Teenage Marriage, Part II: Housekeeping

I was at my parents house and I took off my shoes and left them sitting in the middle of the living room. My dad tripped over them on his way in to the room and yelled at me. Really not so different from the hundreds of other times I had done the same thing over the years, only now I was married and had my own apartment so my dad altered his speech a bit with this rhetorical question: "You don't do this at your house do you?" I think he was trying to make the point that I take good care of my apartment so I should take good care of his house too. Obviously, Scott and I just stared at him somewhat confused. Why wouldn't I do that in my apartment? Who's going to stop me? Well, no one ever stopped me. But who's even going to yell at me for it?

Teenagers aren't well-known for their housekeeping prowess and when two of them are free to junk up an entire apartment as much as they can stand, scary things happen. And I had a history of junking things up. Scott and I went to a residential high school where my room was known as "the pit" for reasons that are best left to the imagination while Scott's was the model room. Seriously, the admins literally used his room as a tour stop for potential donors and such. At the time I hoped he would relax a bit. Incidentally, I got my wish. And now wonder why I ever wished it. But back to junking up apartments, we really did try to keep it habitable. Which led to its own sorts of adventures:

Scott is really wonderful about doing things around the house when I ask him. So when I was cleaning our tiny first apartment and asked him to please shake out the kitchen rug, he obliged by promptly picking it up and shaking it out. In the kitchen.

Speaking of kitchen chores, in my house, the husband always does the dishes. After all, I made dinner. But one afternoon I decided to do the dishes myself, to be extra nice. I had never run a dishwasher before, but I'd seen him do it and how hard could it be? I loaded it up, grabbed the dishsoap I always use for washing dishes, started the dishwasher, and walked away feeling very proud of myself for doing a bit of housekeeping. And I kept feeling very proud of myself until I walked back into the kitchen for a drink and stepped into the cloud of soap bubbles covering the kitchen floor. That never happened when Scott used the dishwasher! I must have used too much dishsoap. So I grabbed some towels, cleaned the floor, put away the dishes and generally hid all evidence of my little adventure. After all, what new wife wants her husband to realize she can't run a dishwasher? Two days later, I knew Scott would be out for a few hours so I tried again. And walked right into another sud cloud. What could I be doing wrong? Load dishes, add soap, start machine. What can I be messing up? I waited another two days until we had enough dishes for another load, then I loitered around in the kitchen after dinner waiting for Scott to run the dishwasher so I could see how it was done. He pulled a bucket of white powder out from under the sink. It was dishwasher detergent. Who knew? I mean, isn't one dishsoap good enough? How was I supposed to know a dishwasher required its own special soap? And being the stealthy spy-type I naturally am, I immediately exclaimed, right in front of my husband, "Oh, it has its own soap!" Whereupon he demanded an explanation. And a very embarrassed wife explained to her husband why the floor looked so sparklingly clean earlier that week.