The three weeks we’ve lived in the Babushka House have felt a bit like camping. For most of that time, we’ve had no working living room, dining room or downstairs bathroom. One of the bedrooms is leaking, and the kitchen has zero counter space.

Worst of all, we have no dryer.

In fact, the Babushka House has NEVER had a dryer. Our plumber just ran a new gas line to the laundry area and drilled a hole in the side of our house for a vent. Good thing our house is constructed of cardboard and tar paper, or he might have had a harder time:

Yes, that is load-bearing tar paper.

We do have a 20-year-old washing machine in the basement, and Babushka kindly left the instruction manual and unsent product registration card:

“Being an early 1990s housewife is a breeze when I delegate chores to my identical septuplets”

I’m temped to send in the registration card, but not sure which activity best describes my lifestyle. Why must I choose between Moneymaking Opportunities, Listening to Records/Tapes/CDs, or Cruise Ship Vacations?

Technically, the washer still works. I’m not sure it actually cleans our clothes, but it definitely gets them wet. Which means they also have to get dry. Somehow.

Hopefully, this will be the first and last time I post pictures of my family’s underwear on the internet.  This laundry shot is a touch classier:

Doing laundry without a dryer (in the winter) has become such a pain that I’ve found it easier to wear the same clothes every day.* There’s nothing like letting your clothes dry to a crispy, paperlike texture in a dank, musty basement to make you appreciate the luxury of modern laundry appliances.

This weekend, I finally got online to research new machines. Never having bought a washer or dryer before, I wasn’t sure what to look for.  Something that wouldn’t cost too much money or set my house on fire?  What I found was a dizzying array of trademarked features dreamed up by a nitrous-huffing marketing department, including:

• Supercharged Steam Cleaning
• TurboWash™
• FreshCare™
• Advanced Moisture Sensing
• The Refresh cycle with Steam
• Detergent Assistant
• Quiet Spin 360 technology
• 6th Sense Live™ Technology
• Smart Nudges
• Precision Dispense
• 14 Adaptive Wash Actions
• 12-Hour FanFresh® Option With Dynamic Venting Technology®
• Active Spray Technology
• Power Foam Active Bloom™ Wash Action

A half hour into my search, my phone rang.  A friend was calling to ask if I had returned her lice shampoo that she loaned me last year (I had).  Panic! Our children are close friends and spend a great deal of time hugging, and presumably, rubbing their heads together.

I hung up the phone, pulled out the clippers and buzzed my youngest child (the least likely to sit still for lice treatments) nearly bald. This would also be a good time to wash and dry the kids’ sheets on a VERY hot setting.

If only I had a new washer and dryer! But how do I know if any of those Newfangled Gimmicky Settings™ would have killed lice and their eggs? Maybe I’ll send a polite letter to the Laundry Machine Designers with some ideas of my own:

WASHING MACHINE SETTINGS THAT REFLECT MY LIFESTYLE:

ACTIVE BIKER TECHNOLOGY™:
– Extra Gentle on torn right pant cuffs
– Tough on Chain grease and Street sludge splatters

KOOTIE KILLER©, for lovers of not-so-new clothes:
– Level 1: Hand-Me-Downs
– Level 2: Yard Sale Finds
– Level 3: Thrift Store Treasures
– Level 4: Scavenger Level for Alley and Dumpster Fashions

POSTPARTUM GODDESS:
– Cloth Diaper Poo-Eraser®, with separate settings for Newborn Poo, Toddler Poo, and Diapers That Have Been Sitting in a Wet Pile for So Long They’ve Turned to Ammonia.
– BabyVomitSensor™ adjusts cleaning power for either milk-based or solid-food-based throw-up, so you never have to guess.

PRESCHOOL PURIFIER for parents of small children:
With TWO mucus settings!
– Snot Scrubber© and Dried-On Booger Chiseling Technology
– Peanut Butter Banisher
– Glue-B-Gone Arts & Craft StainSensor™

TWEEN AND TEEN SANITIZER SETTING
– PocketScanner® checks for candy wrappers, chip bags, pencils, earbuds and wads of gum (sends an alert to parent if condoms, cigarettes, love notes or rated R movie ticket stubs are detected).
– High-Power Hoodie Purifier with extra long dry time
– Tough on Towels™ that have been sitting in a wet ball on the floor for a week. Again.

