Homemaking

Dad teased that my grandma washed her dishes before she washed them – immersing them in soapy water and wiping them down before carefully placing them in the dishwasher for a cycle.

I smiled at Dad’s teasing, wondering at Grandma’s methodical refusal to take advantage of the wonderful convenience she had in her kitchen.

A dishwasher! That washes dishes at the press of a button! Just put the dirty dishes in and, a couple hours later, take the clean dishes out!

We didn’t have a dishwasher, you see. My dad proclaimed he had seven – with no need for another.

I never in a million years imagined that I would become my grandmother.

Yet I have.

After nearly every meal, I walk into the kitchen and fill a dishpan with hot soapy water.

Plastic containers, knives, and lightly soiled mixing bowls and pans get washed first – and rinsed in hot water in another dishpan before I set them in the freestanding drying rack to dry.

Then I place the plates and cups and bowls and utensils from the meal in the dishpan of soapy water. I lift them out one by one, inspecting them for food debris, which I wipe off with a dishcloth before placing the dish in the dishwasher.

Finally, I wash the heavily soiled “big stuff”, soiling my dishwater in the process. But by then it doesn’t matter. I’ll dump the dishwater down the drain or throw it on some plants or use it to soak a pot with persistent cooked-on gunk. No need for clean water for those purposes.

Why did my grandmother wash her dishes before she washed them?

I don’t know.

But I do know why I do.

Because the idea of a dishwasher that turns dirty dishes to clean in the touch of a button is a myth. It might be true for the first few cycles, but eventually, you’ll end up with food particles spread throughout your load of dishes and dried on by the “autodry” function. You’ll have to disassemble the bottom arm and clean out all the detritus that has collected from improper rinsing. It’ll stink.

The alternative most people take is to rinse their dishes prior to placing them in the dishwasher, scraping off the food gunk with a fork or knife and rinsing the rest off under running water.

But, as environmental folks are wont to remind us, the process of rinsing can often use more water than our super-efficient dishwashers do.

So what’s a semi-crunchy-but-still-wants-clean-dishes mama to do?

She washes her dishes before she washes them, using every ounce of water to its greatest advantage.

“Man, this dough is dry,” I thought to myself as I added yet another tablespoon of water to the bread dough I was kneading.

I mentally reviewed the adjustments I’d made to the recipe.

I’d doubled the recipe. No problem there.

I’d used 2 cups of milk instead of 1 cup milk and 1 cup water (got to use up that just-about-to-turn milk!) That could increase liquid needs just a little since milk has a small amount of solids in it. But I’d already added, what? A quarter cup of water?

And the dough was still dry – tons of flour still just sitting on the bottom of my bowl!

I’d used all whole-wheat flour instead of 2/3 whole wheat, 1/3 bread – and had added a tablespoon of gluten per recipe to compensate. That might increase water needs a little…but by now I’d added at least a half cup of water!

The only answer I could come up with is that I shouldn’t have measured out all the flour per recipe before kneading. I must have just never noticed that I never ended up needing the full flour allotment, since I usually mixed everything together with just half the flour and then added in a half cup extra flour at a time as I kneaded.

And then my ten minutes of kneading were up and I wet a dishcloth to cover the dough.

That’s when I saw the oil, still in the measuring cup where I’d carefully measured it out.

Half a cup of oil, substituting for four tablespoons of melted butter times two.

No wonder I needed an extra half cup of liquid.

I used the oil for a salad I was making for the evening meal – and let the bread raise and cook as usual.

It turned out fine.

Even so, I’m writing this down as a note to self: When a recipe isn’t quite turning out as you’d expected, check to make sure you included all the ingredients.

The American Red Cross is a wonderful, helpful organization.

And it drives me nuts.

I donated blood with them once in college – and they’ve been calling my cell phone ever since, asking for more donations.

I’ve told them a couple times that, not long after my last donation, I was told by a doctor that I had hypovolemia (low blood volume) and that this makes blood donation unwise. Would they please note this on my file and stop calling? The assure me that they will – and call again next month. Anymore, I just ignore the calls when I see their number on my phone.

But recently they did one more thing to raise my ire.

They gave my husband a gift.

Daniel donates blood regularly through the Red Cross donation center at his workplace, and when he got to a certain number of units, they thanked him with a gift of a red potholder and oven mitt.

So, a couple days ago, I’d just finished reseasoning my cast iron skillet on the stove and I set it on top of a small stack of potholders on the counter.

I peeled the parsnips and cut up the squash and ham for a Farmer Boy-inspired meal, and I set the skillet back on the burner to fry the ham.

A couple minutes later, I turned aside from the sink to see red smoke puffing out around the bottom of my cast-iron skillet.

You see, unbeknownst to me, the synthetic fabric of the Red Cross potholder on the top of the stack had melted to the bottom of my skillet – and when I’d placed the skillet on top of the burner I’d placed the potholder there too.

Thankfully, the batting was flame resistant and I didn’t have a fire on my hands, just a mess of melted plastic and an acrid smoke filling my kitchen.

Thanks a lot Red Cross :-)

Usually when Daniel asks me if he has any more underwear, I tell him that yes, they’re in the basket in such and such a place-I’m just behind with folding.

But when he asked several weeks back, I had to report that he had none. None. I’d fallen behind such that he had no clean underwear. Now, thanks to our packratrish tendencies (actually, my tendency to think that any clothing can be reused or repurposed), we were still able to find something he could wear, albeit not the most comfortable fit. (TMI? So sorry.)

I’ve lost my Homemaking Mojo, you see.

