For a couple of years now, Jonah and Archer almost always have gotten bathed together, and I’m the one who does the bathing (though Jonah now appears to be outgrowing that and is starting to bathe himself). In a tandem bath it is necessary to choose who will get washed first while the other plays with bath toys. They’d both rather play with toys, so we needed a way to choose fairly. I taught them many months ago about
Rock Paper Scissors and for a while we used that, but one day Jonah decided he was tired of that game and invented his own
variation: Dishwasher Knife Bread. As he explained it:
| Dishwasher washes knife. |
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| Knife cuts bread. |
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| (After some thought) bread covers dishwasher. |
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Once we had Dishwasher Knife Bread in our roshambo arsenal, we faced a new choice at bath time: which game to use for choosing who got washed first, Rock Paper Scissors or Dishwasher Knife Bread? When the kids couldn’t agree on that, a coin toss settled it — but then, which game should be heads and which should be tails…?