Skip to main content

Bathroom Policy

If you have a baby or special-needs toddler or preschooler, it can be tough to get a minute to yourself. This can make it challenging to use the toilet or get a shower.

When my kids were little, I had an open door policy on mom being in the bathroom. If they needed something, they could barge in on me and talk at me while I was on the toilet or in the shower.

I had a strict locked door policy for sexy times. I have no cutesy stories about them walking in on me during sex, but they could come bug mom when mom was in the bathroom.

Just before my oldest turned two, I found out I was pregnant and a week or two later I got notice I was getting a better apartment. I moved shortly.

This new apartment had a nicely designed bathroom. My two-year-old often sat on the wide ledge at the end of the tub -- enclosed on two sides by walls, so he wasn't going to fall -- while I showered and I would talk at him.

This is the ONLY reason I was able to shower consistently while pregnant. He was a holy terror and would dismantle stuff while I was in the shower if he wasn't sitting right there "talking" with mom while I showered.

I once came out the shower to find a cheap plastic bookshelf torn apart and hundreds of books strewn across the living room. So if at all possible, I wanted to keep an eye on the kid WHILE showering.

The bathroom was spacious enough to take a wheeled bassinet into it and pull it up to the shower. After his brother was born, I did sometimes move the bassinet into the bathroom to deal with my awake infant and also get a much-needed shower.

Pro tip: If hygiene is a serious challenge, a shorter haircut may help you get showered more quickly while leaving less opportunity for baby to grab your hair and try to rip it out.

Get creative if necessary, but find ways to take care of yourself while keeping an eye on the little ones. A mom who isn't eating and isn't managing to use the toilet and isn't managing to shower is not going to be at their best and this will undermine your parenting efforts.

Popular posts from this blog

The Hand Licking Incident

When my oldest son was seven and in second grade, we were living in Kansas. Some time after the school year started, he began licking his hands. He soon was doing so all day, every day. His teacher wanted it to stop. So did his dad, my husband. I was a young homemaker, financially dependent on my husband, and I was feeling enormously pressured by both of these people. I also felt they both had real careers and didn't genuinely respect me. They both felt it was my job and mine alone to somehow make my son stop licking his hands entirely. I caved to the pressure. I tried telling my child to stop. I tried spanking him. I tried putting unpleasant spices on his hands to deter him. I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution. He couldn't explain it and the terror in his eyes was disturbing. None of it made any difference whatsoever. He continued to lick his hands all day, every day. He just tried to hide it a little better. Meanwhile, our rela...
Read more

Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood

From my last post on this site: One recurring theme: Bright kids of a certain age are just smart enough to jump to crazy conclusions rooted in lots of knowledge for their age but little real world experience. This seems common in the roughly toddler to preschool age range. I can readily think of a few examples of this from my oldest son's early years. The easiest one to tell is his ladybug freak out. He was about four years old and we were living in a third-floor walk-up in Germany. There were some really tall trees outside his bedroom window and one day there was a small ladybug invasion in his bedroom. He was inexplicably just terrified of the handful of yellow-and-black ladybugs on his bedroom wall. I actually laughed out loud because it seemed comical, but then I took him out of the room and closed the door and made sure he was protected from being around these bugs even though they were harmless. I kept the door shut to his room for a few days and he slept in my room u...
Read more

Letting him shine

Save the Last Dance, audition scene I kind of hate the above scene. It's sort of cringe and probably highly unrealistic but movies do a lot of things to try to communicate plot points to the audience that a more realistic scene wouldn't communicate. The backstory is her mother died in a car wreck while she was at an audition if I recall correctly and she ends up moving in with her loser father, going from a big house in a very White suburb to a cramped inner city apartment and predominantly Black high school. She stops dancing, feeling like it's her fault her mother died. She gets involved with the boy in the above scene and on the phone a friend from the old neighborhood expresses surprise that there are any White boys to date at her new school and classmates give her a hard time about "a white girl taking one of the few good men we got." So there's a lot of social baggage here and he encourages her to resume dancing, helps her learn new moves from his inner ...
Read more