PETMESS PURGER©
– Sensors automatically adjust for Old Incontinent Cat Pee and Angry Territorial Cat Pee
– Sorry, I don’t know anything about dogs, but I hear they’re pretty stinky.

FAMILY PARASITE PASTEURIZER™
Now with three separate settings:
1) Head lice
2) Pinworms
3) Bed bugs (includes can of gasoline and matches)

…WHAT NEW SETTINGS HAVE YOU DREAMED OF?

* Whom am I fooling? I do that anyway. PRO-TIP! Wool socks never get smelly.

Please, sit down. Take a sip of room-temperature water. How’s your blood pressure these days? I don’t want to induce panic, but I’ve identified a silent killer in your kitchen. A SPACE killer. A happiness killer. Every year this killer grows a little bigger, morphing and metastasizing, stealthily colonizing more territory in your kitchen, sucking up more energy, growing fat on the American propensity for frozen dinners, warehouse-club shopping, and produce from other continents.

This (space) killer is your refrigerator.  It’s just too darn big.

In fact, Projectophile’s scientific team found a direct correlation between the size of the average American refrigerator and the average American coffin: I’ve always had a hostile relationship with the refrigerators in my life. As a child, one-pound bricks of frozen hamburger meat would topple onto my head every time I peeked into our family’s over-stuffed freezer.*  That appliance never once apologized.

Perhaps as a result, I’ve spent my entire adult life picking fights with refrigerators. Poor Scott has endured my grudge with refrigerators for more than a decade. The first time I brought him back to my apartment (circa 2004), he noticed that I had pushed the refrigerator into the pantry. Lucky for me (and our future children), major appliance shuffling wasn’t enough to scare him away.

In the first apartment Scott and I shared,** I was so frustrated with the fridge blocking the flow of my tiny kitchen (you could touch both walls with your arms spread), we moved the fridge into the dining room. Here’s the kitchen, with fridge intact.

Scott insists that this picture makes him look fat,  maybe cause he’s drinking cake batter out of a mixer bowl.

When we bought our condo in 2005, the fridge was a giant Black Hole, blocking a window, and sucking all the light energy out of the room: I refuse to choose between cold food and sunlight, so we pushed the fridge into a distant, lonely corner of the kitchen. Our last rental apartment (where this blog was born), the fridge was again the size of a small bus, its girth and awkward placement causing us again to be deprived of an eat-in kitchen. I hate to think of the hundreds of miles I’ve cumulatively walked to deliver food all the way to the dining room. This ivory beast would stand there, half-empty, mocking us with its largeness.  Not long after we moved there, the little ones (aged 2 and 8 months in this picture) found a way in and decided to take inventory: Before we moved into the Babushka House, I decided to take my life back from these overgrown, tetrafluoroethane-fueled bullies.  The original Babushka had her old fridge (now gone) in the back corner of the kitchen, blocking a window to the back yard.  Here’s an aerial view of the Babushka kitchen when we bought it: So, instead of blocking a window, I decided to squeeze a fridge next to the stove, without blocking the entrance to the front hall: The problem is, the fridge would have to be TINY – by today’s portly fridge standards – not to block the hallway.  On the advice of a friend whose brother is a slum landlord, we hit up a store that specializes in “urban” appliances: cheap, used, and (most importantly) small.

The Hobbit*** Fridge was delivered exactly an hour before we moved. Happily, I was able to pack everything from our previous (massive) fridge into this one, with room to spare! The only thing I had to sacrifice was my gas tank full of soy sauce, which the children determined to be too large for the Hobbit Fridge: Here’s the east wall of our kitchen today: To give you a sense of scale, here’s me posing with the Hobbit Fridge. Scott says I could be a refrigerator model.  I think that’s a compliment. And the best (actually worst) part is the easy access for the Hobbits! Let’s just hope he doesn’t find Mommy’s fancy cheese. On second thought, I think my Refrigerator Modelling career may have to wait, at least until these two retire (where IS all that wind coming from?):

* One-pound of hamburger meat was the foundation for nearly every weeknight meal in 1980s Midwest America: Taco Night, Spaghetti Night, Meatloaf Night, Hamburger Helper Night, Raw Hamburger Meat Night.
** “Shared,” as in, I paid the rent and he slept there 6.5 nights a week.
*** Hobbits are know for their small size and habit of eating constantly, much like my children.