The one about baths, bums and hickies

• By Alison
• 31 January, 2010
• 12 Comments

Tonight was the Sunday night bath, which is a weekly ritual that the girls love. Having grown up with a brother, I am relieved for the sake of the general household aroma that mine are both girls, and therefore likely to continue to enjoy cleanliness even as they reach the teen years.

But baths tend to take up a lot of time because the girls love to play. They still have bath toys. Or more correctly – toys that happen to now live in the bath. They’d squeal and laugh and spell out words for hours if I let them. They get out looking like a pair of little pink prunes, and the bathroom is soaked. 

During the week there are days where we can safely skip a bath, especially when we’re coming in late from drama or ballet or any of the other myriad of extra curricular activities we stack our afternoons with.

Sunday on the other hand, is the night before the week begins again. So there is no skipping to be done. Everything needs to be squeaky clean and ready for school. It’s the night I stack all the skivvies in the drawer, line up the grey tights, fold the trousers, hang the blouses, iron the tunics and polish the shoes.

And of so course it’s also hair wash night, which makes the whole bath thing that bit more involved.

Miss Comic Relief has long thin fine hair. It’s not a problem to wash and comb, although keeping it tidy is another thing altogether. But Miss Trouble Pants has long thick wavy hair. It takes ages to work all the shampoo through in the first place, and three times longer to get it out again. It has to be conditioned after shampooing if I’m going to have even one hope in hades of getting a comb through it afterwards.

So the way it works is like this – I wash and rinse their hair first, then smother it in conditioner and pin it up so that it really soaks through. Then I let them play in the bath for a while.

But this week I am not really very on the ball. I’ve had a cold since monday, when the gods of snot decreed that I should runneth over, and I’ve been battling the sore throat, cough and sinus headaches all week. It’s not actually a bad cold. I just feel crappy. I feel crabby. And I act it too.

I am so crabby that the joyous sounds of my happy children playing and laughing grate on my nerves, and I hide out in my office while they bathe. I’m only in the next room, but the sound is somewhat muted and more bearable. All that pleasure and delight. Ergh. 

I wait until they’ve reached perfect prune density, then I go back to rinse off the conditioner and get them out of the bath.

I am greeted by a strange sight. As Miss Trouble Pants stands up – a foam “t” sticking to her backside – I notice a strange red rash. It’s like a red blob made up of tiny dots just above her bum cheeks. Like dots of blood under the skin. 

I am going in for a closer look, my eyebrows narrowing as I squint at it. I can see that it’s a concentrated patch of dark spots.

“What have you done to your back?” I ask, although I already fear that the rash is one of those terrifying varieties that doesn’t go away when you press a glass against it, and I am visualising the sodden trip to the A&E in our crappy that had broken down earlier that day.

I don’t expect giggling from both girls, and a small blue hippo to be presented as exhibit A.

It’s the suction cap that holds the netting bag of bath toys to the tiled wall. Comprehension dawns in a rush, and I realise that what my daughter has on her back.

It’s a hickie.

A hickie from the sucking kisses of a plastic hippo!

There are more on Miss Comic Relief’s back, although they were not as successfully done, so don’t have the really scary look of meningitis. They still stand out on her very pale skin.

Still, at least the hippo didn’t invite her up for coffee!