I bet this never happens to Angelina Jolie

It's the scene every mother of a potty-training 2-year-old dreads: Stark naked in a changing room at the mall, I hear Liza say, "Mama, POTTY!" in a tone that implies now.

With no pants, no shirt, and no bathroom within a 10-minute walk anyway, I tell her to go ahead and use her diaper. Two minutes later, Liza is pulling down her pants and trying to pull down her diaper (despite the snap-crotch onesie that's nominally holding it in place). I pull up the diaper and tell her to wait until I get my pants on; she pulls it down. When I reach down to pull up the diaper again, I see the large streak that's forming on the inside of Liza's (expensive) shirt, so I abandon my attempts to get dressed and start to change her on the floor of the dressing room. I get her cleaned up and out of the soiled shirt, but when I reach into the diaper bag, I'm out of diapers. Oops.

Liza's getting better at potty training, but I don't really want to trust her to hold it until we make it back to the hotel, which is at least a 15-minute walk away. So I fasten the snap crotch of her old shirt, wrap the long sleeves around her waist and through the crotch, and tie the sleeves together to make a makeshift diaper. Topped off with a clean pair of pants and butressed by the old pair of pants folded under her in the stroller, we're ready for the sprint back to the hotel.

We make it back in record time, and I whip off the (dry) pseudo-diaper and get her into a pair of pullups. As I'm pulling my packages out of the bottom of the stroller, I find miscellaneous items left over from a recent walk we took ... including two or three diapers and extra wipes. Oh, well.

An hour later, she's all excited because she pooped on the potty. Half an hour after thata, she's wandering around with a brown smear on the front of her shirt, despite the fact that there's no chocolate in the hotel. Oops. Good thing I bought the case of pullups earlier this week ... they're on sale at Target, in case anyone was wondering.