F is for First World Problem

This is a small community service announcement to be filed under F, for ‘First World Problems’. The other afternoon I found myself caught up in one of my quarterly home tidying rampages. If you’re astute, which we both know you are, you can probably spot the problem immediately. Quarterly is clearly not often enough. If I had these rampages daily, well, they probably wouldn’t be rampages would they?  They would just be tidying my house. The problem is I feel like I tidy my house all day anyway. It’s just never perfectly tidy. There is always stuff. There’s always a basket of laundry to be hung, or folded or put away. There is ALWAYS something soaking in a bucketful of napi-san. There are always books out, blocks scattered and pairs of my heels* lying around.

Usually I just potter about and tidy as the day goes on but the trouble is that the minute I turn my back to tidy one mess another mess, or three, magically transpires. This is, of course, called life with kids and I find generally it’s easier to acquiesce and just accept there will be some level of clutter at pretty much all times. Which is mostly fine except for when I embark upon one of my quarterly rampages and do my best impression of a captain in the army or school principal marching about the place in utter disgust. When this happened the other evening the kitchen was at the top of my hitlist. My issue, or one of my issues to be strictly accurate, was with the, er, dishwasher. (This is where we start to swim in serious first world problem seas.)

My first world problem is that our dishwasher doesn’t dry anything that is plastic. And, because we live with two small children, at any given time our dishwasher is likely to be stacked at a ratio of one piece of crockery to six pieces of plastic. So every time I unstack the dishwasher, at least once a day, I need to stack three quarters of the load on the drying rack. But the drying rack is inevitably still stacked with other pieces of plastic that still haven’t dried yet because the drying rack isn’t big enough to fit all of it. I then have to dry some by hand to make room for the next load and it feels like I handle each piece approximately eight times before it can be put back in the drawer. It’s just another mini-arena in The Tetris Family Challenge but occasionally, or quarterly to be specific, it DRIVES ME BONKERS.

Anyway after my rampage we went across the bridge to have dinner with some friends. During our delicious meal (served on dishwasher friendly crockery) I casually, but seriously, raised my wet plastic dilemma. You can imagine how enthralled our friends were. “Gosh this Georgie’s a hoot! I mean the things she does and sees!! Her dinner party chat is gold standard!” Anyway our host Belinda was not only kind enough not to ask me to leave immediately but she also came up with a solution. Open the dishwasher and pull out the shelves in the morning and by midday they’ll be dry with no triple handling. And it works! GENIUS! So genius that I wanted to share it in case any of you are “struggling” (in fine first world style) with the same problem I was.

While I’m talking about this particular group of friends I also have to mention my friend Sally. She had her first beautiful baby a month before I had Miss L and has recently joined the blogging fray. She is funny and clever and is now blogging here. Drop by and say hi. (And ask her to whip up that raspberry, almond and chocolate cake she made last week). She’ll even tell you why she was on the news yesterday.

Do you have any first world problems you need solved? I'm sure Belinda will have a solution!

*My heels are, sadly, not scattered around because I’ve been wearing them but because my ‘party shoes’ are Miss I’s number one item of choice in our whole house.