We dirty lots of dishes. Lots. Every day. We have all the dishes from cooking all our food from scratch, plus milk jars, cheese pots, and milk pails. This is a normal sink-full. Sometimes it's much worse. Our daughters take turns doing dishes and it's a constant responsibility.
The dishwasher runs about six times a day, two of which are for milk pails, pretty much all day long. There is much to our life that is replicating the way people used to live, except dishes and I'm so grateful. Even better, our dishwasher is energy-star and water-wise. It actually uses less water than if we did them by hand, by a lot! So this work savings is guilt free. Praise God!! Praise God!!
When people tell me they're amazed at all we do, I just think how amazed I am at what women did a hundred years ago without dishwashers or washing machines (of course, they didn't fool around on blogs every day).
Moving toward a self-sufficient lifestyle includes a ban on disposables. The disposable kleenex has seen the last of our house. We switched to hankies about a year ago. At first it was weird blowing my nose on fabric; I had grown up on kleenex after all. But after a while it became quite natural. We have about twenty hankies for our family of seven and they get cleaned with our regular laundry. Most of them we found when we went through my in-laws things after they passed away, many brand new in their originally packaging.
An unexpected, but logical, outcome of this life-style is that we generate little garage. Our trash bin is rarely more than half full. We just don't have much packaging to throw away. It is another example of the way God takes good things and spreads the good to unexpected areas.
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