My bathroom is a metholated mess.

This morning Steve's mother called to say she would be coming over with his Aunt and his cousin. They make a visit every month or so while they are up here shopping. They usually bring coffee and pastries, so it's more than OK with me.

I usually don't stress about cleaning up unless the house is a real mess, and this morning the only thing I wanted to do before they came was give Nathan a bath. It had been a while, and he smelled, quite honestly, like spit up and spoiled milk. You know that baby smell? Yeah - it doesn't exist. It's baby soap. Real babies smell like spoiled milk and poo.

It takes two minutes to give Nathan a bath, due to the fact that he needs almost no water in the tub and doesn't want to hang out in there. While I was doing this Nicholas was playing with some bath toys on the floor. I was keeping an ear out for the sound of these bath toys somehow making their way into the toilet, least he make an attempt to flush them down, but none of the sounds he was making seemed to match up with this visual, so I kept on with Nathan and his bath.

I was just snapping the last snaps on Nate's little onsie outfit when I looked up and saw that Nicholas had the brad new bottle of Vapor Bath had purchased - you know, that highly mentholated bath wash for little kids with congestion. In fact, not only did he get his hands on the bottle, but he had somehow unscrewed the cap, and even ripped off the protective foil cover. And of course he had poured half the bottle on the floor and all over himself. I had to call for Steve to help me as we plopped Nicholas in the tub and I made an attempt to wipe up a half gallon of soap off the floor.

How does one wipe that much soap off the floor. I mean, what do you use? Water? That will just suds it up. Soap? Come on - it IS soap.

Anyway, later that afternoon Steve and I were talking in the den, with the lights off, since Steve was watching TV. I heard the little footstept that indicated that Nick was leaving the room, but I paused long enough to watch a few moment of Coupling on the big screen before rushing off to follow him. And by the time I had caught up to him...

Yep - that's right. He was in the bathroom. And the problem still wasn't bath toys flushed down the toilet. Once again, he had emptied most of the Vapor Bath all over himself and the floor... and this time, the bath mat. We once again had to wipe Nicholas off and this time I just put him in PJ's. I mean, I'm not giving him another bath tonight. That would just be silly. He's clean. He's just got a strange attraction to Vapor Bath.

Anyhow, no matter how I tried to clean up, I couldn't do anything about the smell, which has escaped the confines of the bathroom and wandered down the hall into our bedrooms. The one consolation I have is that now none of us are congested. And I have moved the Vapor Bath AND the rest of the soaps to a high shelf in the closet.