Stahlke Adoption

Extreme

I heard last Friday at noon that the IRS needed all our adoption receipts (2005-2010) for an audit. Our tax accountant's deadline to receive these documents was this morning at 8:00 am. Besides the inevitable problems of a filing system disrupted by the kids' arrival in our lives, I also had to deal with receipts in Cyrillic and conversions with exchange rates from prior years.

After working most of the weekend, I finished gathering what I could still find by Monday morning at 2:00 am. Even with no traffic, it took an hour to drive the documents to St. Charles, Illinois, and leave them in the accountant's lock box near their outside office door. At 3:00 am, in a dark parking lot, I discovered that the lock box was designed for letters, not five large manila envelopes with wads of receipts and financial statements. By removing the larger black clips that were holding papers together, I could with difficulty stuff each envelope into the box. The last one wouldn't fit, but by reaching my fingers in and shifting the contents, the final envelope mostly entered the box.

I drove back to Forest Park, listening to my Swedish murder mystery on the CD player. At home by 4:00 am, I crawled into bed with my injured arm propped up on pillows and collapsed until the 8:00 alarm started ringing. It was now Columbus Day, and all the kids were off school. Jonathan, of course, had a day of classes to teach!

posted by Stahlkes @ 6:48 PM