You know, when you’re about to have your first child people say all kinds of things like, “oh, it’s the most wonderful thing evar,” and talk about little bundles of joy. Still others, the realists–or even cynics–among us, say “oh, boy, you don’t know what’s going to hit you.” I’ve come to interpret these little onslaughts of advice–that certainly happen in other contexts–as society’s way of hinting to you that there aren’t any easy answers for the big things in life. I’ve come around more toward the latter end of the spectrum (realist/cynical) but I do try to keep my mouth shut because hey, loose lips sink ships. Anyway, back to my point. One of the things you’re not prepared for is the simple fact of bath toys. They are cute at first but then they simply become matrices for biofilms. They get old and faded. Non-bath toys become appropriated for bath purposes. Some old bath toys get outgrown, while new ones join the mix. You get the picture. This stuff is so multivariate that it would take a supercomputer to sort it out. And for what? A kid, happy in the bath, for an hour or so. Yup, definitely worth it.

Anyway, two things to deal with: organization and hygiene, which are as intimately connected as the aforementioned biofilms.

Organization

There are lots of products on the market designed to help parents sort out the bath mess. You can see they are mainly bags. Some of the bags have windows. I do not counsel you to use these. The windows soon become clouded, and even when maintaining cleanliness with bleach, etc., they remain clouded and disgusting, only serving as a reminder to you of the wonderful world of microbes that must surely lurk beneath. I used one of these for awhile and it finally got so cloudy and brittle that the little duckies on it begged me to euthanize them, which I did soon after.

Some of these organizers, which I can support, are just bags of purely mesh, which offer as little surface as possible for stuff to grow on. These can also be put in the washer and dryer. I have used a large mesh lingerie bag that hangs from a hook I installed at the back of the tub. This worked pretty well, but the drawback was the effort required to put the toys in it each time, zipping it up and rehanging. For us, that was too many steps during chaotic bathtime and the system ended up breaking down fairly regularly.

The other type, which I’ve pictured above as my final and ultimate solution–and not even mentioned in the bath toy storage sections–is a chrome (or otherwise unrustable) basket. This has the distinct advantage of serving as a mass collection device: simply scoop through the bathwater before letting it out and you’ve done all the collecting. Drain the bathwater from the tub, rinse the basket through with some more hot water, shake it around to make sure there’s no standing water and bingo. It’s the best I can come up with.

It goes without saying here that too many toys is bad. You kind of have to prune them out as you notice they’re not getting played with. They can go to join whatever you do with other toys that have been outgrown.

Hygiene

I must admit, if you can get away with it, just don’t go there with the squishy bath toys. We have them however, and they are favorites. I try and squeeze them out and then make sure they get dry (and this was a motivation for figuring out all the above options.)

When things get too slimy, in spite of my best efforts at daily maintenance, here is what I do:

Solid toys can go in the dishwasher, which does a good job at sanitizing.

My squishy toy process is a little different. I have tried boiling them, but I noticed that they were still a bit whiffy so that told me they weren’t getting clean. Drawing on my vast repository of public health techniques (cough, French major) I knew that there is a difference between disinfection (accomplished by boiling) and sterilization (accomplished using a high-temperature autoclave). Disinfection kills most of the germs. Sterilization kills all forms of life, including fungi, bacteria, viruses, spores and the like.

I don’t have an autoclave but I do have a pressure cooker (two, actually), and autoclaving is often done the same way. According to Wikipedia (the oracle) autoclaves “commonly use steam heated to 121–134 °C (250–273 °F). To achieve sterility, a holding time of at least 15 minutes at 121 °C (250 °F) or 3 minutes at 134 °C (273 °F) is required.” I don’t know exactly what temperature that my particular pressure cooker gets to so I can’t be that scientific. But I do have control over how long it’s in there.

So I take the squishy toys, lay them in a layer of water (to stop them from melting) and set them in the pressure cooker for 20 minutes. When they come out, they are hot (duh). I let them cool a bit and squish them out. The mold comes out. This is gross, but because I see it come out I know 2 things 1) that it is dead; and 2) most of it has been mechanically removed. Dead mold: it’s a good thing.

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