Bathtime soup: Taking a zucchini bath

Last night, Alec was out. I mention this because he usually takes care of bathtime. I also imagine he would have handled things a little differently. But let me back up and explain why the boys had to take a “zucchini bath” in the first place.

Sunday night, I decided to bake chocolate zucchini muffins. I grated fresh zucchini from the garden. I strained it and mushed it and eventually wrapped it in a white dish towel to wring and squeeze the remaining moisture from it before adding it to the muffin batter. The towel was left damp, so rather than throwing it into the dirty clothes, I hung it over the shower rod to dry out.

In the morning, I realized that the towel must have had some shredded zucchini still clinging to the fibers because I discovered hundreds of tiny bits of zucchini totally encrusted on my bathtub’s surface. I tried to wipe it up – of course I did – but it was a no go.

In the evening, after dinner, I prepped the boys that bath would be an exciting mix-it-up (our phrase for doing anything the wrong way or the mom’s-doing-dad’s-job or breakfast-for-dinner kind of thing) zucchini bath.

Being two and four, they totally rolled with it. I gave one boy a scrubber (a nail scrubbing duck if you must know) and the other a sponge (a frog toy sponge) and gave them instructions to clean every last zucchini bit from the bathtub. Once the zucchini was submerged in water, it came up easily. Thank God! And the bathtub was filled with two dirty boys and a bajillion zucchini floaties. I offered them the option of draining it and starting again but they wouldn’t hear of it.

When bath was over, they wanted to sit in the draining tub and watch all the particles collect in the strainer basket. They squealed and screamed with delight as they made sure every last zucchini floaty found its way to the drain.

I can’t help but wonder if Alec would have done any of the same things…