I consider potty training a "running the household" issue because wow. It sure is hard to run a household with potty training going on.

1. This is war. Your child's act of using the potty is the enemy, you are the good guy. 

2. You cannot allow your opponent to detect any weakness. Therefore we have an ongoing persona of, go potty or don't, I could not care less.

3. Your best weapon is realistic expectations. My expectation is that my child will continue to not use the potty for a good two weeks, but will continue to do his business all over my house instead.

4. I continue using cloth diapers to clean up what just happened in number 3.

5. The child has to be ready. I was in the mood for potty training about three months too early with my fifth child, Rebecca, who was about 20 months old. After two weeks of her never once interacting with a potty, and everyone in my house was weeping and gnashing their teeth from constant accidents, I knew to stop and try again later.

6. Rebecca picked the absolute worst time to display that she was interested in some potty action: a few weeks before I was about to go out of town with my husband. She had just turned 2. I am sure it could have waited, but I decided to roll with it because a child might give you this teensy short window of opportunity where he is interested in going potty. I did not want to pass that up and have Rebecca cop a 'tude later. She is successfully potty trained now, although she still wears a diaper at night. Fist bump.

7. Gracious mercy on my soul. I am essentially taming a wild animal. Heaven help me.

8. I try to pick two weeks if possible where I can be home a lot and basically stare at my child's undressed bottom half for the better part of the day. Yes, I let them walk around bare bottomed. We try not to go out in the front yard like that, and never out in public. Girls are easier because they can have on a skirt. It is a full time job to stalk your child in this way for two weeks, without their realizing you are doing this. When they begin to have an accident, I say in a friendly way, "Uh-oh" and bring a potty seat over to them to finish what they were doing. Or I take them to the potty seat. I put potties in my living room and hallway because it's tough at first for them to make it all the way to a bathroom. Generally I am very pleased if 10 percent of the potty matter actually goes in the potty at first. We are going for anything greater than 0 percent.

9. I have never used rewards like candy or cute games, but if they work for you then go for it. You're the one doing all the work, not me. I just figure, hey kiddo you get the same reward as everyone else does: pants that are not messy. I do say, "Yay, good job," after they've gone potty. 

10. The most effective potty training is, in my opinion, very messy potty training. They will go on the carpet. They just will. Dreft laundry detergent is a magical, heavenly substance that will clean any bodily fluid including mischievous pet residue. (You don't even want to know how I know this.) I also sprinkle baby powder on wet areas after drying them as best I can.

11. It ain't no shame in public. My older children find it less than charming, but I am not afraid to walk from my car to the park holding a portable potty seat. Plop that bad boy down by a park bench. This potty training thing is not neat and tidy, and leaving the house without a diaper is big time advanced mode. This is not a drill, this is not a drill, this is real. Code red. I am not taking my potty to the White House formal dinner, just the park, where other moms always understand.

12. I hold a tiny dollhouse-sized potty seat, and a tiny little bear and show my child that bear going potty. The mommy bear comes over to the little bear and says, "My aren't you doing a lovely job of going potty today dear?" I leave that sitting around where they can pretend themselves.

13. Your child will, in all likelihood, embark on a covert operation that threatens to sabotage the potty mission. After stellar performance for weeks or even months -- after you have announced to everyone that your child is potty trained -- he will have lots of accidents all over the place as if he had never used the potty in his entire life. This comes when you least expect it. But now you do expect it, so you're golden. You knew this harmless ambush was coming, it is only a bluff, and it will last just a few days or weeks. So you rally your forces and start all over again with number 1. He's still potty trained, he's just running some tricked out interference. 

14. A more adventurous potty trainee will, unbeknownst to you, wander off and go number two on his own, on the big potty. When he does this, your bathroom will look like someone has been murdered. 

15. Look at it like this: you are taking a child who has been trained to go in his diaper all this time, and teaching him to do something else. He will eventually catch on. Girl you got this.

I had a good six months to fret -- I mean pray -- when my husband asked me to go to Italy with him in May, just the two of us. My friend Amy Hanners was very happy for me and jokingly said, “This is a submissive wife issue. You have to go!”

I asked the children about it and they were sweet. “Go, Mom!" they said. "You never get to do anything fun. We’ll be fine.” My 12-year-old daughter said, “This will be like a second honeymoon for you.”

And it was. I decided to go. My husband and I looked at it this way: if we waited until the children were all grown up to do something like this, we’d be old and gray. I do try to put my marriage first, and our trip to Italy would be like Extreme Date Night with my husband.

I was very grateful to have this special time with him, and I loved every minute of it. Even beginning with the airplane flight over there, I thought: "You mean I get to sit here? And people are bringing me food?" I came home refreshed and happy. Godly woman disclaimer: I am not recommending a fancy trip as the way to find happiness. This vacation is something my husband wanted me to do with him and I had a really nice time. But the most refreshing thing I've ever done in my whole life is spend time with God. Especially read zee Bie-bull. Ahnd zees eez truth.

Every mother is wondering how it went with leaving the children. So that's what this blog is about today, but first I'll address the other urgent issue: "Did you get to take your hair dryer?" The answer turned out to be no, because the low wattage electrical outlets in Italy would burn out and kill our high wattage hair appliances. Italy can't handle our hair dryers y'all. Too powerful for the Roman Empire.

