I love animals and children, but they both create a lot of work. I figure it's probably about 75 percent work with a miniscule 25 percent return on my investment in the form of pleasure. Here's the problem: anything that requires me to clean up poop makes me an unhappy girl. Dogs/cats/fish/children all require one to participate in cleaning of such. You just can't get away from the stuff.

Trying to potty train my children was like the seventh ring of Dante's Inferno. True hell! Both my children refused to be potty trained. I had visions of them graduating high school in "Depends" adult diapers. No amount of coaxing would do it, but I was driven like Scarlet O'Hara, "As God as my witness, I shall never change another diaper again!" I was determined to save the $4,500 a year I spent in diapers. All the magazine articles on the subject say to reward them with stickers when they go. My daughter was too smart for that.

"Honey, if you just try to sit on the potty…just sit on it...then Mommy will give you a Cinderella sticker."

Her response? "Grandma gives me stickers whenever I want, and I don't have to sit on the potty to get them." For boys, they suggest putting cheerios in the bowl and letting them take aim. My son just put his hand in, plucked them out, and ate them. He couldn't understand why I was putting food in the toilet, so then I tried putting in little boats for him, but then he flushed the toilet. So after the toilet literally exploded and the plumbing bill cleaned out my account, he cried when I wouldn't let him play with his boat after it sailed the seven seas of the septic system. This was another helpful potty training tip from Parenting magazine that failed miserably.

With animals it's worse, because you have to pick up after them, and just saying, "pooper scooper" makes me convulse uncontrollably. Thank God my parents moved out to the country when we were kids so we could just open the back door and let our pets roam the 15 acres we had. Unfortunately, they wouldn't come back, and we would have to call them for an hour screaming their names like idiots off the back porch, "Bach! Beethoven! Mozart!" The neighbors were really stumped as to why we were nightly screaming the names of dead composers for all the world to hear. So then we had to start walking them on leashes at 6 a.m. each morning, and I can't tell you how many times I missed the school bus because the dog was constipated. Try writing that on a note to the teacher as an excuse for tardiness.

By far, though, my worst experience with this horrid little topic involves both children and animals. It was right after I had my son and that little belly button nub thing (which is just plain creepy, let's face it) still hadn't fallen off yet. So one day my newborn turned into an unending massive poop factory as I was changing his diaper and there just was no amount of baby wipes that was gonna save me no matter how absorbent they said they were. Just then as I'm cleaning crap off of everything, the little nub thing decides it's gonna cut loose. Like a champagne cork it just pops off and flies across the linoleum. Suddenly the sleeping dog wakes up, bolts across the floor, and snaps it up like a doggy treat. Exclamation points came out of my head like a cartoon as I yelled, "Bad dog! Bad dog!" So now I'm covered in poop with a crying baby and sticking my hands down the dog's throat because I'm afraid he's gonna die or something. Can you believe my mother-in-law actually wanted me to save this wretched nub thing for the scrap book?! What the hell?! Like that's a memory I want to remember — believe me, it's already burnt upon my brain for all eternity. I wake up screaming in a cold sweat every once in awhile.

I suppose eventually the tables will turn though. When I'm 93 and in a wheelchair wearing "Depends," I'll simply smirk and tell my daughter, "Touché”.