I had such a wonderful laundry system set up. Every morning, I threw in the load of laundry prescribed for the day (Sheets on Monday, Darks on Tuesday, Underwear and other things washed on Hot on Wednesday, etc.). Every lunchtime I switched the laundry from washer to dryer or hung it to dry. And after work, I folded and put away (some of the time.) It worked so well, I was never behind except on folding (which isn’t quite as desperate as being behind on washing and drying, you have to admit.)

But I got behind and tried to catch on a Saturday and that blew my Homemaking Mojo clear away. I spent the entire day handling a mountain of laundry, resulting in extreme laundry exhaustion – which means I didn’t do laundry again for a week and ended up with another mountain. And then my husband didn’t have underwear.

So now every ten days or so I freak out, realizing that my husband will soon run out of underwear, and I quick throw in a load of underwear – leaving the rest of the laundry to pile into a higher and higher and higher mess as our closets gradually empty.

There’s an easy fix, you know. All I need to do is throw in a load of laundry every morning and switch it every noon.

The problem is that laundry isn’t the only area in which I’ve lost my Homemaking Mojo. In a frenzy of preparation for guests, I spent a day doing dishes and cooking. And I’ve barely cooked or done dishes since. In a cleaning frenzy (for guests again), I spent myself on housework and can’t even be bothered to move my cereal bowl from the sofa-side table to the sink these days. In a fit of organizing (trying to get my craft room up and running-which it now is!), I wore myself out and am now letting all my organizational systems decay.

The house seems insurmountable. It’s not just the laundry I need to pick back up. It’s the dishes, the cooking, the cleaning, the garden, the grocery shopping. Even just picking up those wonderful one-thing-at-a-time systems I had going seems overwhelming, because it’s reestablishing a half dozen patterns I’ve let slide.

But really, Rebekah, you don’t have to pick them all up at once to make progress.

Just take one step at a time.

Transfer the load of laundry from washer to dryer at lunch today.

You’ll find your mojo one small step at a time.

When we got married almost a year ago, we knew we wanted to make paying off student loans a top priority. We want to have children, and when we have them, we want for me to be able to stay at home with them.

Getting our student loans paid off before we start having children would go a long way toward making that wish a reality.

Which means that we carefully planned our budget such that most of my income goes towards principle on student loans (while Daniel’s still provides the minimum payments-so that we’d have an easily flexible arrangement if a surprise came along.)

It also means that we have a specific date for when we expect to have our loans paid off–and a specific date for when we think we can start “trying” for a baby.

And, since I’m a planner, it means I have a whole list of tasks to be completed before, around, or after those magic dates.

Before we start trying, I need to get my last two wisdom teeth pulled (don’t want to go under OR risk damaging any of my amalgam fillings if there’s a possibility I might be pregnant). I need to evaluate my current medication use and see if I can find effective alternatives to the ones that aren’t safe for pregnancy (like pseudoephedrine.) And I need to get in all the lead exposure I intend to get until the baby’d be at least one.

Does that last one surprise you a bit?

I don’t imagine it’s something many people think of when they start planning a pregnancy.

But lead exposure during pregnancy or breastfeeding can be dangerous to a baby’s health. And my old house likely contains plenty of lead.

Which means that if I need to do any home improvements before baby turns one (the earliest I would consider stopping breastfeeding), I need to do them before we get pregnant.

And, since I’m a project person, of course I have some home improvement projects that I want to get completed.

I want to get the interior doors all sanded down and repainted (we started this last summer but haven’t finished yet!) I want to scrape all the flaking paint from our hall cabinets and trim and get the hall repainted (especially important because I don’t want a toddler coming into contact with potentially-lead-containing pain flakes). And I want to finish vacuuming down the peeling paint in my craft room downstairs so I can hang pegboard on the wall frame my sister-in-law so graciously finished for me last September.

Which means I’m deep in the throughs of project-happiness: removing and soaking door hardware to remove a half dozen layers of paint. Scraping and sanding the doors. Trying to guesstimate when I can have the doors finished, how I’m going to do the hallway (it’ll be more difficult, since not all the parts that contain peeling paint can be taken off and taken outside for scraping like the doors can.)

What am I doing?

Projects. Getting ready for pregnancy. Planning ahead.

It’s not that our house is particularly messy–

But who am I kidding?

Our house is pretty messy.

What I’m trying to say is that we don’t live in squalor.

Almost every day, we eat homemade meals prepared and served on clean dishes. Every morning, we pull clean clothes from our closets and dresser drawers. Every night, we pull down the covers on a made bed and slip between sheets that haven’t been slept on for more than a week.

But our home bears the impact of daily living, and neither Daniel nor I are the neatest people in the world.

We have stacks of books and magazines on our nightstands, stacks of mail and packaging stacked on our table, and stacks of dirty dishes next to our sink. The living room couches are strewn with unfolded blankets, the floor beneath them strewn with shoes left behind where I took them off after I got home from work, the table beside them strewn with used mugs from the tea I drank with my books in the evenings.

And because there are piles of stuff all over the surfaces and floors, surfaces are rarely dusted and floors rarely swept. Which means our house is a mess.

While I have grandiose dreams of a household system to keep the house always spotless, our actual housecleaning system goes like this:

1) Invite someone over for dinner
2) Spend the day before eliminating piles and cleaning underneath them
3) Have people over for dinner
4) Let the dishes from having people over start the next pile of uncleanliness, which continues to grow until…
5) We invite someone over for dinner again

That’s not to say that I’m not working on establishing habits to control the clutter and uncleanliness. But we are also trying to make a habit of inviting people over more often–at least in part so we can keep the house clean.