I’m not sure. Can we even talk about our Big Family Food Journey without taking pictures of all the dishes? Eeek.

What you see pictured above is what our kitchen almost always looks like by lunchtime. It looks that way again after dinner and confession: I almost always leave the kitchen looking like this disaster when I go to bed at night. Yowza.

Why do I do this? Why do I not wash all the dishes after dinner? BECAUSE I AM TIRED. And because my hands are literally always full. Yes, I sometimes “wear” our littlest babe, but usually one of our other babies wants to be held too. So I am almost always working with just one hand.

Therefore, I go to bed and the kitchen is usually a disaster.

Where is the help?

Ah, the help is helping alright. They are holding kids, chasing kids, keeping kids alive, and even changing diapers (awesome daddies in training!).

This is my all-time favorite picture of Elias and baby Keith!

And of course, Matt is surrounded by babes from the minute he walks in the door each evening until we put them all to bed each night.

Sometimes in the evening, if all the kids are being held/watched by Daddy and the big bros (and their fiance/girlfriends or whoever is at the house at the moment) – I can get the dinner dishes done before bed. But usually, the dishes have to wait until morning.

How I take care of the dishes

Besides neglecting them? Ah yes. It’s this:

My typical routine is to get our 6 & 8-year-olds off to the school bus in the morning at 7:10 (which stops a block from our house, praise God!), settle in our 3-year-old with a show, drink my coffee, and read my Bible/journal, then tackle the kitchen before our baby girls are ready to get out of their cribs. (Usually, Matt has fed the littlest baby a bottle in the wee morning hours and she goes back to sleep. I take sippy cups of milk to our one and two-year-old girls at 6:45 when I go in to wake up our 6yo for school. So the baby girls enjoy their milk and sleep again until around 8:00.)

While it would be wonderful to wake up to a clean kitchen to start each new day, that’s just not how it works for us right now. So after my coffee/Bible time, I fill the dishwasher and run it. (We usually run a full dishwasher twice every day.)

Please don’t cringe when you look at my dishwasher loading methods – I know it’s horrendous! But I don’t care, because there are way more important things to care about. :) The top is filled with sippies, bottles, and coffee mugs and then I usually haphazardly throw cooking utensils on top. They all get clean, and they don’t care if they are unorganized so neither do I. (I do also have a third rack above this one, which I use for lids.)

Once the dishwasher is loaded, I hand wash the big bowls and pots from the night before.

After Malachi gets home from his morning classes, he unloads the dishwasher and we start over again with snack and lunch dishes. Eat and repeat. :)

Someday, I’ll have more kitchen help again!

When our older four boys were all still living at home and capable, I almost never had to even wash a dish! We got into a system where they would all take turns loading and unloading the dishwasher, sweeping, and wiping everything down. Now, three out of the four have graduated and moved on, leaving only Malachi (now 17) at our house. (Justus, our college senior, actually lives at home this year too, but he’s almost never here. When he is though, he’s always grabbing a baby so I can get something done!)

Malachi can’t take on all the chores that his brothers left behind, tho he really is a super help to me in many ways and always does what he can. Also? He’s running a videography business, taking college classes, is in a melodrama, is playing tennis and soccer, and for some reason, he also likes to hang out with friends from time to time.

—> We hire a lot of help now – I’ll share about that in another post! <—

I could have taken a lot more pictures of all the dirty dishes at our house. But why? Why would you want to see that? You don’t want to see that. Trust me on this. :)

Stay tuned for more from our Big Family Food series.