I am so tired of holding my sh*t together while my children lose theirs.

To say we have struggled with potty training in this house is an understatement.

I have heard that when the children are ready, they will train themselves. My question is, when is that day coming? Anna is more than 4 1/2, and we still struggle daily.

Before you get all judgemental on me (and to keep this post from turning into a book called, "How Not to Potty Train Your Child: Exhausting 1001 Methods") please know I have really done everything short of beating the kids or bribing them with MnMs.

We have even made an appointment with her pediatrician to talk about it. She asked us what motivates Anna, is it wearing big girl panties, not wearing diapers? No, she seems happy to wear the convenient stuff and sit in her filth all day. The pediatrician made some recommendations that really helped with the urine accidents. But, when the urine accidents stopped, she started having poop accidents. No big b.m.'s (she still does that in the potty) but leaky small soft ones in the afternoon. Like daily. Today, she did it twice. And, she still leaks enough urine to cause her serious dermatitis between her thighs.

Colin showed great interest months ago, even requested to poop in the potty at my sister's house back in June. Since then, suggesting to him to go poop or pee in the potty is like suggesting we pull out his fingernails with his little toy pliers. On weekends or days I'm around a lot, he runs around nudie or I put him in training pants. By mid-day, he's had so many accidents, he's frustrated and requesting a diaper, and all I'm doing is cleaning up the floor and doing laundry.

So, I back off (like everything I read suggests). He tells me when he poops and sometimes even just if he's wet, but now is totally refusing to go on the potty. We used to have a routine where everytime I changed his diaper I put him on the pot and he'd pee. I'd clap and verbally reward him. Now, he NEVER wants to be on the pot, he moans the whole time, "I don't LIKE it... I wanna get DOWN..." He hasn't peed on the pot for weeks.

Today, I knew he hadn't peed in his diaper for at least 1 hour, so I knew he had to go. I put him on the pot and sat down next to him on the comfy (ha!) linoleum floor. I figured we'd just sit and talk and eventually his urges would get the best of him. We sang a few songs, but mostly Colin just played with the toilet seat, then wanted to stick his fingers in my mouth, then played with the lid, then wanted to stick his fingers in my nostril...

Hmm, how much time was I willing to devote to this project? Being the holiday season, we did need to run errands before picking Anna up at school. 15 minutes, I decided. When he told me he wanted to touch my eyes with my eyelids open after 12 minutes, it seemed like the moment of opportunity had passed and we were just in a battle of wills. As I rose from the floor, I thought, "What is this brown mud under my shoe?"

Then I realized. In the moment I had lifted Colin onto the toilet, a small soft poo must have fallen out of his butt. I stepped on it, then sat in it, for 12 minutes. In the bathroom which had been cleaned that morning.

I am so tired of poop and pee and feeling like we live in a litter box. I hear and read about people like Alice whose son potty trained himself in a weekend while she was preoccupied with other things, and I'm happy for them, but I haven't had any inkling of that. I encourage it, and it doesn't happen. I back off, and it doesn't get better. I feel like this is harder than vet school. At least in vet school there was a definitive end, and I had buddies going through the exact same thing as me. (OK yes I am wallowing in it a bit today--literally).