I don’t love bathing my kids. Except I often do.

I am not a huge fan of bathing the kids. I don’t mind shampooing their hair, and I don’t mind scrubbing their feet, but once the actual work is done and the playing commences, I become much less interested in the bath.

Perhaps it’s because of the way my dictatorial daughter demands that I play with her bath toys, elevating her preferred princesses over my second-rate charlatans and placing their words in my mouth to repeat again and again. 

Or maybe it’s the way I am forced to sit on the floor at the base of the tub and get drenched with bathwater as we play.

Or maybe it’s the sheer frequency of the baths. When I was growing up, we took baths once a week. In accordance with my wife’s wishes, my children are bathed every other day or so.

Whatever the reason, bathing is one of those things that I know I will miss when my children are bathing themselves, but it’s also something I really don’t enjoy very much.

Until I see moments like this.

As a parent, I have discovered that as important as my happiness may be, my children’s happiness often supersedes my own, and their happiness almost always results in my happiness.

I know this sounds like a fairly obvious statement, but this was not something I understood or perhaps really believed until I had children.

Even the stupid bath, with its stupid toys, is pretty fantastic when my kids are enjoying themselves.