Too May Dishes?

Do you feel like you are doing too many dishes this summer?

Here are a couple of tips to help:

1) We try to encourage a one glass a day rule. To facilitate this, we have "parking" places for everyone's glass. (These are designated spots, on the counter, marked with a sticker.) Some families use color-coded cups—but they still need a place to park them. We even have “parking” places for the neighbor kids who regularly play at our house. When our college aged children are home for the summer—they even use their spots! If I didn’t do this, I’d have the dishwasher full of cups twice a day.

Too May Dishes?

Insist on no dishes in the sink! Dirty dishes must go into the dishwasher. Definitely not on the counter, table, or anywhere else. For this to work, the dishwasher must always be "dirty." This is not always easy on Mom, but the small inconvenience of making sure the dishwasher is always run and emptied, means less time standing at the sink loading the dishwasher. I've made a new sign so that everyone is aware that the dishwasher is dirty. (I just printed the words out and put it in a small dollar store picture frame. It goes face down when the dishwasher is running. See photo.) There are no excuses now. I was tired of hearing, "Oh, I thought the dishwasher was clean!" Run the dishwasher when there will be the least chance of accumulating dirty dishes in the sink.

Dish "parking"

This is a start to fewer dishes! Sure, I will miss the opportunity for prayer while doing dishes myself, but I am sure I will find other opportunities for prayer -- like laundry, dirty dishes, vacuuming, etc. Or better yet, how about those moments of prayer such as by the pool, on a walk or before dozing off on a nap?