Potty training doesn't pause because you got in the car — but right now, every journey works like this:
You plan the route around toilets.
Not the fastest way. The way with services. You leave earlier than you need to, you take the exit you don't need, and you still spend the whole drive doing the maths on how long it's been since the last stop.
The warning comes too late to do anything with.
There's no build-up. There's a sentence from the back seat and then there's a deadline you can't negotiate with. You can't reason with a two-year-old's bladder, and you can't make a motorway exit appear because she's asked for one.
When you do find a toilet, she won't use it.
The seat is huge, the hole is enormous, her feet don't reach anything, and the hand dryer went off in the next cubicle. So you've driven twenty minutes, queued, and she's still not going. Then she goes in the car park.
And then you're cleaning a car seat.
Not wiping it. Removing the cover, working out whether the harness webbing can be washed, and discovering it can't. That's an hour of your evening and a smell that stays for a fortnight — after three weeks of progress that just went backwards.
It isn't that your child isn't ready.
It's that she's only trained in one room of one building, and you keep driving her away from it.