so that's what she meant

Lemony Child is an independent kind of kid. She doesn't NEED HELP! thankyouverymuch, because she can DO IT HERSELF!! This particular personality trait displayed itself quite early, when she stubbornly refused to be spoon-fed anything by the age of 8 months. I'm not kidding...she would clamp her mouth shut, turn her head, and slap at my hand (which, coincidentally, almost always held a spoon) until there were custard and strained plums sprayed across the kitchen in a lovely, sticky, purple and custard-colored arc.

I finally gave up and let her do it herself. I figured it was easier to scrape the dried-up plums from her eyebrows and ears than it would be to scrape them from the ceiling plaster.

As you can see, my logic wasn't really sound, but scraping the child clean was infinitely easier than listening to her shriek like she was being murdered whenever I tried to spoon some oatmeal into her mouth.

Anyway, all this to say, Lemony Child is a very independent kind of kid.

Which brings me to baths. You know, baths. Water, tub, toys. Most kids enjoy them. Not my kid. She HATES 'em. Why? Because she can't rinse her own hair efficiently and heaven forbid she let me actually help her get the shampoo out of her eyeballs. No, she'd rather sit there and shriek like she's being murdered. Or like her eyes are burning out of their sockets even though the shampoo bottle says "Tear-free and Kid-friendly."

So she takes showers. All by herself. She gets her own pajamas and puts them on the vanity counter and she gets her own towel from the linen closet. She turns the water on all by herself, washes and conditions her hair all by herself, and lathers herself up with her very favorite Burt's Bees soap. About the only thing she doesn't do by herself is put her dirty clothes in the hamper and hang up her wet towel.

(she claims this is because she can't reach the towel hook on the back of the door and because the hamper is "overflowy" but personally I think she's full of it)

Now, my house has two showers...one in the kids' bathroom and one in the master bathroom. The kids' bathroom has your standard tub/shower combo, but the master bath has a giant tub -it's supposed to be some kind of "spa" thing, but really all it is is a waste of space and a pain in the ass to clean - and a separate shower stall. The shower stall has zero space to keep things like shampoo and my Venus razor, so we (okay *I*) purchased one of those shelf things that hangs from the shower spout. Voila. A place for shampoo and the Venus.

I should mention here that the shower also does not have any suitable place for me to prop my leg when I am using the above-mentioned Venus. No top of a tub, no nothing. I bet you're wondering how I shave my legs. Let me tell you...I wedge my ever-expanding ass into the corner of the shower, lift the leg I want to shave as high as I can, and then jam my foot into the opposite corner of the shower. Sounds precarious, doesn't it? It is. The shower is wet. And slippery. And I don't have the best balance when I'm standing on two feet on dry land, so in order not to kill myself while shaving, I make sure I don't have any soap on my, um, backside or feet before I wedge myself in.

A soapy ass and feet is just asking for trouble.

Lemony Child usually showers in the kids' bathroom because she can't really reach the shelf thing, but the other night she wanted a turn in the master shower because IT'S NOT FAIR!!! that Lemony Brother gets to have all the fun.

Alrighty.

I put the soap where she could reach it and the shampoo on the floor. She hopped in, hopped out, and that was that. Later, when I was reading to her at bedtime, she said:

"I washed your shower, Mumma."

Which, obviously, I knew she'd washed in my shower. Duh, kid.

This morning, I realized I had to shave my legs if I wanted to wear my cute green capri pants that don't make my ass look enormous. So, I assumed the position. And promptly slid straight to the floor, one leg jamming itself under the shelf thing that hangs from the shower spout and the other leg folding itself in a way no leg was meant to be folded.

So there I was, bent in half and sideways with one leg up in the air and the other impossibly stuck behind me, blood pouring out of the wound the razor opened up on my ankle, and it hit me. She didn't wash herself in the shower. She washed the shower.

With soap.

She must have been trying to make up for not putting her socks in the hamper.