Purple Monkey Dishwasher

For the first time in almost a year, we can say “we have a dishwasher” without adding “we call him ‘Matt.’” We picked up our brand new, year old dishwasher yesterday, and gave it our inaugural wash that night. The verdict is it works.

Our new dishwasher is a portable model, which I had never heard of before we bought it from an outgoing resident. When I heard “portable dishwasher,” I imagined something you could carry with you anywhere. Just throw it alongside your tent and sleeping bag and enjoy another comfort of home while camping, or bring it to your next dinner party and let it do the work instead of your host. In reality, the dishwasher is “portable” in the same sense that a fully loaded 72-gallon fish tank is portable since there’s nothing physically preventing you from moving it. Like a fish tank, our dishwasher lacks many of the amenities generally associated with portability such as a light weight, independence from water and electricity, and handles, though it at least has wheels. The instructions tell you to place it in a location capable of supporting 180 pounds. This must be referring to your weight as you stand in front to load it, because as I carried it into our house, I figured no way it weighs less than 200 pounds empty. It’s smaller than a normal dishwasher. Of course, the new Hummer H3 is smaller than the H2, but it still won’t fit in my kitchen. If the dishwasher were another quarter-inch wider it would have permanently resided in our doorway. It’s still big enough to displace our kitchen table, meaning we now eat meals off the counter on top of our dishwasher. This new arrangement has a couple drawbacks in that we lose valuable clutter storage space without the table, plus our food is now approximately at eye-level while sitting. This is all a small price to pay for having a dishwasher.

Much to my surprise, we now use enough dishes to run it almost everyday. The last time we had a dishwasher, it was still basically just the two of us. For the month that we had a dishwasher and Abbie, she ate from nothing but bottles. Since we didn’t have enough bottles to last the entire day, I had to wash those by hand twice a day anyway, which was okay since we didn’t have enough pumping supplies to last the entire day either with Ellie pumping approximately 30 times daily. So without contributions from Abbie, we could only fill the dishwasher full enough to run it every two or three days, and even then in order to finish the load I occasionally had to scrounge up extra items, like oven burner covers or curtain rods. With our new dishwasher’s smaller size and Abbie tearing through three meals a day plus a bedtime milk snack, I can fill it and run it everyday. That’s great because we have exactly one day’s worth of sippy cups, and the consequences of running out of sippy cups would probably be immense and involve a lot of whining.

The best part about the dishwasher is it saves me time. No longer will I have to stand in the kitchen washing the dishes by hand while Abbie whimpers with boredom at my feet. Now I can do Important Work while Abbie whimpers with boredom in another room. That’s the joy of having a dishwasher that isn’t me.