So who wants to watch TV when you can play with poo?

The title of this blog is from a comment Nate made when dealing with our little problem today.


Meagan has been letting me know that she is getting ready to be potty trained. How? Well, let’s look at today, for example. She was supposedly sitting on the couch, watching TV, when she came running up to me saying, “Yuck!” and I heard yelling from the other room. Apparently, she took off her perfectly clean diaper and pooped all over the floor. As if that weren’t bad enough, she decided to play in it, too. Yumm. It was smeared into the carpet, and a toy cup that happened to be in the room was covered in it. I have no idea what she was trying to do with the cup. Scoop up the mess maybe? I don't know, your guess is as good as mine. But I'm guessing it’s now time to direct her somewhere else when she gets the urge to keep her diaper clean.

She has done similar things before (i.e. take off a perfectly good, perfectly clean diaper, just to mess on the floor), but fortunately, not with poop. Just several wet accidents all over the house. She likes to sit on the toilet, especially at bedtime when Bethany makes a play for getting up out of bed by saying she needs to go to the bathroom. Well, if it works for Bethany, why not? Anyway, I did actually put her in panties for a few days about a month ago, but that was also when I decided to make another go at training Bethany, and I just couldn’t handle the dual mess-making machines, so I gave up on her pretty soon. Bethany is doing really well now, though, so maybe I should give it another shot. The truth is, the thought of potty training Meagan fills me with dread. I just really don’t want to botch it up with Meagan, like I did with Bethany. Bethany was just over two years old when she started showing signs of being ready. Several people said I should take advantage and go with it before she lost interest, so in January of last year, I tried it out. It didn’t go over very well, so I stopped. Then I tried again a few months later, and she was doing okay, but then we left home for almost five weeks visiting family while Nate was off at SOS. All the traveling and bouncing from place to place was hard on a potty training child, so I put her back in diapers. This was in April/May. When we got home, I gave it another go, and then she got a serious case of diarrhea, related to some antibiotics she was on, and I just couldn’t deal with the mess anymore, so we went back to diapers. Again. Sigh. I waited a few months more and tried once more. This time it seemed like it was working and she went a whole month with few accidents. Then practically overnight she decided she was done with the toilet, and refused to go any more. She would throw absolute screaming fits if I even tried to get her to go to the toilet. She didn’t care if her pants were wet or messy, and she didn’t care if she made messes all over the house. There was so much tension in the house because I was tired of cleaning pee out of the carpet five times a day that I gave up again and went back to diapers. This was somewhere around November/December. After that I would ask her every so often if she wanted panties or diapers, and she would often pick panties until I told her that if she wore panties, she’d have to use the toilet, then she’d change her mind again. I just let it go for a long time. Finally, about a month ago, I just put her back in panties. She had a lot of accidents in the beginning, but then she got the hang of it again. Now, I rarely have to prompt to her go—she actually does it on her own. Whoever knew that the sound of the bathroom door opening and the toilet lid being liften could be so beautiful? I was out running errands with just her today, and she even told me that she needed to go. It was wonderful.
So, anyway, it was a long and dreadful saga getting Bethany to this point. Part of it was her and her stubbornness, part of it was circumstance, and part of it was my unwillingness to just stick it out. But the whole thing was such an ordeal, that I’m afraid to mess it up with Meagan. But really, I guess all the messes Bethany made were not any worse than what I found smeared into the carpet this afternoon. Oh dear. I think I’m in for it either way.