Day 160 of the Great Potty Training Epic.

"I ask you this... if the whole motivation for not pooping in your pants is the sheer and utter grossness of it all, what do you do with a two year old who doesn't really seem to mind?"

So, no one else gave me an answer to this question, which I asked on the first day of potty training lo those many many days ago, but I have finally figured it out for myself. Along with the answer to another question I posed on the same day, which was: do I really have to wash the dirty underwear?
The answer to the second question is "no". And this leads directly to the answer to the first questions, which is : After you have run out of toddler underwear- which you buy in bulk (as in, many packages of all the different characters available in a size 2T whether or not they are supposed to be for girls)(Juliette loved her Thomas the Tank Engine and Spider Man briefs) for the third time because you refuse to clean the poop... you give up. You buy pull-ups.

Yes, that is correct. For all of those dedicated readers who were silently horrified at the lack of progress I was making- and the amount of laundry I was washing- it gets worse. Because after all that... Juliette is back in diapers.

And really not too concerned about it.

If you need a reminder, you can relive the drama here and here and here and here and here and here. I can't do it. It's too painful still.

I think we were doomed to failure because we didn't actually throw out all of our remaining diapers when we started potty training. Not because I thought I'd fail; I just thought I had a one year old who would eventually wear that size so why waste them. But the security blanket, so to speak, was there. So on the fateful day when the trash can closed with a reverberating thud on the last pair of soiled underwear we didn't have to actually buy pull ups. We just retrieved them from the closet. Course, given all the money I spent on underwear which got thrown out as if they were disposable... I probably just should have thrown out the diapers.

Although everyone in the world keeps trying to reassure me that it won't be so, all I keep thinking is that it is a good thing they make diapers in adult sizes. Juliette will just have to wear a wedding gown with a big poofy skirt to hide the bulk.

Maybe I should throw out the pull ups and use diapers. Maybe that is the psychological push Juliette needs. Maybe maybe maybe. But then, she does still use the potty... sometimes. Mostly when she's not at home. Which gives me a vague sense that I am the one at fault here. All I know for sure is that my laundry load has gotten to be much lighter, especially now that it is summer and Juliette likes to run around naked anyway. And that, at least, is a good thing.