Bathtime for Bonzo

Asher and Simon generally take baths together, simply because if they didn't I would spend twice as much time bathing little boys.  The only down-side is that when they get together they do a lot of splashing.  For a while, I tried to deal with this problem by saying things like, "no splashing, please.  Please don't splash.  No splashing, please!  Don't splash!!"  Eventually, I got wet enough to give up on this and tried the lay-the-kids'-towels-on-the-floor method instead.  The idea behind this, as you might have gathered, was that the children would be motivated to not splash because splashing would make their towels wet.  This turned out to be less effective than I hoped because Asher only cared intermittently and Simon didn't care at all.

So now the boys are allowed to have as much water as they can keep in the tub, which, it turns out, is about three inches.  And now they can splash as much as they want because even when they splash, my bathroom and I stay dry.  Mostly.

Today, as they were all-out wrestling in the tub, I heard amidst the giggles three words that brought warmth to my heart:  "No like it."

Simon has been significantly slower to speak his mind than Asher was.  By the time Asher was two, he knew all of his colors, the letters in the alphabet, his shapes, and several songs by heart.  He was speaking in complete sentences.  Simon, on the other hand, knows what a star is, and calls all letters "M."  He will sometimes put two, or occasionally three, words together.  I have heard several theories about why Simon doesn't talk much.  I'm not terribly concerned about which one or ones are true, and I'm convinced that he will eventually talk just fine.  However, I am sometimes frustrated by how much Asher takes advantage of Simon's silence.

And so, those three little words, spoken amidst the brawling, felt like one giant leap for oppressed little brothers everywhere.