Domestic Bliss Report

Motherhood is hard work. If we don't stick together, we'll all fall apart.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

"Leap" dishes

Danielle Bean wrote about a phenomenon she called "fake laundry." It would drive me nuts, too. My kids are trained to put their stuff in the hamper in their bedroom--and they do it (I've told you before, they're weird).
No, I have "leap" dishes. With no dishwasher, I get to hand wash all of them. It's my husband's task to put them away--the equivalent of emptying the dishwasher, no? He is conditioned to do this once a day, regardless of how many times I wash dishes or point out that we do own dish towels.
The problem is, if I prepare three meals a day, and wash all of the dishes involved, I run out of room in the dishrack. I've tried to make modern sculpture balancing things precariously and I always end up with something glass at the end, awaiting its place in my still-wet hands. Great.
To avoid this, I don't wash everything in the sink, which results in the phenomenon I have dubbed "leap" dishes. I virtually always have some accumulating in the sink awaiting washing. Once or twice a week, depending on whether I bake, I get motivated to dry and put away those dishes I've just washed so I can turn around and wash another dishrack full. A few times any given week, I have a clean and empty sink. Which means I actually do two loads of dishes in a day.
Maybe instead of "leap" dishes, I should call them "blue moon" dishes.

2 Comments:

At 10:52 AM, Blogger Milehimama @ Mama Says said...

When we didn't have a dishwasher, I tried Flylady's thing of putting a dishpan under the sink to hold the dirties. That worked great! Until I went into the hospital to have a baby and was out of the kitchen for a couple of weeks...apparently, even though I had been doing this for 18 MONTHS and my husband/children had learned to rinse their dish and put it under the sink... they didn't realize the dishes in the tub under the sink didn't wash themselves.
Sigh.
Now I have a problem with DH washing pots and pans - don't get me wrong, it's fabulous when he does! But for some reason, he sets them on the stove. He doesn't wipe the stove first, or even take the dirty pans off the stove, just sets the new ones on to dry.... so I end up redoing them a lot.

 
At 1:26 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Holy cow! I'm not the only one who still handwashes my dishes! (we don't have a dishwasher either...yet)

 

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