All wet.

Soon, it will be Thanksgiving, poorly poorly planned Thanksgiving. Surely our three part, many hour flight across the country on the busiest flying week of the year, compounded by infant, TSA insanity, and jet lag, will be a merry adventure, yes? I'll be sure to let you know. On the other end of all that travel, at least, there will be three additional tiny cousins, each in his or her own personal state of mental and physical disarray. I think—I hope—that it will be so stark raving mad as to be worth the trip. At the very least we should get some good photos out of it.

In other news, one fault in our generally beautiful and comfortable house is that the bathtub is simply crap. There is a shower, perfectly good, with rather stupid sliding glass doors, and at the base of those glass doors is something that roughly resembles a bathtub. If you consider that a defining feature of a bathtub is to be a tub for bathing, however, it fails the test.

It is fine for standing in while one showers, but no good for bathing a baby in, thanks to the awkward arrangement of the doors, and really extra no good for bathing one's adult self in. It is short and it is shallow. It is not long enough to recline in comfortably, even if you are a stumpy short creature like me. The skimpy depth is worse. With so little water you cannot possibly soak. One is not submerged, one merely sits in a bath-shaped puddle.

The other consequence of the limited capacity, which I did not anticipate, is that the water gets cold very very quickly. The thermal mass of the bath puddle is no match at all for the cold tub and walls and air, which conspire to suck all the heat away in seconds. So, you see, it's quite hopeless.

Many people, I understand, have no particular interest in baths. They could take nothing but showers every day of their lives and be perfectly happy. I, however, have been having increasingly acute pangs of longing. It is a hunger. I want so badly to lie in an enormous, wasteful, GIGANTIC bath, up to my chin in water almost too hot to enjoy, steam rolling off the surface. While I'm fantasizing about this, and I more and more often find that I am, let me have several volumes of light fiction and a little shelf across the tub for a glass of whiskey. Please. I am getting desperate.

But good news! My mother has a proper vast iron claw-footed tub, and not long after our ill-advised trip across the country for Thanksgiving, we are undertaking another, this time to her house, for Christmas. I hope she has no ambitions of seeing or interacting with me, nor of using her bath herself, while we are there.

Comments

[Lumpy badger]

Baths are good! Mine is filled with bucket and baby too often, and me not enough, sadly.

[Elsa]

Oh, GAWD, I simply do not understand the people with no interest in baths. (During my search for an apartment in Chicago, I amused many a prospective landlord by toeing off my boots, climbing into the rental's tub, and stretching out to see how it accomodated my 5'11" frame.)

Here's to your family visit with lots of hot water and slightly less whiskey!