Bathing Beauty

Giuliana is loving bathtime lately. Her usual schedule is every other night, just before bedtime. But for her birthday she received the toy she lovingly calls "Dora-Boots castle" and well, it's rocked her world. She is begging for a bath several times a day, and anytime she is in the bathroom and sees the "Dora-Boots castle" it's a fight to get her to leave it alone. We've added some Little People and Elmo to the mix, as well as all her "old" bath toys. But the castle remains, well...king.

I've been using more big-girl bubble bath with her, too, because she likes to pop the bubbles. She "swims" and blows bubbles in the water. She hides her toys under mounds of bubbles and then makes you search for them. She kicks and splashes and is generally silly.

We've introduced the shower. I began using the shower head to rinse her hair months ago and she hated it. She put up with it, but protested...loudly. She is finally beginning to like the feel of the shower. She leans her head back and lets the water run over her head and face, she even asks for it on occasion.

It's the little things like this that give me pause. The little, unexpected, totally familiar little girl things that she does. Every day, it seems, she becomes more kid and less and less baby. The first time she layed on her stomach in the bath and told me she was "swimming," for example. I REMEMBER doing that as a kid. She's just two, but she's already advanced to levels of play that I can recall from my own childhood. This is just a little scary to me. Up till now I've been seeing things through her eyes, for the first time, the world is all new experiences, yada yada. Very cool. But now she's moving on and doing things that I vividly remember about being a kid. Still cool. Slightly unnerving.