For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for September 24, 2012

But Mom, Lizzie went to the baffroom in there!

Reminds me of bath time at our house…3 girls in tub at the same time and my youngest sister pooped in the water, then we all screamed to get out!!

For kids that age, you are Right On, Elly!!

Looks to me like assembly-line bathing. We do much the same here. The second the girls are out, it’s time for my son. If you don’t have them all go in one after the other, bathtime can go on forever. My son (like Michael, by the looks of it) is an expert at avoiding the bath.

John Wesley was wise about many things, like Jesus didn’t say you had to “work your way to heaven”, but if you want to follow him, there is a lot of healing and helping the poor that he did, and if you sit back and are evil and “say” you love him, well, hmm… but anyway, cleanliness next to Godliness I’ve never understood. And I hope I never do, because so not me. Well, kind of, but you know what I mean. Well down on my list of priorities after family, doing cool stuff, hopefully helping others…

my youngest grandson loves to take a shower but his idea of taking a shower is to just stand under the water and get wet, no soap, no shampoo, just water. He is 10 and his mom still has to go in and remind him to soap up and wash his hair. Kind of like Leave it to Beaver when him and Wally just ran water in the tub and got the towels damp but no real bath.

@SUSAN NEWMAN: Have an easy fast and, remember, it’s OK to have water with your pills because “health comes first,” Pikuah Nefesh.

http://askville.amazon.com/%C2%93Cleanliness-Godliness%C2%94/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=594818This site contains a discussion of the origin of “Cleanliness is next to godliness.”

Getting me out of the tub was usually the problem when I was a kid (2 or 3 minutes ago).

It’s from Peanuts. Pigpen says “For me cleanliness is not next to Godliness, it’s next to impossible”.

Reminds me of the saying ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’. I never understood that. It seems the baby should have been bathed first,then the adults. Now throw out the bath water.

Michael’s just like Calvin and Dennis the Menace when it comes to taking baths. I was always glad my three enjoyed baths 3 or 4 times a week.

Lynn saying “it came to mind” isn’t necessarily making a claim of originality.

Ironically, “Cleanliness is next to impossible” was a chapter heading in the book “Girdle me a Globe” (1957) by Eric Nicol. Mr. Nicol was a Vancouver humorist who wrote a column in the Vancouver Province while Lynn and I were growing up there.

This is from a Peanuts strip. I have a wall plaque of Pigpen saying the punch line

Pig pen said that to Charlie Brown years ago