The Greatest Invention....EVER?

The dishwasher. That little box beside the sink in just about every household in America. It cleans our dishes, makes cleaning up at night easier than snapping your fingers, and it makes us feel all warm and fuzzy about disinfecting our dishes. So, when it doesn't work and we have to do all these things ourselves, we are left to wonder : Just HOW do people live without a dishwasher? Especially people with kids! When we moved into our new house we discovered that our dishwasher doesn't work. Well, that's not really true : our dishwasher doesn't cycle through its cycles and the soap dispenser doesn't work. So, in essence, it runs but it doesn't clean (and it certainly doesn't disinfect) our dishes! And to top it all off, the water in our kitchen doesn't get very hot (and it takes forever to get as hot as it does) so if I want to disinfect our dishes I have to boil water and soak our clean dishes in the boiled water. Either that or I can add a drop or two of bleach to our dishes. But this makes unpacking really difficult -- I want to wash our dishes as they get unpacked so they can be used, but washing by hand is next to impossible with a toddler around!

So, how in the world did people in the "olden days" do it? And how do people today survive without a dishwasher? Since we have American Home Shield on our new home they can give us the money from repairing the dishwasher and we can use it to "upgrade" our appliance.

What's awful is : we had to replace our refrigerator before we could really move in because something was terribly wrong with our old one! And then, to top it all of our dryer stopped working so we had to buy a new one (we bought a washer, too, since who knows when they'll have that great a deal on them and what if our washer goes out too?). Add to that the oven doesn't work properly (but, according to the repair man : it does....maybe he should try taking 25 minutes to bake a can of biscuits, then he can tell me it works properly), but we're pretty much stuck with that.

The upside? Once the appliances are all replaced, we'll have all new appliances! DUH. ;o) That means that things we wanted/needed for Zoe and her room are falling by the wayside for the "necessities." But with her impending arrival, things are stressful inside my brain.

I'm hoping I'll get some rest soon, though.