I FORGOT MY TOWEL!

My son has a well-documented attention problem. It’s maddening for all of us, but we’re working on both helping him directly as well as modifying our attitudes and expectations. It can be a battle, though, especially when his also-well-documented high IQ and impressive vocabulary lead us to expect more from him than he can deliver.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that are the most annoying. For example, take our recent towel problem. The Boy cannot remember to take his towel with him to the tub at bath time. He has to walk right by it to get to the tub, and yet he somehow doesn’t notice it on the way past (even though we remind him 10 seconds before he goes to take his bath). This leads to the inevitable post-bath bellow: “I FORGOT MY TOWEL!” He expects one of the rest of us to stop whatever we are doing and deliver it to him. If we don’t do it fast enough, he’ll shout about how cold he is. If we don’t do it at all, he’ll espouse on the dangers of wet feet on tile and drip copiously everywhere, possibly on purpose. If it weren’t for our daughter’s unexplainable desire to be nice to her brother (who is rarely nice back), my husband and I may have already gone insane (oh, wait…).

Recently I decided I deserved a long hot bath (after I “deserved” a couple of discounted books at Borders, and also after I “deserved” to take a night off from working after really not getting enough work done during the day ; not sure why I felt so entitled today), and I thoroughly enjoyed a soak and a magazine. As I was getting out, I noticed something disturbing. The Boy’s towel was sitting in a heap on the floor next to the tub. This means that he finally remembered to bring it to the bath with him, which is fantastic. But since I know that he didn’t bring clothes to the bathroom with him to put on after drying off tub-side (he never dresses in the bathroom), I’ve come to the conclusion that he must have forgotten to dry off. Since he usually dries for .2 seconds anyway (why waste time drying off when water eventually evaporates anyway, right?), excessive post-bath dampness was not observed by anyone, so I can’t say this is what happened for sure. But if this is in fact what occurred, I’m not sure if it’s an improvement or a step back.

As it is, I’m just going to ignore it. That works, right?

UPDATE: I picked up the towel to put it away and it was damp, suggesting that he was either too distracted or too lazy to stuff the towel onto the towel rack like he usually does on his way out of the bathroom. I’m not sure which is better, but either way, at least he remembered the fundamental step of using the towel that he actually brought with him to the tub. This is a step forward, I think. A very tiny step…

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