Doha Adam

It's the day before the day before we leave. 

The kids had a water fight at John's house this morning and then we went to the pool for the very last time—so we have time to wash, dry and pack everything we got wet today. 

We were hoping to run into friends at the pool, but we had it mostly to ourselves (there were some older swim team girls there, but they weren't very interested in us, understandably so). 

I'm feeling rather overwhelmed at the moment, so it was nice to get to go to the pool...but I did have to explain to Phoebe that I simply wasn't feeling up to playing "The Family Game" with her (a game that has quite a lot of imaginative labour on my part). Instead she decided to play with her mermaids but—horror of horrors!—found that one was missing. 

Baby Dora has long been a staple in our bag of pool toys (we picked her up at a Trading Tables event when we lived in Durham) and even though we weren't playing "The Family Game," Phoebe wanted to make sure that Dora (who she often calls Anastasia) was at least settled in her bed (which is a pull buoy). Unfortunately that was missing from our pool bag as well. 

We cleaned up a little hastily yesterday, it seems. 

So we checked the lost and found and she quickly located the pull buoy and got Dora/Anastasia settled. 

Then she decided she wanted to look for her missing mermaid. They had come in a three pack: a teal-tailed mermaid with purple hair, a pink-tailed mermaid with teal hair, and a purple-tailed mermaid with pink hair. 

She was missing the last one: the purple-tailed, pink-haired mermaid. 

And—wouldn't you know it?!—she found the mermaid in the lost and found box.

Unfortunately...

"That's...not our mermaid," I told Phoebe.

"Yes, it is!" she insisted. "Purple tail, pink hair."

"Okay, yes...but...that's not our purpled-tailed, pink-haired mermaid."

"Yes, it is."

"No...it's not..."

"Yes, it is."

"I really don't think it is."

"It looks exactly the same!"

"It looks very similar...yes...but it's not our mermaid."

You see, she had found a purple-tailed, pink-haired mermaid with a lovely dark complexion while our original set was a trio of pasty-white mermaids. 

I told her she could play with it (for now) and asked the kids to look around for a mermaid with a purple tail and pink hair. It had been less than 24 hours since we left the pool so surely the mermaid will still be around (reader, it was not). Getting the kids to actually help look for it was quite the task because they all pointed out that Phoebe was holding a mermaid that matched the description of the missing mermaid in question. 

"Except that that's not our mermaid!" I insisted. "Can you please just trust me...or at least placate me...and help look around for another mermaid that looks just like this one but, you know, is white?"

I didn't even know these mermaids came in different skin tones!

I'm not mad about it (I think it's great, actually), but I wanted to find our original mermaid out of principle. Alas, she is forever gone, I fear. But Phoebe had fun playing with all the mermaids at the pool, anyway.

Anyway...here we are with a big thunderstorm gathering behind us. 

We left when we heard the first boom of thunder...and then it simply...never actually stormed. But that was fine because we had been at the pool for a few hours and it was probably time for us go go home to get a few things accomplished. We are quickly running out of time here!