Making bathtime more fun.

My boy requested a purple bath today.  It's been quite a while since he wanted a coloured bath, so it wasn't until now that writing this advice occured to me.  I'm not in a writing mood, so this will remain short and no frills, but here goes.

My

youngest was almost impossible to get in the bath.  Regardless of how many fun toys he had, he just wasn't interested.  I needed new ways to make it interesting, and I found some.  It was particularly useful on hot days, but worked well on cold ones also, I just needed to be aware the bath water would cool down a little bit faster and I might need to top it up with warmer water.

Every evening my kids didn't know what to expect to find in the bath, and couldn't wait to get in there to find out.  This is what I did:

I would use plastic cups to freeze some food colouring mixed with water.  I'd do a variety of different colours.  After filling up the bath, once the kids were in it, I'd drop one cup per kid into the bath without them knowing.   As the contents melted, the water changed colour.  They used to search until they found a cup each and be amazed and fascinated, as every night they had a different coloured bath that came from a coloured block of ice in a cup - that made for something fun to play with as well.  Face it, kids love ice, and coloured ice is just top stuff for little ones.  Of course, they could have the standard red, blue, green, or yellow, but if I dropped in different coloured cups each, they'd get purple, orange, in fact the combinations were limitless.  That amused them even more.  Eventually they started asking for specific colours each night, so I had to keep a selection of colours in the freezer at all times.  Sometimes for a change I'd give them a block of uncoloured ice, or only coloured just enough to tint the ice itself, not the bath water, so they would be amazed that some blocks of ice turned the water coloured and others didn't.

After a while, different colours became dull.  So I expanded the idea by freezing the coloured ice mixed with bubblebath.  So now they didn't know if they'd get a coloured bath, a plain bath, a bubble bath, or a coloured bubble bath.  It worked a charm.  Suddenly my littlest one was interested in having a bath, and my only challenge became coaxing my eldest to get out of the bath... but that's a different story.