How to take a shower when you have a toddler

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I don’t shower as often as I would like to. My last one, in fact, was weeks days ago.

It’s not that I don’t like to shower. I really enjoy a nice, long shower. It’s just that I can’t seem to get showering worked into my stay-at-home-mom schedule. 
 
My schedule, by the way, goes something like this:

  • 6:30 am – Grace wakes me up. I go get her from the crib, and I bring her into my bed to try to eek out another half hour of sleep.
  • 7:00 am – Grace is either playing with the speaker phone or jumping on me or prying my eyes open, so I get up. We feed our 4 cats and give Molly (one of the cats) her medicine. We feed the turtle.
  • 8:00 am – Grace sits on the potty for a few minutes, then I prepare our oatmeal, and we eat breakfast. After breakfast, we play until Sesame Street comes on at 9.
  • 9 to 10 am – We watch Sesame Street, all snuggled up on the couch.
  • 10 am to noon – I struggle with Grace to take a nap. She finally conks out and sleeps for an hour if it’s a really good day. If it’s not a good day, she sleeps for twenty to thirty minutes. Of course, she only sleeps if I’m rocking her, so I do that and check email and catch up on my Google reader and Twitter. If she wakes up too soon, she’ll happily empty all of her dresser drawers while I finish what I’m doing.
  • noon – I make us lunch, and we eat. After lunch, we do the day’s chores, which always take longer than I anticipate. If we get them done early, we play and read books in the living room.
  • 3:30 pm – Joe comes home, we start dinner, and we play. I usually check email, reader, Twitter, and try to blog during this time, too.
  • The rest of the evening is family time – Dinner, Grace’s bath, bedtime, then Joe and I do something together, like watching tv (classic bonding activity, non?).

I digressed a little with my whole daily schedule. You get my point. When am I going to shower? I’m always “on duty.”
 
I was lamenting this to my father recently, who said, “Uh, why don’t you take a shower during the day?”
 
I thought the answer was perfectly obvious. I can’t leave the baby alone in the house for a half hour while I’m in there, and if I put her in the shower with me, she screams the whole time.
 
“Leave her in the bathroom while you’re in the shower. Shut the door so she can’t get out. You should’ve been able to figure that out; you’re the smart one.” Being the “smart” sibling always gets brought up when I’ve missed something important.

 
So this morning, I tried out his suggestion. It worked. Grace did not escape the bathroom. She didn’t throw anything into the toilet, and she didn’t get into anything poisonous. (For the record, everything poisonous was locked away, but I was still paranoid worried about it.)
 
We have sliding glass doors on our tub, so I left them open a bit at the back. Grace could see and talk to me, and she kept herself busy the whole time. 
 
Because she was looking for things to toss into the shower.
 
First, she threw her rubber ducky in. I guess Ducky needed a washing. 
 
Then she found two bottles of shampoo, and threw them into the shower. Maybe she thought I didn’t have enough.
 
Then Grace got a box of tampons from behind the toilet, and attempted to throw them in. Fortunately, I intercepted those just in time.
 
I guess I looked bored because she found some of her fishy friends and tossed them in with me.
 
Next came the bag of Plackers, into the shower.
 
Because I wasn’t hurrying enough, she also got into the trash and threw some used cotton swabs into the shower, too.
 
Oh, it was a fun time. I can’t wait to do it again next week tomorrow.
 
 
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