As far as leaving the children goes, it went well. My parents heroically came to our house to stay with the children. If we are going to weep and gnash our teeth in ashes and sackcloth on anyone's behalf, it would be for my parents, not my children. My parents did a marvelous job and loved this time with their grandchildren, but it was a lot of work for them and I think they probably still have a nervous twitch.

It was mostly my two-year-old Rebecca who ripped my heart out when it came to leaving the children. I don’t think I would have left the others at that wee age. Not because I’m more cold hearted now or less attached to her than the others. No, it’s because my older children didn’t have a staff of six people to look after them. My young toddler had my parents and her four older siblings to love on her, so she was a handful but she did fine.

I'm so very proud of my three oldest children, have to say. My 14 year old daughter is like having a built-in Mary Poppins. She's everywhere and doing everything. My son helped with bedtime while I was gone, because his younger sisters melt whenever he pays any attention to them. Big brother is a right hand man and a calming influence over the littles. My 12 year old daughter sweetly pitched in and was extra gracious when all her Lego's got taken apart every time she turned around. All three of them really stepped it up with helping run the household while I was away, as an act of love and gratitude to me.

Their biggest challenge was our sweet, adorable but age 2, say no more, Rebecca.

In the days before I left, I talked with Rebecca about Mommy going on a trip. Her Daddy travels for work so she understands “trip” means you go away for a few days and are in fact coming back. I’d use that word “trip” a lot and when my husband would come back from work. I’d say to Rebecca, "Yay, Daddy’s back from his trip." A child that age really doesn’t have much of a concept of time so I wanted to make sure when we left for Italy she didn’t think I had died or something, and was never coming back. Poor baby.

During the weeks leading up to the trip, I cooked extra meals and froze them, so that my Mom would not have to cook as much while we were gone. The children and I cleaned the house the day before I left so that my parents would not have a big mess to deal with when they got here. When you’re 70 years old, you get tired a little faster than when you’re 40. Plus, I think it must be a weighty thing to keep someone else's children from drowning or getting run over by a train on your watch. They probably supervised the younger children more closely than I do. I arranged for a housekeeper to come and clean one day while we were gone.

I tried to set things up so that mostly what my parents would have to do was look after the children and not have quite as much to do for the yard or house or meals. I assigned extra chores for the older children to do while I was away, such as dog walking duty for our teenage son and laundry for our teenage daughter. We picked a week where school was out, no major recitals or events were happening, and I didn't schedule any appointments during my trip.

Before I left, I spoke to all the children about respecting their grandparents and being obedient to them, and I told them it meant a lot to me for them to be gracious if things weren't the way they were used to. I told them it was a wonderful act of love for their grandparents to come and visit, and for them to honor and appreciate their grandparents for it. I did some role playing with my two argument prone children in how to handle conflicts and talk those through, without needing someone to referee. When I came back I had the children each write their grandparents a thank-you note, sincerely and specifically writing what they enjoyed and appreciated about their time together.

I had left my parents a gigantic document longer than Congressional legislation titled “More Than You Would Ever Need to Know and Then Some,” explaining about routine, activities, and general house rules. Just ones that mattered such as “Rebecca's lovey and binkey have to be waiting in her crib or she won't go to sleep.” I wrote all of this to them in the spirit of trying to make things go smoothly for them, not to be bossy or micromanage their visit.

I tried not to place hefty expectations on my parents or ask them to have sky high standards about movies and treats. I looked at it like a vacation for my children as well. We left money for them to get take-out or do fun things together. I tried to have realistic expectations about what I might be facing when I got back, such as some discipline issues that might have gotten rusty, or a sort-of-potty-trained Rebecca becoming a mostly-un-potty-trained Rebecca. Which turned out to be the case but it’s not anyone’s fault. Things were different without Mommy and it took a little while to get back to where we had been.

Once we got to Italy, I knew that whether I had a blast, or if I spent the whole time full of anxiety about the children, their situation would be exactly the same. My worrying would not help them at all. When I started to feel that tug in my heart for them, instead of stressing out I would say a prayer for them.

I had prayed in the months leading up to the trip that God would surround our home with the Holy Spirit, and that He would keep their little hearts happy in my absence. I prayed for my parents and asked Him to give them an over abundant supply of strength and love. I would picture our home, aerial view, and I would imagine armies of angels surrounding it. I’m pretty sure those angels were right there.

We have some French doors in our house, and they lead to a top secret no-no realm that must be highly protected from toddler predators. It's my husband's office. He's really patient when little people come and go while he's in there, and we have a train set for them to play with, at his feet.

But we don't want to leave this room unsupervised, only to have certain members of our family under the age of two rearrange all the paperwork and buy a new portfolio of mutual funds on his laptop without realizing it. 

So he came up with this brilliant childproofing idea. He tied some string around the door knobs, and voila, no entrance for the little people. He did the same thing with pony-tail holders on cabinet knobs. If you are visiting someone's house and your toddlers are getting into things, a couple strings and some pony-tail holders could help.