Bath Time

Eliana is so excited to see me after I’ve been gone at the office all day. Tasha is also glad to see me because that means that she can get a rest while Eliana and I catch up. Our evening routine involves eating dinner together as a family, then Eliana and I have some play time together, Tasha joins us, and after a while it is time for me to give Eliana a bath.

I have Eliana round up some bath toys while I am filling up the tub with water. She cannot put them all in at once. She must drop each of them into the water individually. She loves to play with the water as it comes out of the faucet. She can hold up a plastic container that holds maybe 5-6 cups of water and let the rushing water fill it up completely before she pours it out and does it again. I am pretty impressed with her strength.

The squirting animals are especially fun to play with. Eliana hands them to me and I put fill them with water. She likes to squeeze the water out of them. She doesn’t quite understand how to point them so that she can squirt something specific. She often will squirt herself by accident and thinks it is funny or gets upset at the toy and pass it back to me. We discovered this week that if we leave a certain amount of air in the sea animals, that we can push them beneath the water and it looks like they are swimming between the bottom of the tub and the surface of the water.

I have learned that there is little argument from her that bath time is over if the water has been drained. I have Eliana pass me the toys while the water is draining. I have been telling her the names of the toys while we play for a couple weeks so that I can now ask for them by name. “Eliana, can you hand me the fish?” She loves the fish because she knows the sign for it (with a flat hand move it left and right like it is a fish swimming through water). She is so smart. She is able to pass me each of these toys when I ask her for them: fish, manta ray, walrus, giraffe, block, ball, sea horse, and pig.