I have a confession to make…
I despise – and yes, that is the correct word – baby bath toys. They are disgusting. Oh, they are cute. They suck you in with their adorable happy whale faces and sweet, silly smiles, but they are waiting to disappoint you and question your cleaning methods.
Have you ever looked inside one after it has been used for a week? If you have kids who use “squirter” bath toys and you’ve never ventured to look inside, just skip this entire post. Scroll down to see the fun Danger is having in the bath and then just move on. I’m not kidding.
For those of you still reading, I hate baby bath toys because nearly all of them get moldy! Yuck to the power of nasty. If you think about it, the bathroom is the perfect breeding ground, which is why we obsessively clean bathrooms. Well, it’s why I obsessively clean bathrooms, at any rate.
Now I have come across some absolutely adorable bath toys. It seems that the baby bath toy designers just know which buttons to push to make you say, “awwwww” and throw down your cash. I never get them, however, because a vision of black mold crawling out of a little whale’s plastic mouth while I sleep jumps into my brain. Of course, I have read that you can clean them out with a bleach solution but ya know what? IT COMES BACK! So…
I prefer to make bath toys that I won’t feel guilty about tossing if they get nasty. I made these little foam cut-outs for Danger one night while Jeff was drawing the bath, and she still plays with them. We make up stories, practice animal sounds and even get to rip them apart (poor, wingless owl).
I keep my eye out for inexpensive items that I can make into bath toys and came up with an idea using Dollar Store sponges after I found a butterfly net from the dollar section of a big-box retailer. The net is big enough that Danger can handle it well and the fish I cut out sort of resemble fish, so she gets the general idea.
Here is Danger bath fishing. Sadly, I wasn’t able to capture her face while she was sporting her look of serious concentration. It’s a good look because she gets a furrowed brow and she boldly, without any shame, sticks out her tongue from the side of her mouth. It’s such a funny face; it’s such a grown-up face (minus the tongue).
Sorry about her in nothing but a diaper, but it was bath time!
