I had a great, light-hearted post swimming in my head all day today. Something about how life as a full-time caregiver of small children is such a strangely delightful mixture of adulthood and childhood; how one minute I’m paying bills and folding laundry and the next minute I’m holding hands with my 2-year-old, skipping along the leaf-strewn sidewalk in my high-heeled black boots. Lovely, lovely stuff, I’m sure it would have been.

Also, this morning, I sent an e-mail to my mom about the slow but steady progress I felt sure I was making with my latest little potty trainee. And I told a friend at church on Sunday how I thought she was getting it. I eyed my stash of mini-Tootsie-Pops that we’ve been giving out as potty rewards and told myself that there would be no need to buy another bag; by the time we got done with that one, certainly she would be fully potty trained.

All this positivity was a mistake on my part. Such cockiness is unseemly. I did what Jennifer from Conversion Diary calls “angering the poop fates.”

I know this now because at about 5 p.m., just as I was in the middle of my busiest dinner-cooking time of day, Lucy came into the room and said, “She pooped! In the play room! And it’s allllll oooooover.”

And it was.

I won’t go into details, dear readers, so as to spare you the horror. I had a moment when I hoped, hoped against hope that what had actually happened was that she had climbed up the bookshelf, and gotten down the leftover Halloween candy, and that what I was actually seeing was chocolate, because that would truly have been a preferable situation to me.

But it wasn’t.

And so there are no happy skipping through the leaves posts from me today, and no more talking about how I think she’s almost there.

No more angering the poop fates. No more. I will just keep trudging humbly along.