Saboteur

I was fifteen the first time I loaded a dishwasher. Prior to that we were strictly a hand-wash family.

My grandma had a dishwasher, but I don't think she ever let me load it because things had to be rinsed and placed precisely so, which I kind of understand.

Yesterday morning I had finished loading the dishwasher after breakfast so that we could run it. Ordinarily we only run it once a day, but with Andrew and Rachel home full-time now, too, there are just enough extra dishes that we end up running it something like 1.3 times a day. So we hadn't run the dishwasher the night before because it wasn't full enough (we're on such a weird dish schedule).

Anyway, Miriam had done the previous night's dinner dishes and I had loaded the breakfast dishes except for Andrew's. He was a little slow getting his breakfast so he said, "Don't run it yet. I'll turn it on after I add my bowl."

He'd made himself cream of wheat (another staple from his childhood that I just...ew) and put it in a big bowl and then, as promised, he'd turned on the dishwasher.

When we opened it up we found that in squeezing his bowl into the dishwasher he'd collapsed a line of plates so they were leaning against each other instead of standing up right. Nothing got clean!

Miriam and I accused Andrew of sabotaging our dish-washing efforts, which he laughed about. But then directly after I went to prepare some lunch for the kids and found the beautiful loaf of honey whole wheat bread Miriam and I had made the day before completely desecrated. We had literally ground the grain to make that bread! It was a thing of beauty.

But then, instead of slicing a piece off, someone had unceremoniously torn it apart! It was now no good for sandwiches and I'd have to come up with something completely different for lunch.

"Who did this to the bread?" I asked the children, all of whom (of course) said "Not me!"

So I showed the loaf to Andrew and said, "Look what someone did to this bread. But of course no one actually did it..."

He surprised me by admitting, "Oh, that was me! I was so hungry after class last night that I just ripped some off."

"It was sitting on a cutting board with the knife right there," I reminded him. "Why...just why?"

"Hey," he said defensively, "That is how people used to eat bread. You know....back in the day...before any sort of utensil had been invented."

"Are we cavemen now?" I asked.

So Miriam and I spent the whole day joking about how Andrew was just following the two of us around, sabotaging everything we attempted (which of course isn't exactly true, but it was still fun to have something to carry on about (we are hard up for entertainment these days, apparently)).