On Family Baths

With Tara now three months old (yes! to the day! and only another three months before she's off to nursery, now how scarily big is that?!), we're old enough, all of us, to have developed some family traditions. One of them: Cuddly family baths with as many adults as fit in the tub. Which normally is one, but on special occasions like today, two (and that's the limit! We're not inviting! There are prizes that just can't be shared). It's a splishy-splashy affair, and so much more convenient when it comes to hunting down baby gunk in the inaccessible valleys between chubby leg and neck roll mountains, the most inaccessible one being located between her double chin and what might be either her triple chin or her neck, one can't be sure. Poor baby, she's inherited her mother's insatiable appetite, and while mummy proudly kisses each extra gram of baby, daddy fears the onset of skin disease in said valleys.
A wonderful feature of family baths is the inbuily mummy soak time. It's not that long ago when I never made it to even the post-shampoo conditioning stage (and forget about the body lotioning stage and other finishing touches!), but now I simply hand a clean, fed, happy, naked baby to her father, and dive, not to be heard of again until after all of the finishing touches.
Different from Tara today: She's decided she decidedly dislikes getting dressed, and must have burnt up all her bathtime snack calories protesting loudly, wahwahwah. I had just gotten through the shampoo when the door burst open, and Jose, looking accusingly at queen Alex in her tub, dangled a crying Tara from outstretched arms. The little angel promptly stopped crying, dangled a little longer in baffled silence, and was then withdrawn ('The doooooor, Jose!'). I soaked on. Poor man, he'd had her for most of the day. But then, I had her three months ago. I think the deal was fair (and Tara was, of course, fed promptly and, as ever, generously. Yum).