We started working on potty training Petra yesterday. We thought she was ready last summer, right around the time she turned two, so we bought all the potties and toilet-seat inserts and cute underpants and started making gentle suggestions that all this gear was much more fun and cool than wearing diapers. Of course, she was having none of it, so we backed off. Since then we’ve brought it up to her now and then, but, other than one glorious time Tage talked her into pooping on the potty, she’s refused at every turn and we just let it go.

Now, however, we’ve decided that the time is right. For the past week we’ve been telling her that when her pack of diapers was empty it was time to start using the toilet. She went along with it in a “yeah, right” sort of way, I’m sure not believing we were serious. We were quite serious, though, and when we put the last diaper on her on Sunday night (okay, it was the second-to-last — we did have to cheat a bit so we didn’t have to switch horses mid-day), we made sure she knew it was the last. Yesterday morning it was all about the big-girl underwear.

She thinks the underwear are great. She carries her entire collection around wherever she goes, and she changes in and out of them whenever the fancy for a new color strikes her. What she doesn’t think is great is using the potty or the toilet. Instead of wetting her pants, however, she just refuses to go. Like all day. She must have a bladder of steel, because by my reckoning she’s peed only three times in the past two days. Notice I said “in the days” — overnight she must have peed like a racehorse, because the pull-up (excuse me, nighttime underwear) she was wearing was full nearly to bursting when she got up this morning.

I’m afraid she’s onto us, and knows that the diapers aren’t really gone — all she’s got to do is hold out until bedtime and she’ll be wrapped back up in all the absorbent goodness a two-year-old could want for. What she doesn’t know is that she inherited that stubbornness from somewhere, and her father and I love nothing more than a good battle of the wills. The best part of this one is that, for once, he and I are on the same side.