Who's in charge here?

How many times have I publically declared that we will start potty training TOMORROW here? Three? Four? Guess what we still haven't done?

I think I have overloaded myself with information on this matter because I flip-flop, literally every day, between (in a deep, gruff voice) Being The Boss and telling Delphine it's time to start using the potty, or (in a light, floaty, slightly mocking voice) Waiting until She Is Ready. The consensus in modern theory seems to lean towards letting her decide, with vague handwaving talk of Negative Consequences if I force the issue. At this point I am leaning towards going with the consensus on the basis that if it turns out to be the wrong decision I can pull out the "everyone was doing it" defense. That's not a defense I have a lot of respect for, though.

This is complicated and irritated by the fact that Delphine has decided to stop pooping. Pooping is unpleasant and smelly and generally beneath someone such as her. However her body didn't get the memo, so at around 4:00 every day (her body would like to be regular) I am faced with a two-year-old frantically waddling around, penguin-style, moaning "My bum hurts! My bum is sore!" Every third day or so her body wins.

Altogether this means I am spending much more time than I would like to thinking about, talking about, and reading about poop. (Did you know Everybody Poops? I have a book that says so.) I am done. I need a poop holiday.

Everything else is going okay, though. We are reading more and more meaty books (I even got a picture-book version of The Secret Garden!) together. We just discovered Curious George, which I don't remember reading as a kid but quite like now. I gather there is a movie coming out -- we will be sure not to go. (I think two-and-a-half is too young to sit through a whole movie. She can hardly pay attention through a 20-minute Baby Einstein DVD.)

We still don't watch much TV with her. She gets one or two 20 minute DVDs a week, and we almost always watch with her. Actually, she watched TV by herself for the first time yesterday, while I did a Grocery Gateway order. I felt strangely neglectful and inclined to crack open a can of cheap beer and light a cigarette.

(Actually I think I might buy some beer this weekend. Maybe some popcorn too.)

She has lots of dollies now: a Cabbage Patch baby named Phoebe from Baba, a homemade rag doll (with no fixed name that I can ascertain) from my mother, and her first dolly, a rag doll named Boy which Auntie J'Anne gave her. She also has a variety of stuffed animals, which rotate in and out of her favour. My favourite is a purple and orange orangutan-type thing named George. She likes to put her babies to sleep, and push them around in her push cart, and generally leave them underfoot for me to step on and swear. (I am turning into my mother.) Phoebe and the rag doll are both naked at all times, as were my dolls when I was a child. The only reason Boy has clothes is that they are stitched on.

She also likes to play with the Fisher-Price Little People house I got her for Christmas, and to draw and colour. Her drawings are getting more representational, they are no longer just scribbles. Now they're circles and lines which are arbitrarily (probably not to her) assigned meaning: this blob with lines coming out is a mouse, and this smaller blob is a banana. She likes to help in the kitchen too; she stirs things. That's about all I let her do so far, since she's clearly too young for fire and sharp things.

She's cute; she's lovely; she's funny and interesting and I like her very much.