May the Spirit of Larry Nelson Preserve and Defend Us

Adam's dad, God love him, before he passed away, could load a dishwasher like nobody's business.

You could invite 40 people over for dinner and throw a seven course meal, and after everything was over, Larry could find a way to load every single dish, cup, plate, bowl and serving utensil into a single dishwasher load.

Not that he ever manually did this himself, mind you. In my era, he just sort of stood there and cheered from the sidelines, offering very specific and corrective coaching should the actual loader start to sluff. "Not there. Here," he'd point out, and sure enough, if you knew what was good for you, you'd follow his geometry, and before you knew it, the water would be sloshing away on all 40 plates at a time. The man was a master.

So now, when I load the dishwasher, I actually invoke his name, quietly to myself, like a Catholic prayer. "May the spirit of Larry Nelson preserve and defend us." And then I go about the complicated business of trying to fit a day's worth of dishes into a single load. If I could muster up the original Latin, I think I'd try it that way, just for the additional mojo.

You'd think adding two new kids to the household, Adam and I would simply double the dish load. Basic math would seem to dictate where once there were two, now there are four. Two plates per meal would change into four. Four glasses per meal would replace our previous two.

As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth.

Justin and Justuce use approximately 900 cups, glasses and plates a day. I'm almost sure of it. Somewhere in the hallowed halls of Oneida Flatware, there probably exists a laboratory testing department where a small team of dedicated employees actually dirty, for research purposes, more dishes per diem than J1 and J2. But if they do, it's not by much.

My kids can take their first sip of apple juice in one cup and end up draining the bottle nine cups later. I'm not sure why this is a requirement for their comfort, but the two of them and a bottle of Mott's is like lining up ducks in a shooting gallery.

And plates. God, don't get me going on their plates. I have absolutely no earthly clue what they stick on their plates or how it gets there. They eat the exact same food Adam and I eat, and ours rinse right off. I take a look at theirs after an average meal, and it's as if Marie Curie and Linus Pauling got together to resequence the molecular structure of protein.

And my stove. My beautiful, wonderful, once-perfect white stove.

Our friend Sarah came over to the house for dinner one night. This was 2011 B.C.E. (Before the Children's Era), and she took one look at my glistening white stovetop and said -- and I will remember this forever because it made me so proud -- she said to me, "Look how clean your stove is. I hate you."

Sarah, you will never have to worry about that again.

There are things on my stovetop now that defy science. Much of it is most certainly dried scrambled eggs mixed with Cholula hot sauce. The rest, I have no idea. All I know is, if 3M ever decides to upgrade Super Glue, I've got their first two formulators on standby with a dozen Grade A Large. We've moved way past scrub sponge, friends. We're now looking at chisel with an option on blowtorch.

Dishes, a mess. Stovetop, a mess. Countertop? I haven't seen it since June 8, 2012 and it's in no danger of returning.

Laundry is unending. Again, foolishly deceived by the math, I figured one load would turn into two, maybe even fewer because their clothes are so little. But I was wrong again on all counts. Justuce has so many costume changes during a typical day, we might as well be living backstage at a Bette Midler concert. Justin goes through underwear like a mildly incontinent sled dog marking his territory from one end of the Fruit of the Loom tundra to the other.

Things smell like pee that have absolutely no business smelling like pee.

Fortunately, neither of our kids are frequent bedwetters, but we have racked up a few minor accidents. Justuce woke up in a hotel with us once, claiming the wet hair from her shower before bed made her pajamas all wet. Justin, just last night woke me up at 3 a.m. saying, "Dad, I got my jammas all sweaty." The "sweat," no surprise, carried a definite whiff of bladder blend.

Which is fine. They're little, I'm big, they wet, I clean up, but it doesn't explain why other things smell like pee. Sheets I can understand. Pajamas and undies I can understand. But baseball caps? Seriously, I picked up a baseball cap from his floor a few days ago and it smelled like a healthy dose of Old Yeller. Not to overly ponder aerodynamics, but WTF, what kind of superhuman trajectory does a six-year-old need to piss on his own head? I have no idea, but I'm duly impressed.

So, that's where we stand on the new housekeeping chores. I jealously watch friends and family with their nannies and their maid service while I scrape dried boogers off the coffee table and wonder why the flush knob on the toilet never gets used. Seriously, after they poop, I think the flusher turns to molten lava or something, because I know they're not touching it with a ten foot pole.

"Life is too complicated not to be orderly."
- Martha Stewart in Harper's Bazaar

Unless of course you're trying to figure out how to rescue your once-perfect stovetop and wash the pee out of your son's baseball cap.

Sigh. Love you, Martha.

It's a good thing.