Potty Training is the Pits

Or should I title this, "Adventures in Potty Training", or "Doo-doo Tales"? Something along those lines at any rate.

My husband and I have been attempting to potty train our daughter since she turned 2. We haven't been ridiculous about it or anything, just asking her, "Do you have to pee pee?" or just taking her in the bathroom with me when I go and I tell her, 'Momma is going pee pee on the toilet like a big girl. Do you want to sit on your potty too?"

And at first things were going really well. She actually told me a few times that she had to go and then actually went in her potty.

Things have back slid since then - she never seems to want to go on it now. Always with the 'no' when you ask her.

Well this morning I had JUST bathed her after she got up and I had just lathered her with this expensive diaper rash cream which costs about $10.00 an ounce, freshly diapered her and was getting her dressed when I smelled poo.

I said, Emily, are you pooping?

No. Always with the no.

So I pulled the diaper back and peeped and sure enough, she was pooping - in the process in fact.

So I scooped her up and running for the bathroom said, you have to tell mommy when you got to poop or pee. We're going to use the potty.

To which she replies, No.

So I whip off the fresh diaper, plop her poopy butt down on her potty and wait. She gets right up and squats in front of it.

So I pick her back up and put her back on the potty and say, poop in your potty Emily like a big girl.

She sits there a few minutes – my husband is trapped dripping in the shower while this is going on because we're in front of him and he has no way of getting out - then she gets up again. I say, are you done?

No.

Which half the time means yes, so I clean her up as best I can with wet wadded up toilet paper, because again, my husband is standing in the tub so I can't put her in there, and let her go as she runs out of the bathroom.

Of course the potty is 'clean', and by that I mean that besides from the poop that was already in her diaper and thereby on her that got smeared on it from contact with her skin, we had no payload in the potty.

So I clean the potty and then go back into the living room and I see her squatting underneath the table next to what suspiciously looks to me like a pile of poo.

Sure enough, a pile of poo. She squatted and pooped on the floor like a dog. She looked at me and said, Mommy, poo poo!

<sigh> Yeah, I can see that.

Of course I didn't have paper towel #1. Our toilet paper, because I am a cheap skate when it comes to paper products, is 1 ply and was totally NOT up to the job of dealing with this situation, I had to use a wash cloth. Which I promptly threw away because the thought of it ever coming into contact with my face after the load that I picked up with it, washed or not, was repugnant to the extreme.

And so concludes my potty training tale.