Dishful Thinking

“I don’t need you anymore,” said boy wonder this afternoon as I was whipping up some tasty hummus in the cuisinart. “I can make toast and cook dinner and do the dishes.”

Yeowch! Hard to say which hurts worse—the prospect of being considered irrelevant by my firstborn or the pathetic assessment of my role in the household as related by a preschooler. Sadly, that’s pretty much what it feels like around here much of the time. Which brings me to another subject: where the hell is my dishwasher??

I had let my husband know that one of my conditions for having a second child was the presence of a fully functional dishwasher before delivery. Well, somebody forgot to get Coco that memo, so here she is over eight months old and I’ve still got dishpan hands.

The truth is, Christian acquired a perfectly fine secondhand dishwasher several months ago. It’s even installed in our kitchen. The only problem is that it’s not hooked up. Apparently, some fairly complicated plumbing/electrical work is required for my dream to be realized. Neither of those being Christian’s area of expertise, we are at the mercy of a charming but unreliable buddy of his who has the required skills and has offered to help out but can’t seem to make it over here. Now, you may ask why we couldn’t have just gone out and bought a dishwasher and had it installed. That would seem to be the simple way to do it. Unfortunately, that is out of the question. That, you see, is what normal people would do.