adjustment aplenty

Adjustment #1 - Drew's a 2

Drew moved to a new room at his daycare this week - out of the toddler room and into the K2 room.

In a flash, he went from being the biggest kid in the room to being one of the smallest.

It didn't seem to phase him. He doesn't care who has the shiny dump truck toy - a defenseless 8-month-old or a burly three-year-old - if he wants it, he's by-God going to take it.

I think he's going to be fine, though. His new teacher, Miss Shannon, seems very sweet, and for goodness sake, she reads the Bible during her breaks. How bad can she be?

I think this is going to be more of an adjustment for me than it is for Drew.

Adjustment #2 - adventures with appliances

This one, fortunately, was a short-lived adjustment. For three days this past week, we had to adjust to life without a dishwasher. I feel much less motivated to cook, by the way, when I know we have to wash all the dishes by hand afterwards. Yes, I'm spoiled by technology. That's what it's there for - to make my life easier.

Anyway, what happened to our dishwasher? My husband happened, that's what.

I'm in the living room, hanging with Drew after dinner. Charles is in the kitchen, purportedly cleaning up after dinner.

"Oh crap, Amy. Keep Drew out of the kitchen."

"Um. OK. Why?"

"Just do it. Don't ask why. And don't look."

"Oh, no, you can't do me that way. I'm coming in there."

With Drew in tow, I turn the corner into the kitchen, and am greeted by the sight of Charles frantically trying to mop up about six inches of suds from the floor. Our dishwasher looks like it's possessed - suds spewing everywhere from every crevice.

Drew thought it was the greatest - he was struggling to get down so he could go play in it. It was like his bathtub - only in the kitchen! How cool is that!

Turns out Charles used liquid dishwashing soap - you know, the kind you use in the sink - in the dishwasher because we had run out of powder detergent.

"Did you know you weren't supposed to use that stuff in the dishwasher?" he asked me.

"Honey," I replied gently. "Everybody knows not to use that stuff in the dishwasher."

The up side is that now our kitchen floor is really, really clean. Seriously, you could eat off of it.

The down side is that apparently once you've put liquid sink soap in a dishwasher, it starts to mutate and grow fruitful and multiply, so that every time you use the dishwasher from then on, it continues to spew suds about the kitchen floor.

Charles, being Internet-savvy if not kitchen-appliance-savvy, did a Google search on dishwashers that won't stop foaming at the mouth.

"My first hit was a page about what to do if you used liquid dish soap in your dishwasher," he told me. "So ha ha on you, apparently everyone does not know not to do that."

Turns out we needed to buy a de-foaming agent, like the kind used in hot tubs, in order to encourage our dishwasher to stop freaking out about the liquid sink soap.

Adjustment #3 - still church-shopping

Ugh, this is worse than car shopping.

We've been trying to find a good church for about a year now. We'll go through spurts of going to a different church every Sunday (or maybe we'll go to the same one twice or three times) and then we'll give up and turn into Godless heathens for a few months before we start trying again.

This past Sunday we tried a Presbyterian church. Neither of us had ever been to a Presbyterian church before, so we thought it might be interesting to try something new.

The service was fine, very similar to the Methodist church I grew up in, but about halfway through, the pastor started bashing Israel. It was subtle, he wasn't foaming at the mouth or doing anything crazy, but he was definitely making a political statement.

Now, yes, I am a conservative, but even if this pastor had also been conservative, I still would have been put off, because I believe that the pulpit is no place for politics.

I go to church to learn more about God and Christianity and to fellowship with other Christians. I don't go to church to learn about current events or to discuss political beliefs. I can do all that by watching the news, reading the Internet and posting on political message boards.

Drew liked the nursery, though, so that was a plus. Maybe we should just start judging our churches by their nurseries - that would make things a lot easier.

Comments

[Carla]

The night before my college graduation "some seniors" - who shall remain nameless - went to the front fountain with a bottle of dish detergent. My roommate, who lives near the school, went back three weeks later and took pictures of the still foaming fountain. It wasn't sudsing as strong as the first night, but you could still tell that bubbles were still there.

Hee...