deep doo-doo

I apologize in advance to anyone whose delicate sensibilities may be offended by this posting, but I gotta get this out, so to speak. One of our many struggles with Stella is potty training. She has been able to use the toilet for nearly 2 years now, but only in the past six months or so has she used it regularly, and even now there are lots of slip-ups, here and at school.

Let's just say we are not yet at the point where she consistently goes to the potty rather than letting it happen in the pull-ups. This makes for lots of messes which require quite a bit of energy to clean up, but today was a definite low point. Bob had taken her to the bathroom, but she took the potty seat off the toilet and refused to use it. Then, a few minutes later, Bob returned to find that she had used the middle of the bathroom floor instead, and (this is priceless) put the bath mat over it to try and cover up the mess.

It took over two hours, several heated arguments, quite a few tears, and tons of elbow grease on everyone's part to clean everything entirely. By the end of it, Stella was not the only one who had let loose a bunch of crap. The place still stinks of it all, literally and metaphorically.

It's times like these I remember all too well what our midwife Jeannie said when, pregnant with Stella, I told her we were not interested in amnio. "Couples who have children with disabilities have a really high divorce rate." I thought she was just trying to scare me into having genetic testing.

To quote Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married. God help us.
Yes, indeed, God help us.