Dear Great-Grandma, you rocked!

Yesterday morning, I put the kids on their school bus. 

Came home and pushed the button to close my garage door. 

Put dinner in my crock pot. Loaded the dishwasher and turned it on. Turned on the washer and dryer. 

After that, I turned on the Roomba vacuum that I got at a garage sale for $20. (All it needed was a $20 battery and some bleach to clean it out. Good as new!)

I washed the toilets with Scrubbing Bubbles one use toilet cleaner. 

Pushed a button and turned up my heat. It is getting chilly. 

 I made a cup of coffee with my one-cup coffee maker. 

While I waited the thirty seconds for my coffee to brew, I invented a robot that could fold and put away my clothes for me, in my head.  Warmed up a muffin in the microwave. Finally, I grabbed my iPad and paid a couple of bills. The whole process took an hour.

 

Then, I stopped. It hit me. Wow!

 

I suddenly got an image of our ancestors. Like my great-grandmother and her mom.   I remembered a story that I heard on a school field trip. I went with the boys last year to a historical museum. It was an old farmhouse. The family that had lived in this old house included fifteen children! The mother home-schooled all of them. 

She made their clothes. 

She washed their dirty farming clothes with a metal grate in the freezing cold water of the river.

 

She made huge meals three times a day for her hungry seventeen-person family. All from scratch. 

She knitted blankets. Read to her children. Chopped wood. Fed chickens. 

Then once a week, the family took two small buckets (that the dad had made) and hauled water from the river up to the house. 

Each bucket of water was heated on the wood-burning stove and used to fill the tub in the kitchen.  The dad would get the first hot bath. Then, the mom. Then each of the fifteen children took a turn in order by age. In the same water! Imagine being the youngest? Gross!

 

As I remembered the story, I looked around my house that was currently "working" for me.  I said a tiny thank you for all of the diligent folks who have made my morning WAY better than my great-grandmother’s. Maybe that's why they say "Necessity is the MOTHER of invention!"