What I Learned From A Broken Dishwasher

Photo By Scott Umstattd

I’ll try to write this without complaining.

A week before Easter our six-month old dishwasher broke. Typically when an appliance breaks in my house I attempt to fix it myself but since this was so new I called in for warranty repair. Unfortunately it took a couple days before someone could look at it and then another week and a half to get the part. I know there are people with a lot bigger problems but not having a dishwasher for our family of five was kind of a pain in the neck.

Our evenings are busy enough without spending time washing dishes by hand. My wife and I each pack a lunch for work everyday and the kids usually pack a lunch about once a week. The kids added to the problem by continuing to use dishes as if they didn’t care that we were hand washing everything. That’s probably because they really didn’t care.

The whole traumatic ordeal has forced us to think more about how many dishes we use on a regular basis. It’s a lot. I’m not sure the kids learned much since we didn’t make them help out with the dishes as much as we probably should have. It seemed like by the time we finished with all the craziness of each evening, they were going to bed late. Then my wife and I would end up doing the dishes later.

After two weeks of hand-washing, our dishwasher is repaired and we appreciate the convenience more. We used to get lazy sometimes and leave anything that couldn’t go in the dishwasher until we felt like washing by hand. Sometimes things would sit there for a couple days before we got around to hand washing.

I’m trying not to do that anymore by accepting the fact that the hand-wash items are just part of the evening clean-up routine. After I take care of anything that can go into the dishwasher, I just quickly wash anything that’s left. I love being able to go to bed without dirty dishes sitting around.

Now if I could just figure out what to do with all the papers and stuff my kids put on our kitchen island.

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