Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater!

I heard that expression so many times from my mom when I was younger.  I never really knew exactly what was meant  by it, but my imagination ran wild with those simple words!  All I could envision was some poor baby flying through the air while grayish, dingy bathwater hit the dirt sending splashes of wet mud up and around that baby as it sailed along!   It's an idiomatic expression according to "Wiki".  Kind of like ~ don't inadvertently throw out the good while trying to get rid of the bad.   Wiki even suggest that it could also mean:  throw out the good and keep the bad.  I don't know, that's too much to decipher ~ a little on the deep side for me right now.  I like my imaginative description better, I think.

At any rate, here I am, again, writing about an event that was triggered by a photo I happened upon on FB:

No ~ not me ~ don't know who it is, but I certainly do recognize the means by which this tot is being bathed.  I can remember getting a bath the very same way at Mimi's house.  It was like a little, tiny pool.  All to myself ~ sometimes.  Sometimes Bobby got a bath with me.  No need to waste perfectly nasty good water every time you bathed an itty bitty. And if there happened to be a line, you
just used what was there with hot water being added every now and then for warmth. The water, by the way, was heated on an old wood cook stove.  It's a lot of work emptying and refilling that tub, especially if you were bathed indoors ~ in the winter, specifically.  Can you imagine doing it for a hoard of hooligans? Um, to be first would be lovely.  Excuse me a minute. . . . thanks. . . . had to gag regroup.

Excuse me one more time.  Have to wrap a boat engine part with saran wrap.   Ok.  Done. 

I also remember, aside from shivering if the water got too cool, how gray and nasty dingy it looked.  I can also vaguely remember being bathed in front of the wood stove in the winter.  No need to completely freeze itty bittys to death.  We wouldn't want that now, would we?  Tepid, gray baths *gag* were agonizing enough! What's the old saying:  "What doesn't kill you tends to make you stronger."?  Well, we should be strong as oxen, able to shoulder the world, let life's quirks roll off our backs. . . . yea, yea, whatever.   I'm just glad I don't have to hunker down in one of those things now for a bath.  It wouldn't be pretty.  No sir-ree-bob.  Not.  At.  All.

Well, that's all for now folks.  All this talk of gray, tepid water makes me want a  hot shower. 
So I'll catch ya on the flip side ~ Lord willin' and the creek don't rise.