Picture this: Suburban Atlanta.....February 2013. It's pouring down rain and time for carpool.
I get my 3 year old dressed for getting out in the nasty weather in order to pick up her 9 year old brother from school.
I asked her 27 times if she needed to go potty and she adamantly denied. "No, Mommy. I not have to pee pee." I even went myself and took her with me as this normally gets her to go. When I told her it was her turn she did her very best impression of a wet towel, flopping down on the floor and screaming at me that she didn't have to go.
Under normal circumstances I would calm her down, explain sweetly how big girls go in the potty and then convince her to go. Today it was pouring, there would be traffic. And did I mention it was pouring?
We left the house and as we are sitting in carpool line wedged in what seemed like a never ending line of minivans and station wagons I heard it. The dreaded...... "Mommy, I need to go potty!"
Sigh.
Now what? As I may or may not have mentioned before, today's weather is less than gorgeous. We are in an SUV stuck between at least twenty cars in front and just as many behind us. To make matters worse, she's in her big girl Rapunzel panties.
I tried distracting her, letting her play games on my iPhone, turning up her favorite song on the radio. Anything to keep her from peeing in the car seat.
As I sat, NOT moving along in the carpool that is taking longer than normal because of the weather, she went into full on freak out mode and told me she had "ewwied" in her panties.
Awesome. I just took a deep breath and planned for the worst case scenario when we got home.
When we finally get my 9 year old in the car, I hurried us back home for a super fun clean-up in a downpour. My car seat cover will need to come off, she'll be drenched and disgusting. Right? Wrong.
When I get her out of the car she isn't "Ewwie" at all. As a matter of fact, she's dry as a bone. So immediately I think this is my chance to get her to go poop on the potty. She pees in it all day. No problems at all. She'll stop playing, go by herself, wipe, flush, wash her hands and come back. Like a boss. When it comes to "ewwies" though, not so much.
I sit her on the potty, she pees right away and then tells me she's done. I know different.
We fight for 20ish minutes - me trying to keep her sitting on the potty after she peed, her flailing around abd trying to escape. Then she calmed enough to sit still but then started doing everything in her power to piss me off bad enough to let her off of the potty. I ignored a lot of it.
Picking her nose and attempting to eat it.
Sliding half way off the seat as if to "stick it to me".
Flushing the toilet.
And then I couldn't take it anymore. After the 10th time of flushing the potty after I told her not to, I let her off the potty to go to timeout which is at the foot of our stairs, just around the corner from the bathroom we had been in.
Once she got quiet and finished her time on the stairs I told her why she was punished, we hugged it out. Blah, blah, blah.
She swore she was done going potty and didn't need to do anything else. So, since we were both calm, I decided to let her off -- for now. I set a timer for 5 minutes and was going to try again.
Except....in that 5 minutes, technically within the first 2, she went into a corner of the kitchen and not only "ewwied" but also peed her pants.
I'm at a loss. We have tried rewards, buying her fancy new princess panties, punishing her with wearing a diaper "like a baby", literally holding her legs down to the seat to keep her still enough to go. We have even tried making her run around naked so that she couldn't go in her pants.
Nothing is working.
The thing is that she HAS gone in the potty before. Twice. But not since about November. She got really, really sick and was in diapers a good bit. All of our potty training accomplishments relapsed. But then when she got well, we got her some new panties and she started going all of the time on the potty again.
She's just been super stubborn about the "ewwies".
Whatever ideas you guys could offer outside of what we have tried would really be great. I am seriously baffled. My 9 year old didn't separate the two. The first time I put him on the toilet, he had woken up dry so I sat him on the potty and he did both. Straight out of the gate. While I knew that he was the exception to pretty much every potty training rule, I still didn't expect my daughter to be this difficult.
Signed,
Frustrated to no End
aka
Insane in the Membrane
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