Our puppy is potty-train proof. I'm convinced she will never be potty trained in the conventional sense. No, it will be more the 1950s style potty training in which you take them (them in the 1950s referring to an actual child) to go potty on a schedule every 45 minutes or so. We have become confident enough in her bladder muscles that we have started giving her more and more freedom in the house, but it always comes back to the critical issue of her leaving it up to us to tell her when she needs to go outside to do her business. She seems to be completely incapable of alerting us as to when she has the urge.
Take this morning for instance. I'm sitting on the bed, writing on the laptop, when I get a whiff of Odeur de Poop, and I stupidly think, "Huh, that's smells suspiciously like poop, but that's impossible! Oh WAIT..." I had forgotten that Poe had been running loose in the house all morning long. I catch out of the corner of my eye a shadowy figure and look down to see this black menace curled up in the Hunchback of Notre-Dame pooping posture. Immediately, I jump up, flailing appendages frantically, screaming unintelligible monosyllabic sounds, gracefully executing the "No! No! Stop shitting on the carpet!" dance. Of course, soon after this I realize that she chose where I was sitting as the end of her crap journey and that there is a whole trail of treats preceding her. After I get her out the door, I start planning my poop scooping strategies. I can't believe a part of my day is actual spent in planning how I'm going to pick up excrement. This incident requires more creativity than usual because we have run out of paper towels. (We haven't made our Costco pilgrimage this month and, again, too cheap to buy them anywhere else.) After I've spent a little time, appropriately, in the bathroom, devising my battle plan, I make it back to the scene of the crime with Nature's Miracle (nature's miracle indeed) in one hand and napkins and plastic bag in the other. Dave has already beaten me to it. It's interesting to see how our minds work. His weapons of choice are handy wipes and paper plates cut up into makeshift shovels. (Evidently, I was in the bathroom for a while.)
Vaughn has been blissfully unaware of the whole event, in his room (if you must know, watching TV), and trots upstairs after we've finished our cleanup job, the evidence of the whole distasteful experience having been promptly eliminated. Unfortunately, the air in the room has been permeated with the potent Odeau de Poop, what with the whole bottle having been spilled on the floor. Of course, leave it to Vaughn to state the obvious with his power of observation in his ever so delicate manner, "Something smells stinky up here."
It baffles me that Poe is now 8 months old and the ability to notify us to let her go outside to potty still eludes her. The closest she comes to it is doggy charades in which she sits on her haunches and goes through a series of paw signals and earnest eye contact, puppy sign language for "Pardon me, but I do believe I need to use the facilities." Unfortunately, you have to actually be looking at her to grasp this cryptic communication because she would never be so crass as to actually interrupt you with a bark or nip to get your attention. It's the equivalent of a mime trying to alert someone that a bomb is about to go off.
I have also concluded that I not a very good potty trainer. I started before Vaughn was 2, and it wasn't until he was well over 3 that he was potty trained in the conventional sense. (I was biting my nails, fearing that he wasn't going to be trained by preschool. As a matter of fact, I think I was still covertly putting him in Pull-ups for that first year, just as a matter of insurance, of course.) He's still in diapers at bedtime, and frankly, I am retiring from my potty trainer duties, taking the advice of the pediatrician that "It'll happen. Give it time," and if that means eventually switching over to Depends, so be it. After my ordeal with Poe, I am at peace with the fact that it's me, not them. I will never make it to the potty training big leagues, and honestly, I'm okay with that.
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