Dishwasher

There are certainly more glamorous reasons to spend a day at Home Depot picking out several major and minor kitchen appliances. For instance: perhaps we won a modest jackpot and have decided to remodel our quirky house to our own updated quirky specifications. (Disco ball over the hot tub! Stripper pole in the library! Sink disposal with not one but two grinding levels! Ooh, fancy!) Or: perhaps we’re volunteering as appliance experts for an outfit that builds homes for deserving families. [Insert halo here.] Or: perhaps I got a gift certificate to fund a sponsored blog review of the latest, greatest high-tech faucet, disposal, and dishwasher, all courtesy of the social marketing liaison for Moen, Whirlpool, and Badger.

Unfortunately, what happened is that everything just up and broke, and also unfortunately, my Klout score isn’t high enough to qualify me for much more than a quarterly Dear Mommyblogger pitch to advertise a product in exchange for a linkback on an advertising site no one reads. So, basically, I’m not holding my breath for that new washer and dryer. But of course there’s still much to be grateful for. For instance, our hangdog trip to the hardware store on Saturday to replace said appliances was better than our hangdog trip to the hardware store last spring, back when the disposal actually broke, right after Simon lost his job. We stood in front of the disposal display and looked at our options and compared the prices and then took a deep breath and decided we just couldn’t spend that $100+ right then. (A non-working disposal is no big deal, but one that leaks because it somehow punched a hole in itself–that’s an actual problem in need of fixing. The solution of the last ten months had been a post-it note embellished with a crayon frowny face covering the on/off switch plus a slug of putty in the hole and a strip of industrial gauze wrapped around the unit in the style of a Civil War soldier who had taped up his own headwound.)

Anyway, at least now we can afford to replace these things. (The dishwasher crapped out at the end of last week, but the faucet has been only semi-functional for the last three months). And at least Simon is handy enough to tackle all the installation himself. And at least Simon’s mom was in town to tour Wombat up and down the hallowed halls of Home Depot, enabling us to be unencumbered as we stood slack-jawed before a dozen dishwashers and tried to determine which should come home with us for the low, low price of exactly the amount of extra money we earned last month minus a $50 cash-back rebate for buying the energy-efficient model.

That seems to be the way things work around here, though. Every time we receive the boon of extra income, we receive the bane of a surprise expense. I get paid for a freelance gig, and my car registration comes due. I get a tax refund on Monday and the property tax bill comes on Tuesday. True story: Simon got a small raise and the dishwasher broke the very next day. In fact, Simon lost his job the month after I spent ten weeks chained to the computer editing a book for a crazy person. It’s lucky, yes, but it’s also such a fucking downer, you know? This year we’re due a percentage-based childcare reimbursement from Simon’s work that is large enough it probably means a tornado will spin our house into the air within hours of the check going through. But at least I’m expecting it this time. Oh, I hope we land somewhere technicolor and that the yellow brick road has been upgraded with a monorail!

(If there’s a life lesson here, I don’t think it’s one that Oprah would endorse–”Don’t make too much money or you’ll lose your job! Being successful invites disaster!”–and yet even if it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy, I’m still glad that we always seem to miraculously have just enough extra money to cover the surprise expenses that, really, at this point I should stop being so surprised about. Especially the ones that come on the same schedule year after year after year.)

And, as always, there’s still plenty to celebrate (and I’m not just saying that because I need an excuse to drink champagne). Simon got a raise and Grandma was in town to babysit and we had a Groupon to our favorite nice sushi restaurant (where we haven’t been since Wombat was born), so on Sunday night Simon slid out from under the sink, we both took a shower (singular!), and I put on a dress and we went out to eat and to hold hands and to drive up into the hills to enjoy the cold and sparkling view–the champagne of lookout points!–until a truckload of douches poured out of their douchemobile and left all the doors open wide so that the two dozen other people enjoying the night could also enjoy their obnoxious mariachi music. (I don’t dislike mariachi music in and of itself, but we have a history.)

At the sushi restaurant, I lasted a whole twenty minutes before I could no longer resist namedropping our daycare (which the chef knew about and then recommended a Japanese afterschool program that his friend runs for elementary students), and then we all sang a few Japanese childrens songs (I like to think the Chinese apprentice sushi chef was impressed), and then Simon passed his iPhone over the bar so the entire staff could see a photo of Wombat in his judo gi, and although Operation Pretend We Don’t Have a Kid for a Night was a spectacular failure, my god we had FUN.

And then we came home and Simon’s mom had handwashed and dried and put away all the dishes–the dishes that for three days had sat in the broken dishwasher and then sat piled in the sink and on the counter and the kitchen table, and then were transferred to two giant galvanized tubs on the floor so we would have space to prepare lunch–and all of that after she had spent the rest of the weekend folded inside a play tent working puzzles and staging tea parties with a two-year-old who does not know the first cardinal rule of tents: NO FARTING IN THE TENT. He had so much fun with Gramma, in fact, that nothing I did this morning could get him off to daycare now that he has decided home is where all the fun happens.

Over the moon and over the rainbow.

And it was then–as I was attempting to change his diaper this morning, crocodile-wrestler style–that I realized we don’t really need a new dishwasher after all…or daycare or babysitters or Groupons or deep reserves of parental patience. We just need a live-in Gramma. So it’s true, then, that sometimes, like a click of your ruby slippers, the answer has been with you all along.