Happiness Is...

A new dishwasher.

Shortly after Christmas my dishwasher died. I mean completely no chance of revival dead. And right around that time we had some major repairs done on our van to the tune of about $1400. Take that plus recovery from the holiday and I got a "we'll you'll just have to handwash until our savings recovers a bit." Well, you can guess how long that took. Me hand washing all the dishes worked fine at first. But then I got pregnant and was terribly sick for about 10 weeks. Dishes piled up constantly and we were never NOT doing dishes. I was getting exhausted but we still had a hard time throwing down $700 for a new dishwasher. And, of course, other things became a priority over that. After all, it wasn't that the dishes weren't getting cleaned. I mean really, a dishwasher is actually a luxury. Apparently. According to my husband. Who probably actually did the dishes a total of maybe 3 times in the 6 months we were without a dishwasher.

Anyway, long story short, John knew I was reaching a breaking point. It's one thing to hand wash dishes once or twice a day for a couple people in your family. I make nearly everything from scratch and we've got 4 little mouths who like to eat all day long. I'm not a firm believer in disposable things so we use actual dishes when we eat. I spent the past couple weeks expecting to go dishwasher shopping at the end of May, like John said we would. Well, the time got closer and he clearly wanted to push it off longer. We DO need to buy a new lawnmower ($3000+) this summer, fix the well (hopefully only $500 but maybe $10,000), the garage roof needs to be reshingled ($500), the roof on our large steel shed needs replacing - VERY necessary before winter ($3400), and finally we need to buy a more stable family vehicle before the baby comes ($9500). Yeah....this summer is going to be an expensive one. I understood that. And John being John, would prefer to pay cash for as much of it as possible. Understandably. However, I reached a melting point and fell apart Friday morning. It was everything. Just a lot for a mama to keep up with plus I'm not physically able to do it all as this pregnancy has really put some limitations on me. John sat and listened to me, held me, and said, "We'll go look for a dishwasher this afternoon." Really?! I mean, you can't joke around. We can't go if you aren't serious. We found one, bought one, and he installed it on Saturday.

I am one VERY happy mama .... and wife.