Weekend Swim

It was just another typical weekend morning in the Rowe household:

Madeleine perusing some books over breakfast

This afternoon, we took a trip to Rosemary Pool for free swim, which delighted the girls, since the pool has been closed for maintenance for the past three days.  Julia spent most of the time working on her mad pencil-jump and cannonball skills at the diving board, while Madeleine alternately practiced her goggle-faced lurk-swimming under the water and took breaks to crouch down in the shallow end, clutching her crotch.

ETHAN: Madeleine, do you need to go potty?
MADELEINE: Um, no.
ME: Madeleine, do you need to go potty?
MADELEINE: Um, no.

After our swim, I took the girls into the locker room to give them showers, since they were both due for a good cleaning.  Before getting into their shower stalls, they both wanted to use the potty, so we went across to the other end of the locker room to use the toilet stalls.

Can you guess which of the following events occurred during the next fifteen minutes?

a) Madeleine's urgent need to pee turned into an urgent need to do explosive diarrhea
b) Julia got stuck in her bathroom stall and freaked out
c) Madeleine insisted that I hold her stall door shut, from the outside, with both hands.  If I got tired and took a hand off for a minute, she would shout from inside the stall, "Mamaaaa!  How come you're doing just ONE HAND?"
d) Julia repeatedly shrieked things from her shower stall like "Mamaaaaa!  The water is too HOT!", "Mamaaaaa!  The water is STILL TOO HOT!" and "Mamaaaaa!  This shampoo AND my other shampoo are getting low, so can you buy me a NEW SHAMPOO?", causing me to abandon my door-holding job and run across to the showers to help Julia in the shower
e) Madeleine began a naked whirlwind freak-out dance around the tall, circular fountain sink because she didn't believe me that she could wash her post-pooping hands in the shower instead of have me lift her nude little body up so she could reach the fountain water
f) all of the above


At any rate, we FINALLY emerged from the locker room, with a few battle scars, to meet up with Ethan, who had been sitting outside on a bench waiting for us all that time.  As we began to walk to the car, Julia noticed that the lifeguards had, at long last, made a new "Welcome to Rosemary Pool" sign, similar to the old one (which had hand-prints of each lifeguard on it), but now with the handprints and names of the current lifeguards only.  Since Julia's swim teacher is also named Julia, it was extra exciting:

JULIA: Mama!  Look!  I see JULIA'S name on here!  Look, it says JULIA!

As Ethan and Julia continued on towards the car, Madeleine became stuck in place, eyes searching the sign in fascination.

ME: Madeleine!  Come on!
MADELEINE: Uh, Mama, hang on, I'm just trying to find the hand-print that says "MADELEINE."
ME: There is no Madeleine.  Those are the names of the lifeguards.  It's not your sister Julia's hand-print.  It's the lifeguard Julia.
MADELEINE: (face crumpling) But why is there no Maaaaadeleine??
ME: Because there's no lifeguard named Madeleine here.
MADELEINE: But Mama.  I see that the Julia hand-print is the size of JULIA'S hand.
(It actually isn't, since it's adult-sized, but there was no way I was going to convince Madeleine of that.)
ME: Well, maybe your sister has super big hands, so her hands are the same size as her teacher's hands.
MADELEINE: Well Mama.  Are there any MOMMY-SIZED hand-prints?
ME: Uh...I don't think so.
MADELEINE: Are there and DADDY-SIZED hand-prints?
ME: Well, what do you think?
MADELEINE: Well Mama.  There are some BOY lifeguards, but...none of them are named DADDY.

I wonder why.  Daddy is a pretty cool name.  It's weird that it's not more popular.