Seablue, I just went through the same exact thing with DD3. We introduced the potty early and she seemed excited, then quit. When we tried re-introducing the potty at around 2 1/2, she willfully rejected it. DD3 sounds like your DD -- very willful and bossy. We backed off with the potty because she'd throw a fit if I tried to sit her on the toilet. I figured we wouldn't get anywhere like that, so we took some time off.

We did talk about the potty, though, at other times. As she approached 3-y-old, I told her that they didn't make pull-ups any bigger and that she'd have to start wearing underwear. She understood that pull-ups meant she could pee herself and underwear meant she had to use the toilet. I also made sure we worked on pulling our pants up and down. DD gets VERY frustrated at the drop of a hat if she can't do something the first time. So we took a lot of time working on the pants so she'd be able to do it by herself when she did learn to use the potty.

One day she wanted a purple pull-up, but all we had were blue ones. So DH told her we had purple underwear. Once she wore the underwear, I could not do the normal potty-training thing of taking them to the bathroom every hour or so -- DD fought that terribly. She had to pee her pants a few times to realize that oh yeah, I need to pee in the toilet, not my underwear. After that, we've been good to go. She still wears pull-ups for naps and bed, but I'm fine with that for now.

It definitely helped when we backed way off of the potty training in the earlier stages -- I didn't even mention it for a long time -- and I tried to act like I didn't care about changing her pull-up, like it was no big deal. Sometimes when I had to use the bathroom, I'd say to DD, "Uh oh! I need to go pee! Where do I go????" She'd say, "The potty!!" So I'd sit on the floor and say, "Here???" And she'd say, "Nooo, the potty!!" We'd do that about various places so I could reinforce where we went potty. I don't know if it helped, but it made her laugh.

In the end, she was trained just before her 3rd birthday.