The Bother with Baths

DJ loves his baths. He gets a bath most every night. When he was little I used to hold him down in the water on his back and he would flail his arms and legs and splash around and squeal in excitement. When he got a bit bigger I sat him up and he splashed around then too. I had to be sure to hold him up because he kept falling over in excitement. When he got better at sitting I didn't have to have a constant hand on him anymore, and I could just sit back and relax and watch him having a lot of fun in his bath, occasionally I would have to hand him a toy that floated out of his reach. Eventually he learned to scoot along on his bum and he could travel from one end of the bathtub to another. Then he learned to pull himself into a standing position. He kept trying to pull himself up to play with the faucet and the knobs, or reach up for his shampoo, or just the side of the tub. It was pretty easy to keep him down though because it was still difficult for him to get up there. Then he finally mastered getting himself into a sitting position and then the real trouble began. When he was sitting in the bath before he never left that sitting position (except occasionally to stand up) because I guess he knew that he couldn't get back. But once he could get into that sitting position he then had no qualms about throwing himself down onto his belly to dive after toys. I tried just taking the toys out of the bath, but then he discovered that he likes to drink the water. He gets down on his belly and sticks out his tongue and laps it up like a dog. And now he has gotten so much better at standing up that he can get up a lot quicker and easier than he could before. So now, when he is in the bathtub it sounds like this: "Don't stand up, sit down, don't drink the water, sit up, no, don't stand up, sit down, sit, sit, sit up, sit down, don't drink the water, no, don't stand up..." He still loves his baths, but I have to be reprimanding him constantly. I think he is finally learning what the word sit means, or at least he is learning that when I say it, he needs to sit down quickly or I push him down, or that he needs to sit up, or I pull him up. Many of his baths get cut short because he is just ignoring me. Many others of his baths get cut short because he has in the last few weeks started pooping around the same time every day, and that just happens to be the same time that I bathe him every day. I cannot count the times that he has pooped in the bathtub. It really is disgusting. Sometimes I get a bit of warning and then I pull him out and put him over on the toilet, but more often than not, there is no warning at all. I'm getting a little tired of cleaning poop out of the bathtub.