The Ultimate Poo Face, 6 days old

I almost got poop on my taxes. It’s true. My accountant sent everything over for me to review in a nice, crisp, manila envelope, and I hungrily opened it. It was like somehow the most mundane of things had suddenly become this portal to a sophisticated, adult world where people wore ‘suits’ and talked in a fandangled business dialect over dinners and deal-making cocktails. Exciting!

Well, as I’ve mentioned before, we have 800 square feet of ‘creative living’ to our house. At times there are so many dirty diapers bunched in tidy little packages on the floor, that I play casual games of soccer to get them over to the Diaper Genie (Gooooooooal!). I’m not squeamish about said diapers, and I have the whole ‘change process’ down to a fine art, lasting no more than 20 seconds on a relatively slow day.

This particular time however, my little bug -after some kind of explosive effort- had made her onesie into, well, a two-sie. She had to be stripped down and cleaned head to toe, before being transferred into another clean fuzzy sleeper. As is my habit, I washed my hands right after and put her in her chair to gurgle at her favourite toy. Then I went to investigate the tax situation.

That’s when I noticed it. The rogue poo. On the envelope. Instantly mortification seized my belly with a grip of ice. Oh my God. There’s poo on the pristine doorway to the adult world. There is shit on my taxes. How in the hell did that even get there? How am I even going to explain this? Is this going to be one of those stories I hear told back to me by some important person as a kind of anecdotal urban legend?

Like Lady Macbeth I ran to the sink and proceeded to scrub my hands again and again, bristle brush and all. Before I turned off the tap I rethought things and proceeded to scrub up to my elbows, hurriedly ripping the shirt off my back. 5 minutes later, and with all sound judgment completely gone, I found myself stripped down to bra and undies dripping in soapy water.. for fear of THE POO.

Finally satisfied I was squeaky clean, I donned my housecoat, and went to see what I could do about replacing (and burning) the envelope. I caught myself thinking in the most twisted mompreneur dark humour. ‘Yes, that’s what we need.. envelopes made out of diaper material. They’re padded for all your fragile shipping needs, yet absorbent! Brilliant! Child mishaps? Not a problem with ‘Diaperlope.. or The Enviaper..’ Necessity breeds invention. And insanity.

The strange thing is that I thought the stressful part of the taxes would be, oh, I don’t know.. the taxes. I guess the prospect of my ‘mom’ and ‘business’ worlds colliding so publicly caused me infinitely more anxiety, although I am not sure why. And I can’t help but smile when I think of what the CRA would have said if I had just sent everything out as-is and the envelope wasn’t the only thing smeared in crap.