The Best Bath Toys for a Party in Your Tub
This year we sort of “lied” to our 5 year old. We told him the new bathtub we installed wasn’t really very good for taking baths. The truth is we were tired of giving baths. That’s nothing though because my friend Leslie who has 4 kids ages 5 and under has been done with baths for about two years. Her youngest child is 22 months old. Life has to be efficient when you have four young kids and baths are not efficient.
On the other hand, when my kids were little bath time was a great way to burn off the end of the day witching hours. I’d fill the tub, grab all the laundry, a magazine and my laptop and get the kids in the tub. They were occupied and not fighting (mostly) and I was able to fold the laundry, read, catch up on email and sometimes I’d even grab a clorox wipe and clean the bathroom.
Now that I think about it, I might end up throwing my 8.5 year old and 6 year old in the tub by the end of the day because they’re making me insane and it’s only 7:34am. We’ll need toys, let’s look at those while I debate the wrongness of Spring Break.
I was prompted to start searching for bath toys when Isabel emailed me a few ideas she likes for bath tub fun from Alex Toys. I tried looking for other clever bath toys I thought looked fun and almost all the ones I found were from Alex. They’ve got a monopoly.
I love this car wash, a crank moves your cars along the conveyor belt where they’re pushed through rollers, sprayed with water, soaped up and even run over with the “spider legs” as we call them. I’d like to see something similar as an outdoor toy, I know my son would like to wash his thousands of cars and perhaps this would burn some daylight during the summer.
When Isabel forwarded this fingerpaint set to me, the subject was, “I’m a mean mom. I only let my kid fingerpaint in the bathtub.” I thought to myself, “I’m a mean mom, I think fingerpainting is why God created preschool.” Because that’s the only place my kids ever fingerpainted. But the bathtub is the perfect place for fingerpainting, just hose everything down and you’re done.
Maybe you have a very virile child with excessive facial hair. This bathtub shaving set can help! My dad used to let my sister and I ‘shave’ while he did. We’d use his shaving cream and the plastic razors from our Play Doh barber set. For hours we’d do this and to this day I have a very smooth face. All that early shaving really paid off.
We rarely had bubble baths in our house because they seemed to make my daughter’s skin itchy. Plus, I’m not that fun. Maybe you are fun and you would like to make the bubble bath even more entertaining. Show off. The Bubble Beater whips your bubbles into a froth. Literally.
We got the most use out of a set of stacking cups in our tub. We used them for rinsing shampoo out of their hair, for having tea parties (no drinking the water…mostly) and for filling and dumping over and over and over. If you’re really good you could show your kid how the contents of one cup will fill a bigger cup half way. It’s practically home school!
You have to have a classic rubber ducky in your tub. It’s a law or at least an ordinance I think. It just floats, but maybe your child can shave it or jazz it up with those finger paints. At the very least tell them the story of the rubber ducks which fell off a ship headed from China to Seattle. The toys drifted from some point in the Pacific ocean, through the arctic and onto the Atlantic ocean. 11 years later washing up on shore in New England. That’s a children’s book waiting to happen.
