Doing dishes seems to be one of the never-ending tasks of motherhood, along with laundry, sweeping, etc. and I recently had been having a little bit of a hard time getting myself to get the job done. They would pile up during the day and then finally at night I would buckle down and get them cleaned and away.
(This is in part due to my little shadow who is such a fun helper, she just loves to pull all of the silverware out of the little holders and scatter them everywhere and then when she's done with that, climb up onto the dishwasher to get the glass cups that are just out of her reach... so it's not totally a lazy thing for me, but kind of yes...)
All this was true until last Friday night, Cameron was kindly washing dishes, cleaning up dinner, when we got a visitor from downstairs telling us that they had hot soapy water coming up their sink.... Our drain lines connect somewhere along the way down to neverland, but before reaching neverland, something had clogged and was not allowing anything to go down the drain, which meant that anything we were doing upstairs, was going to reappear momentarily in our neighbor's sink downstairs... So Cameron stopped cleaning and that's when the cleaning freeze began. We couldn't use our dishwasher because it drains down the same pipes and no kitchen sink use... So the dishes just started piling up...
This went on until I literally had nothing left in my cupboard! I'd used all of my measuring cups, measuring spoons, plates, cups, silverware, bowls, everything was in a pile in the sink or near to it... Sunday, our neighbors had someone come look at the draining problem, but his 25' snake didn't find the problem... so the freeze continued... I washed a few plates, cups, and pieces of silverware from the dishwasher in bowls on the counter just so that I had something in the bare cupboards. I finally gave up hope that they would get a plumber in who would actually fix the problem and decided to use all paper products...
By Tuesday, I had just about been driven crazy, I felt like my house was a mess because my kitchen was covered in flour, dirty dishes and soaking dishes... gross! I was about to pull out all of my camping-dish-doing skills and cart all of the dishes into our bathroom to do them in the bathtub... when I heard mysterious sounds coming from our sink! It was a repairman! He had a 50' snake which was able to get things moving and allow the use of our sink again!
I've never been more excited to do the dishes! I seriously stood and washed dishes for over an hour smiling the whole time! I am mostly writing this post for myself, but if you read this I'm glad you did to know of the immense gratitude I feel for the modern conveniences of running water and drains that work! So, now even when there is a pile of dishes and I'm tired or whatever... I try to remember how it could be and happily do the dishes!
