November is the Thanksgiving month and this week I’m particularly thankful for a new appliance – my dishwasher! It comes with a funny back story though.
Last month there was a day that I was feeling particularly overwhelmed. Or rather, I’d been feeling overwhelmed for weeks and I felt like it was coming to a breaking point. I had texted James that I was really struggling and he said we would talk when he got home from work. So that afternoon he asked me what was bothering me and laid down on the floor while I sat in my rocker and nursed Aviva.
I started to talk about my frustrations and after a few minutes I realized he was giving brief grunts every so often, and I thought to myself – he’s falling asleep! But I couldn’t see him because of the table blocking my view so I stopped talking mid sentence, to see if he would notice and respond, and there was no reply … and then I heard him snoring 😂
And I started laughing. Because I realized that I wasn’t mad at all! There was a time in our marriage that if I had been having a rough day, and told him that I needed to talk to him, and then he FELL ASLEEP in the MIDDLE of me talking, we both would have had a much worse day when he woke up 🙈
But instead I was thinking – wow, he must really be tired! And then – wow, I’m not upset with him! So I got up and laid Aviva down and started working on things. About 15 minutes later he woke up and was like – I’m sorry, I was thinking of solutions and I fell asleep.
And I started to laugh and said “sweetie, you fell asleep in the MIDDLE of me talking to you!” And he says – no, I don’t think so. And I’m like – oh yes, because you started to grunt in response to me and that’s when I knew you were asleep enough to not be listening to what I was saying, but awake enough to know I was still talking 😂
And we both laughed about it, and I told him that I was so pleased with how God has been growing me up so that I wasn’t angry with him, and he agreed that I had made progress!
We sat down (again!) and he rubbed my feet while I finished talking and then he said – do you think it would be helpful to you if we put a dishwasher in the laundry room?
See when we remodeled this house, there was no room for a dishwasher in the kitchen, and I was ok with that. I also only had two children at that point 😅 Nowadays I spend a lot of time washing dishes. I never thought there was any way we could have a dishwasher (until we do an addition sometime in the future, Lord willing), but my husband was smart enough to recognize that there was an available space right beside the washing machine, and he figured it wouldn’t take too much work to hook up the plumbing there.
We found a used one, and this week my father and James installed it. It has been very helpful! And I’m particularly thankful that I didn’t lose my temper when James fell asleep, or else he probably would not have come up with such a useful solution to one of the problems I was facing. Sometimes you just really do need to “sleep on it” for a few minutes 🤣