My Daducation

Posts Tagged ‘Relationships’

One the better inventions of the last century for kitchens everywhere was the dishwasher. The promise of never washing another dish, of easily cleaning up after dinner, of spending more time with the family……..what a crock. I have yet to see a dishwasher clean a dish without human intervention. It’s pathetic.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe my wife is in tune with this reality. Her confidence in our dishwasher is staggering. I have witnessed the depth of her confidence as she loads the dishwasher. I can see she believes she has a dishwasher that actually WASHES dishes. Spaghetti still on the plate? No problem. Oatmeal still in the bowl? Easy. Cake on a platter? Piece of cake. (sorry)

Of course, the reality is that the dishes are not clean. If there is a speck of dirt on them going in, it’s still there when you take them out. I’m not sure what is happening in there, other than jacking my water bill, but it certainly isn’t WASHING anything.

Yes, I’ve seen that advertisement from Maytag where the guys loads a full cake into the dishwasher and it disappears. What a total joke. What a great way to destroy your plumbing. I don’t care if it has chopping blades or not, can it scrape that grain of pulverized oatmeal off a bowl???

I’ve had friends tell me to try different detergent. So I did. This appears to be a whole other racket. Seriously, how many different detergents do you need? And how do you choose when NONE of them get anything any cleaner? Reminds me; I need to buy stock in these companies.

So, of course, I have been relegated to hand-washing each dish before placing it in the dishwasher. Now, mind you, this is only to rinse debris off the dishes, not an actual soapy cleaning. Why should the dishwasher get off that easy? No, our dishwasher is a sanitizer now. At least now I won’t know if it isn’t doing its job.

Which leads me to the next problem…..loading the thing. Not to brag, but I have the ability to organize the loading of a dishwasher pretty well. It is an art, because not only do you need to fit everything in, you need to do it so that the water reaches all the dishes. However, my wife does not appear to be concerned with this. Actually I would guess she loads the dishwasher using a horseshoe toss technique. From across the kitchen.

I open the dishwater to find bowls on top of bowls on top of more bowls. Cups turned over and full of water. The silverware is wedged in the tray so tightly I need a crowbar to extract them. A huge pot is turned upside down blocking all water from reaching the top rack, like a blast shield. The pot is huge. Real big. It should have its own zip code.

“Hey, ” I mention to her, “why didn’t you just hand wash the pot? It’s too big for the dishwasher.”

“Ah, it can handle it. Besides did you see how big that thing is? I’m not washing that in the sink. It won’t fit,” she responds. “By the way, can you load the dishwasher tonight?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Great. Make sure you throw in the toy box. I need it sanitized.”

I think I have to ban her from touching it.

So it follows not long after that I smell burning in the middle of the night. I rush downstairs to find the dishwasher near the end of its drying cycle. And something is smoking. That something is a plastic spoon that slid down to the heating element and melted into something that resembled the devil’s pitchfork.

But worse than this, there is a green film all over the inside of the dishwasher which does not want to come off. I scrape. I scrub. Not coming off. It is not until I look into the bottom on the machine and see a little green paper stuck in the silverware tray. It is the wrapping of a crayon. A green crayon.

“Oh yeah,” my wife says,” The one-year-old must have stuck that in there when she was playing with the dishwasher tray earlier.” She finds this hilarious.

“Of course,” I say. “Silly me, I didn’t know this was one of her toys.”

“Oh pipe down, slim,” she says. “She likes the dishwasher. Who cares if she plays with the tray?”

Apparently I am the only one with a hangup on a properly operating dishwasher. As for the green mess, well I am wondering if I can find a way to get the one-year-old to clean it up since she loves the dishwasher so much. Any ideas?

As a kid I remember going over to a friend’s house was always a neat experience because it was interesting to see how other people lived. I had a friend whose parents yelled at each other in a combination of Italian and English. He and his sister would fight once a day. Not yell at each other. Fight. With fists. And hair-pulling. It was great theatre. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

One thing I saw from time to time was that they stored their books, magazines, and newspapers in the bathroom. For years I never said anything, because who was I to tell them where to store things in their house. Finally one day I asked my friend.

“Why do you keep your books and magazines stacked in your bathroom?” I asked.

“That’s where we read. Where else would we keep them?” he said.

I am floored by this at the time. I had no idea people did this. Bathroom time was always a SEAL operation for me. Get in and get out. Sitting and reading was not an option. For that matter I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose that as a reading spot. What’s wrong with the couch? Or a recliner? Personally I liked to sit on my bed and read. I still do to this day.

For years after I can remember going to visit people and seeing a library in their bathroom. It seemed to be more often than not people maintained a book depository in the water closet. For years I shook my head in amazement. Why would you pick this place to read??

One day the realization comes crashing home to me. It happens shortly after my  second child has learned to walk. While an independent sort, he liked to walk around and find out where you were. This is cute. For a while.

Most parents get into a pretty good groove when they have the first child, learning how to skillfully hand off the kid from one parent to the other when something has to be done. It’s a tag-team deal and it works pretty well. When the second child comes along, you shift the defense to man-to-man coverage. This seems to work fine, until one of you actually needs to get something done. Then someone is on double duty.

After a few years of double-duty, finding some peace and quiet is mandatory. Little did I realize the ONLY place to do this is the———BATHROOM. Not the bedroom, with the door locked. Not the office, with the door locked. The bathroom. Because you have an alibi.

