While I’ve been pretty good about blogging three times a week for many months now, there are still many, many things I don’t include here on the blog. Sometimes I don’t include some events because they’re too mundane (like us eating leftover homemade mac & cheese for lunch today for about the 3rd time this week), too personal (the lists of anxieties that keep me awake at night), or not my story to tell (the details of my father-in-law’s condition after the scare we had at the end of January).
And there’s a fourth category of stuff, too—
The things I don’t think will be of interest to very many of my readers, but the things that are important to ME.
Sometimes I go ahead and publish these things anyway (like I did yesterday with my revelation on why my monthly to-do list just wasn’t cutting it for me anymore), but more often than not, nothing ever gets written or said here (or anywhere else), and before I quite realize it, the details of all those memories and events and little happenings have disappeared into the abyss, probably never to be recovered again.
So I started keeping a Google Doc that I’ve simply entitled “The Motherhood Diaries.” In it, I write down those everyday moments that I don’t want to forget, but that I don’t always find noteworthy enough to share here on the blog.
Occasionally, though, I want to give you glimpses into just such moments, even though the writing won’t be as polished as what I typically try to do with my blog posts.
So, I present to you now the story of the Bubble Bath Fail (copied directly from my document):
What I thought would be an epic parental success tonight turned instead into one of the most traumatizing (it would seem) experiences of Raven’s young life—
The Bubble Bath.
Raven has long been obsessed with us blowing bubbles (ever since Matt had the brilliant idea to put some in her Christmas stocking), and she often begs me during the day to blow “big bubbles” for her in the kitchen. Well, it seemed a natural stepping point to go from there to bubble bath, so I picked up a bottle for $2.99 at the store yesterday, thinking she was going to squeal in delight and give me the smile that basically translates to the best parent of the year award.
What actually happened was that she stared at the mounds of white bubbles as they foamed forth at the mouth of the water stream and started distinctively whimpering. I thought at first it might be because she didn’t want to sit on her potty, but it immediately became apparent that she was not only wary of this new bubbling foam—she was outright terrified of it.
Knowing that it sometimes just takes me thrusting her into the unknown for her to like something new (e.g., her first time going into a kiddie pool at Emma’s first birthday party), I grabbed her trembling body and plunked it right into the middle of the mass of bubbly water.
And she proceeded to scream in terror, her little face going bright red in fear, huge tears streaming down her face.
I called in backup—Matt trying to come to the rescue blowing normal bubbles to show her that they were basically the same thing—but though they served a small distraction, she in no way forgot her predicament of being surrounded on all sides by the foreign matter, and she continued to sob.
Finally, after several failed attempts to play with the bubbles and help her to see how absolutely fun they could be, we admitted defeat and took her out much earlier than planned (and without having properly bathed her at all, really).
And then, all the rest of the evening, as we proceeded forth with the usual bedtime routine, she would say, with a certain amount of finality and lingering uncertainty, “Bye bye bubbles. Bye bye.”
Bye bye bubbles, indeed.
We won’t be trying that again anytime soon.
