Will My Daughter Ever Be Potty Trained?

I have always wanted my daughter to be potty trained, she has started potty training for a whole year now. But for the whole 365 days in a year, I tried to teach her how to potty training yet there's no success.

One day my two years old daughter wanted to pee and decided to use the potty, and that was how potty training entered our world. Since then, I can count the number of pee accidents my daughter has had.

This was what encouraged us into thinking it will be easy and simple to potty train her. "Why do most mothers complain about the effort they put into potty training?" we asked ourselves.  We got the answer "poo poo" the major problem we have in potty training our child revolves around poo poo. Never in my wildest imagination did I ever thought that something common to all living creatures could turn my life into a nightmare.

I went to the extent of buying a children's book, that talks about poo poo like it has human characteristics, which allows the poo poo to talk and have human needs and wants, believing that this will help my child understand where poo poo belongs. In the potty, not her underwear. LOL

And before you go off giving me a few suggestions let me tell you "I've tried everything" yet nothing works. And here are some of the things I've tried to get my daughter to use the potty when she wants to poo poo:

• Rewarding her with small and big prizes.
• Using a small, toddler potty chair.
• Bringing the small potty chair to the living room (or bedroom, or playroom, or kitchen).
• Letting her watch videos or play games on my phone.
• Rewarding her with special food or candy. She loves cheeseballs and bobo.
• Reading targeted poo poo-related potty training books to her.
• Dumping poo poo from underwear into the potty while she watches, undisturbed.
• Making her help clean her dirty underwear.
• Letting her sit around in dirty underwear to prove that it’s not a comfortable feeling. Apparently, she doesn’t care.
• Sitting with her in the bathroom.
• Leaving her on the toilet for an hour.

I've used bribery, songs and dancing, and even encouraged her. I have shouted at her, used adult terms "pooing in your underwear is dirty" and in toddler terms "your poo poo swims when you poop in the potty" yet nothing has worked. She is just so stubborn. Sometimes I wonder if I'm okay in the head when I catch myself talking so ridiculously about poo poo to her.

The main problem is that my daughter is too stubborn, always wanting to do the opposite of what we say, and yeah she's very smart too. She knows she should poo poo on the potty but just wouldn't. The reasons why other kids don't like using the potty like being scared doesn't apply to her.

What makes it worse is that there's no definite time when she will poo, which, therefore, makes it hard to predict when she will poo or do anything about it. And because of this, I've become so much aware of her signs so I stalk her. Immediately she shows those signs (clenched abdomen and funny facial expression) I know she's about to poo poo.

Watching her all the time is exhausting and causes me to be anxious, but what can I do? Of course, people tell me to be relaxed she will outgrow it, but only someone who has been in my shoes will understand. Of course, she will later get it, but in the main time it's still frustrating, disgusting and smell to be washing the poo of a three-year-old off her underwear.

And the only hope I give myself  when I'm washing poo-soiled underwear of a toddler for the 200th time angrily is to tell myself that soon she will poo on the potty by herself and then I won't have to be face to face with human faeces and elbow deep in it. And when that light of hope is rising in me, and I remember that I will still have more children to potty train and probably many more underwears to wash in later years, my heart sink When will this end?

The hope is still there though, all my children will not be that hard to potty train and even if they are all, they will all grow up soon.