Yes, sometimes it is necessary to head in with a good book and catch up on some reading. Sometimes they hang around outside. It can be a little hard to concentrate with all the yelling:

“What are you DOING in there?!”

What’s funny is that isn’t what they want to know. What they really want to know is if they can come in and harass me some more, and how come I won’t let them in to do this. If the book is good enough I don’t hear them at all.

So I am wondering if any of you parents can recommend a good book to take in with me next time?

I’m not sure what dinner-time is like at your house, but frankly it has become such a chore at ours that some days I would rather send everyone to bed starving. I think God invented mealtime as a form of birth control.

Our kids represent the first three stages of chaos:

Our 1-year-old is an eating machine. It’s actually like feeding a snapping turtle. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

Our 5-year-old’s tastes change as often as his underwear. This week he only wants to eat things that contain chocolate. So I have been telling him that broccoli is made of chocolate.

Our 8-year-old has improved his eating habits but will not eat fruit, or sit next to anyone eating fruit. Don’t ask.

The following things happen through the course of “dinner”:

1. The 1-year-old tosses her plate of food across the room. Thank God for hardwood floors.
2. The 1-year-old cries because she has no more food. I inform her it is on the floor. She seems surprised.
3. The 5-year-old informs us that the chicken that has been made “tastes like garbage.” Since he has never eaten garbage we are pretty sure this is a ploy to move on to dessert.
4. The 8-year-old begins talking about who got in trouble at school.
5. The 5-year-old spills his cup of water.
6. The 1-year-old spies my iced tea and demands a drink. She demands this by making a noise that sounds like angry monkeys.
7. While I am cleaning up the 5-year-old’s mess the 8-year-old informs us he did not get in any trouble at school.
8. The 8-year-old decides he needs to pee. He is allowed to leave, lest there be an accident.
9. The 5-year-old decides he needs to pee. He is told to stay in his chair, as we know this is a ploy to move on to dessert.
10. The 1-year-old has consumed 10 mandarin oranges in 0.3 seconds, a world record. I checked.
11. The 1-year-old demands more food. Loudly.
12. The 5-year-old spills his cup of water again.
13. While cleaning up the 5-year-old’s mess, the 8-year-old informs us he may have gotten in some trouble at school.
14. Under harsh questioning the 8-year-old folds and explains that he really didn’t do anything wrong, the teacher just thought he did. We are fuzzy on the details, but I am at least relieved he was not eating cake off the floor.
15. The 1-year-old begins testing the acoustics of the room. It is becoming impossible to talk over her.
16. Not happy with “fuzzy details,” my wife gets the 8-year-old to admit he was talking in class.
17. The 5-year-old spills his cup of water. Yes, this REALLY happens three times.
18. The 5-year-old is made to clean it up.
19. I regret having the 5-year-old clean up the mess.
20. I clean up an even bigger mess he made.
21. My dinner is cold. I eat it out of spite. My wife is exhausted. She is staring at the clock. I think I hear her muttering something about their bedtime
22. Everyone is cleaned up and sent to their respective play areas while my wife and I recover.

Yes, dinnertime. The cure for conception.

OK, so this study was among my friends. But I stand behind it. However, I don’t think my wife agrees. Nor do their wives. In fact, they still think we’re idiots.

My wife recently wrote a post about my inability to read her mind. Now, she would say that it isn’t about reading her mind, but rather paying attention to what she is doing. I can respect that statement, however this assumes I am not doing something myself. Which is what she thinks, I’m sure.

Yes, my wife does a lot. More than me. I do a lot as well, including getting the kids up, fed, and to school in the morning. Some days I give my daughter lunch and put her down for her nap. I fold laundry when it is sitting there. I handle the kids while she is making dinner. Every now and then I cook meals. Sometimes I even make the earth stand still. OK, I may have dreamed all that.

However, the other day she was furious with me because she said I wasn’t helping her. I was in the living room with my daughter, and she had gone downstairs to put laundry in. After that she began to get dinner ready. We had earlier discussed what we would be having for dinner. We decided on cooking a frozen pizza. Fast and easy. However, after a few minutes she peers around the corner from the kitchen and shouts, “GEE, THANKS FOR YOUR HELP.”

I am stunned by this. Did I miss her calling for me? I didn’t hear any trouble in the kitchen. The boys were upstairs and my daughter was with me.

Ummmm……

I proceeded to ask her what she was talking about. She flips.

“Oh, I don’t know. I had to put laundry in and start dinner. Don’t you think I could use your help?” She yells.

“OK, I didn’t know you needed help unwrapping the pizza and throwing it in the oven. Nor did I know we were starting dinner now, since it is much earlier. Maybe you should have asked me to do it so I knew the agenda,” I say.

This apparently does not matter. I should have sensed what she was trying to do. Somehow. There were several walls between her and I at the time, so this may be why her ESP brainwaves never reached me.

I get irritated when I hear the “you always” or “you never” complaints even though a specific instance cannot be repeated to me. I employ the “give  me one instance” self-defense maneuver in these situations just to prove that I do help out. I have even heard these complaints while I am folding laundry.

I would never go so far as to say that there isn’t more I can do to help. However, some guidance on the agenda of the day would help me know what is going on in her brain and help me anticipate how I can help.

To me the essence of ESP is still verbal communication. It’s more about anticipation than reading her mind. But drop me a clue on what you are trying to get done that day so I can plan mine.

Now if I can just find a way to get these kids to do some of these chores, I’ll be set.

*DISCLAIMER*  This article is based on opinions from the author and doesn’t necessarily represent facts (as per my wife).