Patrick Henry Block

Patrick is so cute in the tub.  Sometimes we go floating because I want him to get used to being comfortable in the water.  By floating I mean I get in the tub with him and let him go bouyant while supporting his fat ol’ head.  He wiggles a LOT and kicks his feet quite happily, sometimes splashing his own face.  He seems kind of annoyed with that, lol.  A few months ago I started having Matt hand the nekked bebe to me at the end of my shower because it was a lot faster to clean him that way.  He gets quite slippery when wet, but a good grip fixes that.  It’s really about the same level of safetyness as giving him a bath, because he wiggles and splashes then too, and could just as easily slip under the water in his bath chair as he could wiggle out of my grip in the shower.  He enjoys putting his hands in the stream of water in the shower and trying to catch it. Once in the shower, I guess he was really hungry and realized he had easy access to food, so he tried nursing!  We’ve also done that in the tub a few times while floating whenever he got upset about something.

When I wrap him in a towel and put him on the bed to dress him, it is then that he realizes bath time is over and gets quite unhappy.  I’m glad he likes it so much, though!  Hopefully we will have no problem getting him to bathe when he’s a dirty bird, or getting him to learn how to swim some day!

We have lots of bath toys thanks to Aunt Jenn and Great-Aunt Karen, and even a bath book thanks to my friend Lisa!  So we squirt water from the toys and squeak the ones that squeak, and usually read the book.  I like swooshing him in the water so he can feel it rushing over his skin.  His little hairs fly out all over the place in the water!  That used to be my favorite part of a bath – swooshing my hair.  It feels good!  You can see Patrick’s swooshy hair in the picture below.

I read [part of] this book called “Water Babies” and it basically talked about how to teach your child to get used to being in the water.  It’s pretty informative if you ever get the chance to read it (I found a copy at the Greene County Library).