Bathing triplets plus one!

Bath time has always been dreaded in this house. Not sure why, but it's the one thing that I find overwhelming in terms of caring for so many littles. Okay, there are more things I find overwhelming, but bath time is right at the top. It's just such a process and one that often ends with crying, the bather soaked, things in the bath which shouldn't be, somebody splashing in the toilet while someone else is unraveling the toilet paper at lightning speed and near catastrophe. For example, they all try and jump into the bath at once (which they can do) whether still clothed or not. Whether I'm able to help them in that moment or not they don't care. They are going for it! Maybe we're just bad at giving baths but I swear, bathing triplets has been such a challenge for us!

So we just didn't :)

For a while, we got away with bathing them once a week. Yup, I said it. For most of this past year, we bathed them only once per week and I know some people out there are probably appalled. I'm admitting it because it's the truth and because I can't be only triplet mom struggling with bath time. I can't be the only mom who bathed her kids once a week during year one and they survived.

We started with this little bathing device.

It was great! I'd highly recommend it. We had a bather (usually me) and a drier and dresser... usually Chris and maybe a relative if one was around. Sort of like an assembly line if you will.

Then we used these bath chairs, pictured also in this post.

I would moderately endorse these. We were able to fit them side by side in the bath but I found that the clasps broke easily. You can pop them back in but it's a pain. And as I said, we weren't using them much so I was surprised that they would break so easily. When they worked, they did a pretty good job of keeping them contained.

Often we'd just hand them into the shower one by one (if one of us was already in the shower) but that didn't feel ideal either.

Recently, now that it's warmer and we're outdoors more, they're pretty dirty by the end of the day and therefore we can't get away with once a week baths anymore! It's become an almost every day thing. Grrrrrrrrrr.

So we've been experimenting.

We tried bathing one at a time.... sooo time consuming and felt draining especially since bedtime is already the end of the day when Chris and I are both fried. (although I should say that Chris doesn't find bath time near as daunting as I do).

We tried two and two. Two kiddos in our master bath and two in the kid bath.... ehhh. That was okay.

And honestly, we've still been using the bath chairs! As if we were afraid to let them out! Goodness golly, it even says right there on the front, "Don't use when baby starts to pull to stand".

See:

They started pulling to stand last November!!! Apparently I never noticed that label through my crazy bath time eyes. Must be why they could actually STAND UP WITH THE CHAIRS STILL ATTACHED TO THEM, thereby making bath time even more challenging. We both agreed that it's time to let go of the bath chairs.

Then for some reason, tonight, totally unplanned we just threw everyone in together.

And knock me over with a feather, it was FINE.

Faster.

More enjoyable for them- and us. God bless them, they were probably like, "Thank God she FINALLY got rid of those confining, highly inappropriate for our current development, baby chairs!"


And just when I started to relax, a whole other craziness took over when I realized,


"OH MY GOD THIS IS THEIR FIRST BATH TOGETHER! MUST GET CAMERA!"

In these pictures I'm yelling, "Look at Mommy! Look at Mommy!"

Clearly my children listen to me well.


But then they did.

One

at

a

time.

I'll take it.