Bathing Beauty

I read somewhere once that if your kids don't humiliate you at least once a day, then you're not getting your money's worth. There is no question that my kids were a bargain in that department, because if we leave the house, I'm guaranteed at least two public humiliations, and that's on a slow day.

We were at the pool today and the kids were fine, but the longer we're there, the sassier Harper gets. Eventually she was spending an average of two minutes in Time Out for every one minute she was in the pool. While she was sitting next to me right by the pool edge, she was amusing herself doing whatever; I wasn't really paying attention since I was watching Aaron. At least, I wasn't paying attention until a little girl about 6 or 7 walks out of the pool, looks at Harper, and makes a face that would lead one to believe she had seen something unpleasant. And I look at Harper and realize that she has barfed up the gallon of pool water she had consumed, as well as the lunch she had eaten shortly beforehand. And it's all down her stomach and crotch, all over the chair, and all over the pool deck.

Hoo, boy, let me tell you, you haven't LIVED until you get the opportunity to wrangle a towel out from under your soggy (and, of course, dirty diapered) toddler and get on your hands and knees wiping up vomit from concrete, calling over your five year old because you have to get out of there RIGHT NOW. Because as other pool moms know, when someone barfs in the pool, the entire thing is shut down for an hour and everyone has to get out, which makes you not very popular at all. Since no barf had actually gotten into the water, I don't know how it would have been handled, but I didn't particularly want to find out. So I wiped up the barf and took Senorita Soggy Stink and Captain Yell and hightailed it out of there and didn't notify a single authority, because the only thing that could have made this more humiliating was me having to tell the perpetually bored and annoyed 17 year old lifeguard that we had a vomit issue that needed to be addressed.

At least let me defend the dirty diaper- I didn't *know* it was dirty, it must have happened while she was in time out, maybe in the midst of all of puking (that I wasn't paying attention to. Where's that mother of the year application again?) Clearly, though, that wasn't the time to deal with it; we needed to make a speedy exit, not get caught in the locker room where we would have potentially been lynched if the pool was, in fact, closed. Thank heavens we live just a couple of miles from the pool, because by the time this diaper got home, I was hanging my head out the window and gagging, and I rationalized that while I had committed a parenting sin by running out on public puke, my penance was addressing that diaper (and I'm not going to go into details, but any parent who has dealt with swim diapers should understand the mechanics of the nastiness I was dealing with).

So, you might want to wait until it rains to visit our pool. Or at the very least, wear your shoes on the pool deck. I'm sorry for the situation, but I know if I had to do it over again, I'd make the same coward choice, so my apologies to anyone who runs into my kids and their blinder-wearing, rationalizing mother.