Wednesday

Shark doesn't make swimming any easier. We're late out of the house today because of a towel.

Shark can't use a dark blue towel, apparently. It has to be a light blue towel. Oh dear. Tiger's picked up the light blue towel and got in the car with it. Shark goes bonkers.

After ten minutes I abandon Shark in the house while I fetch petrol. When I get back she's sitting on the stairs clutching the dark blue towel. It has threads hanging off it where she's bitten it. And it has a strange shape. It looks suspiciously like she's strangled it. I get her in the car. Tiger, seeing her arrive, and probably fearing that Shark's about to draw blood, jettisons the light blue towel out the car door as we set off, somewhat complicating the towel negotiations later at the swimming pool.

We miss twenty minutes of the swimming lesson. Fish, our swimming teacher, who is probably one of the kindest women on the planet, runs the lesson on for us, so the girls don't miss so much. Shark, who's cheered up enormously once she's in the water, looks like she's over the towel incident, and I'm thinking I could just manage to get through the day.

But then we have the towel trauma all over again in the cubicle. Shark locks herself in. She doesn't smash the cubicle up this time, so we're making progress, but she refuses to get dressed. I point out that she might have to walk to the car in her swimming costume and that the temperature outside now is minus 3. She says she doesn't care. After 30 minutes I say I don't care either right now and go off to wait in the car.

It takes 50 minutes to get Shark out of the cubicle. She sat and waited until she drip-dried so she didn't have to touch the dark blue towel. It's thrown out the cubicle anyway, and it's lying, bitten, strangled and beaten, in a puddle of swimming pool water.

So I can add this to my weekly list of things to remember and do: don't cross Shark on Wednesdays, and hide the light blue towel.