Doing the Dishes

Doing the dishes used to give me panic attacks. No... seriously.

A huge pile of dishes after every meal.

For most of my adult life, I have not been able to eat out. First it was personal choice and then it was finances. It's just too expensive.

So every single meal (3) each day of the week (7) is 21 meals a week... that's a lot of dishes. I care about my environment and also the expense, I couldn't afford paper plates.

Who washes the dishes? I do. It's the job that is never done. You have to eat. There's no choice about it. I'm teaching my children and they get very excited when the sink is empty. They're learning that a pile of dishes is really lame.

I do my best to wash as we go. It's challenging to do but it really saves time. The food doesn't get stuck on the dish if you wash it as soon as you are finished.

But there are days when the dishes are just piled. We have errands to run, appointments to keep and it just gets pushed down the to-do list.

So I've found the key to happiness! NETFLIX! I'm not kidding. I have an awesome window sill above the kitchen sink. Whether I use my smartphone or my laptop, I watch something just to get through the drudgery of getting them done.

I used to listen to audio books while I did the dishes. I can't seem to keep a cd player working, so streaming video works well too. So whether you have music, a book, or a movie... getting your mind off of the task and multitasking makes doing the dishes less of a pain. I'll do another blog post about ways to actually do the dishes. But I have the whole month of December. :-)

PS. I actually look forward to doing the dishes!

There isn't much that makes me as happy as an empty kitchen sick.