For the past week, we’ve been in the throws of a bath-time meltdown phase.

Bath water starts, Lila gets super-anxious. When I come to pick her up to take her to bath (and sing our transition song), she completely loses it.

After a few failed attempts at distraction, I came up with the following: put her balloons in the bath (she loves them). NOT for her to play with, but to help re-direct her focus onto getting those balloons out of the bathtub (they don’t “belong” in the bathtub).

She gets busy trying to get them out, and inevitably sits down while doing so. Once she sits down, it’s like “Hey, wait a minute – this isn’t so bad”, which buys me enough time to get her clean.

The time this happened before, I solved the issue with the fuzzy hair twisties. She would focus on picking them out of the bowl I had them in, and I would say what color she had in her hand.

Hoping this works for a while, and already trying to think of some new distraction techniques for next time!