the organizers of the annual giant flea market/auction send out flyers soliciting gently used goods one weekend from all the households, and then cheerfully sell them back to everyone in town but the original owners the next. Crayfish parties swing and sing under the moon, slapping mosquitos and swilling schnapps.
Everyone is back from vacation, work is a madhouse. Suddenly the calendar is full and it’s not just me; EVERYONE in the family is getting busy: choir, scouts, hockey, musiklek, club, skating school. My calendar is packed for the next 2 months, packed above and beyond the already hectic enough schedule of work/meals/school/sleep. My head is whirling just thinking about everything I have going on (it’s whirling extra hard because the rabbits did a pretty good job of cleaning it out, and empty heads are very whirly).
Which is all by way of saying I may be a little more scarce than normal around these here parts. Although you never can tell, since this habit sits pretty hard nowadays. Routines and habits are what keep us grounded, after all.
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The kids and I have evolved a bathtime game that evokes the wildest laughter in all 3 of us. The kids still bathe together, although I can see the day fast approaching when one of them will suddenly balk and turn modest. They fill the tub with toys, mostly little plastic boats and people their watery world with Fisher-Price figures and small plastic fish: Nemo and his buddies, as well as a 6-pack of neon-orange rubber goldfish that sink instead of swimming. We dump water on their heads with a child’s watering can, one that used to have a sunny flower on the spout with tiny holes in it, long since abandoned in the interest of lots of water, at a faster pace than a tiny-holed-trickle. Shampoo first, with the obligatory bubble mohawk or rabbit ears, then another water dump, and a scrubby rub with a soap-slathered washcloth. Finally a little playtime to soak the stubborn grime, and then I sneak up on them and quietly pull the plug.
It never works. They always notice, and they shriek and bob about and splashily grab all their toys, corralling them under and around their seal-slick bodies. They lie face-down, heads tilted up along the curving slope of the tub, giggling their heads off with their toys clutched in their hands and trapped under their tummies. It’s my job to get the toys out before the water runs out. If they manage to hang on to them, and geez louise does Karin have a GRIP on her, until the final ssssllllluuuuck, then they win. So I wait, and pounce, and tickle a bit, and grab! when I see a toy and wrestle it out of their laughing, shrieking hands. Which makes me laugh like a loon, so the bathroom is echoing with our mad cackling. The neighbors, who can certainly hear us through all the open windows of the house, must think that 1) we are torturing our children and/or 2) we are all nuts.
It’s a ritual; we play it nearly every bath night, which is to say, every other night. I’m not looking forward to giving it up as they grow up because it makes me laugh just as much as excites and delights them. I love the age they’re at right now. Exciting and delightful describes it perfectly.