This is a book my boyfriend read when he was a young child in the early 1980s, he thinks it might be as old as the 1960s though. It was a picture book and it must have been a pretty easy reader. The parts he remembers are that there was a little boy (possibly named Sam) who was taking a bath. The tub overfilled and flooded the whole house, and while it did he rode the tub on the water throughout multiple stories of the house. He thinks there also might have been a parade at the end. I’m trying to find it for him as a present, so any help would be great. Thanks!
It wasn’t written until 1995, but otherwise this sounds like ‘No More Water in the Tub’ by Tedd Arnold. “William is getting ready for his bath when the faucet breaks, sending him and his tub surfing through the building! On his wet ride, he collects a strange fleet in his wake — from Uncle Nash, who sits in the trash, to Little Dottie, who sails the potty. Who will William carry off next?”
That’s the book that has turned up in my search results as well, but he was born in 1980 and remembers reading it as a small child. Thanks for the help, though!
I think I know what you’re talking about, though I don’t remember the title either. It was a picture book, I think the boy is blond. The title is something like the Greatest/Coolest/Best Parents in the World. The story is a boy telling his parents what the best parents in the world would do for him – they’d let him fill up the entire bathroom with water during bath time and he could scuba dive around (the illustrations showed sharks and stuff in the water with him), and when he was done he could open the bathroom door and flood the entire house. They’d never make him clean his room, and he could tunnel around underneath the mess. They’d let him throw a huge pizza party and invite all his friends and they’d have a competition, and the winner got to eat a whole pizza and the loser had to eat the crusts. There may have also been horses parachuting down at some point. The end of the book is the kid saying that what he wants most is parents who will tuck him in and say they love him, and his parents do that.
“The Big Red Tub” by Julia Jarman
“Stan and Stella in the big red tub. I splash, you splash, splash splash splash!”
I used to read that to my kids all the time, but I would change the names to my kids’ names. They loved it.
The Wild Baby Goes to Sea, by Jack Prelutsky?