Washing Dishes, A Job That Needs To Be Done
It was taking as much time for our family of 7 to get dishes off the table and into and out of the dish washer and back into the cupboards and drawers is it was doing them by hand. Plus, it was often difficult to tell whether the dishes in the dishwasher were waiting to be cleaned or waiting to be put away. And that made it easy to put it off until it was too late; meaning that if they were dirty when we needed them, we ended up having to do them by hand anyway.
The fact that our old GE dishwasher was a poorly working hand-me-down helped make it an easier decision to retire it. I simply removed it and set it out with the trash. In its place we now keep our family-sized 40 gallon trash can – which we fill every 1.5 days!
Needless to say that with a large family, we produce lots of dirty dishes, as well as having many other challenges in the home organization department. I am the first person to say that no manner of dishes is fun in my eyes. But, I am happy to say that having a system that you can work easily and consistently can – and does – bring an element of peace to the home.
Now we clear the table and do the dishes immediately after a meal. It is an opportunity to build self-discipline into our children by example, as well as to bond together during that time. Sometimes we’ll listen to the Adventures In Oddessey family radio program over the Internet. We hope that exercising this family activity will encourage the kids in practicing other forms of self control and self discipline. Plus, our table is always clear, and our dishes are always clean and available for serving on.
Well, I guess I better get to the consumer safety part of my story. My inspiration for this article on clean living actually came from soap. That’s right. We ran out of dish soap and the dirty dishes began to stack up. So, I grabbed the next available soap that was handy in the closet and was just about the same amber color, and I filled the kitchen sink soap dispenser with it. It was antibacterial hand soap.
Sounds good right? If it can clean hands, and if it is antibacterial, then it ought to be good enough for dishes. At least that was my thinking. But the problem is that the hand soap binds to surfaces in such a way that it leaves a residue – no matter how well you rinse it. So, for several days every cup of tea or water had a very soapy taste. Yuck!
However, adding real dish soap to the dispenser diluted the other stuff well enough to fix the problem and get us back on on track, as well as initially scrubbing with a soft dish brush during rinsing.
All the best to you in living clean!
- Michael Dean
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