Doing Dishes

Aaaaaahhh!  There’s just something so nice about watching your flesh and blood offspring toil doing the dishes at the very same sink and counter that you, yourself spent so many hours at doing dishes!  At our house loading and unloading the dishwasher largely falls into my own jurisdiction mostly because it is difficult for the kidlets to reach the cupboards where the dishes are stored, and we have kind of a confusing system for storing dishes.  While I’m dealing with dishes, I often have them off cleaning up different areas of the house, sweeping under the dining room table and washing the table, and doing various other tasks.  From time to time I have them wash dishes by hand, but usually the dishes that need to get washed by hand are the difficult sort of dishes that aren’t able to go into the dishwasher for some reason or another, and so it’s just easier and faster for me to take care of them at this point.

At Grandma Robbie’s house, however, there is no dishwasher!  There are lots of opportunities to learn to wash dishes in a sink that is low and easy to reach (thanks to my short grandmother who had it built that way).  The kidlet dishwashing experience was overseen by me, with a bit of instruction that, believe me, was not taken graciously.  It was complete with every aspect I remember from doing dishes daily with my brother:  whining, complaining, and a great, great deal of pestering and bickering from both sister and brother.  My mother will be pleased to know that there was also drama, and stomping off down the hallway on the part of the first kidlet, a situation which had to be overseen by a calm and patient daddy in a separate room until a certain small one had calmed down enough to come back so I could show her how to rinse out the sink with the sprayer.

It was glorious.  Slave labor is wonderful, even though it probably is actually more work to oversee than actually just doing the dishes alone.