Ali is off someplace warm and lovely and I* am here, dealing with unspeakable horrors – and lucky you guys, I’m going to share them with you.

(*Beck, from Frog and Toad Are Still Friends)

We have a long room table that sits at the end of our long living/dining room, right in the bay window nook. It was an anniversary gift from my in-laws, and is a lovely light birch table from Ikea with matching chairs that have – this is important for the story – woven wicker seats. Or something – grass? straw? Some sort of fabric that the Very Dumbest of the three pigs would have joyously seized upon to build his doomed house. If you have cats and your cats have claws (and why do your cats have claws? BECAUSE YOU – meaning me – ARE A SUCKER.), they WILL seize upon straw seats like this as a lovely gift to them from the Mysterious And Stupid Humans and they WILL scratch the crap out of them.

My husband and I had recently been talking about de-strawing the chairs and replacing the seats with something substantially less cat tempting, although we haven’t been talking about sending the cats down the road with their wee hobo bundles slung over their backs because a) we’re suckers and b) we’re fond of the little furry morons. The most damaged of the chairs had a small hole, and this was the chair, perched behind the table, that The Baby (who will be three in two months) was cheerfully sitting on this morning when this story begins. 

The Baby is potty training, as I have mentioned. In order to facilitate easy potty usage, she was wearing a dress and that was it, although she had added a pair of kicky orange boots to her ensemble and was sitting at the table happily colouring with some markers. “I drew on my boots!” she wailed. I absent-mindedly told her to go wash them off, and she scuttled off to the washroom, where I could hear her cheerfully scrubbing her beloved orange boots.

She came back, looking downcast, and told me that she couldn’t take it all off, and showed me her boots to illustrate. IT. WASN’T. MARKER. It was another, more primal substance, one she manufactured herself. 

Like a character in a particularly grim horror movie, I arose from my desk and walked around the dining room table. (cue horrifying strings RIGHT HERE) There, sitting wetly upon the damaged wicker seat, was a mound of feces, suggesting that a bear or possibly a Great Dane had suddenly been seized with the need to relieve themselves whilst visiting my charming home.

I let out a wild cry and The Baby shrieked “SOMEBODY POOPED ON DA CHAIR!” Yes, indeed. I wonder who that was? The chair was unsalvagable, utterly ruined. My father – who I had been talking to on the phone while this whole grim debacle played itself out – cheerfully suggested bringing over the pressure washer, which caused me to give The Baby the phone. “Mama is MAD!” she whispered into the receiver as I scrubbed and cursed under my breath. 

Meanwhile, Ali is sipping drinks on some warm tropical beach and I am thinking, wistfully, that it might snow again today AND I’m wanting to have a shower that lasts at least an hour. And for future reference, “I drew on my boots” and “I POOP on my boots” sound an AWFUL lot alike. You may want to note that down.