There is a war happening in my kitchen, and it is not about the food. It is about the dishwasher. And I am losing it to people who are under four feet tall.
Here is how it goes. Somebody — and I am not naming names, but the smallest hands in this house are the guiltiest — "helps" by loading the dishwasher. Bowls face up, collecting water like little soup ponds. Cups stacked inside each other like nesting dolls. A fork stabbed straight through the rack.
I open that dishwasher the next morning and everything is somehow dirtier than when it went in. The cereal bowl has a little lake in it. There is a spoon welded to a mug. And the fork nobody could find at dinner is at the bottom, doing a jailbreak through the tines.
For a long time, my move was to just fix it. Quietly unload, quietly reload it properly, quietly resent the whole situation while pretending I was fine. Classic mom move. Suffer in silence, then explode over a spatula three weeks later.
Not anymore. New rule in this house: if you load it, you own it. I will show you once how the bowls go. I will show you twice. But the third time, you are doing it yourself while I supervise from a safe distance with my coffee.
Is it slower? Oh, absolutely. Is it still loaded like Tetris played in oven mitts? Sometimes, yes. But eventually, they start doing it right. And I get to stop being the unpaid dishwasher quality-control department.
And when the kitchen is finally quiet and the dishes are actually clean, that is when I get my moment. Just me on the porch after bedtime, a little exhale, my mommy's magic flowers, and a dishwasher running a full cycle without a single bowl turned into a birdbath.
Mamas, what is the one chore your kids "help" with that somehow creates more work? I need to know I am not the only one running a quality-control department over here.
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