I thought I was busy before I became a parent. Gosh, was I wrong.

I don't mean to sound negative at all; I just didn't realize how precious time was until I had a baby and suddenly found I had very little time to do the little things in life, like maintain my appearance. I've discovered that, usually, I do enjoy being the mom with unbrushed hair because that means I've made time for something extra with my little girl, and therefore my heart is full.

To ensure my family members have a full heart, I get to spend my spare time doing things like... laundry,  vacuuming (sometimes), meal prepping, and all of life's other necessities. Needless to say, my hairbrush is not the only luxury I've cut from my life. Thus, I stay on the lookout for ways to make my family's routine simpler. I'm excited when I find a "life hack" to streamline our days — except this new thing I'm about to share isn't so much a life hack as it is a wife hack. It's a clever strategy that'll blow your mind if you're a wife who  (like me) gets the scaries every time you look at the kitchen sink.

Wife Hack: Throw out all your dishes. Yes, I'm talking about the dishes you carefully hand-selected one by one at HomeGoods. Get rid of them all. They cause the bad kinds of stress when they pile up in your sink — and as we all know, they will pile up, just as soon as you've levelled a whole mountain of them. Dishes lead to stress, which leads to sin, and if what is in your sink causes you to sin, throw it away and purchase paper plates, which you can also just throw away later. No more dishes in the sink. See how that works?

When my husband and I started dating almost 10 years ago, I was surprised to learn that his family ate on paper plates for many of their meals. I didn't think too much about it, but I did take notice how short our cleanup times were. It turns out his mom found this hack years ago! She hasn't thrown away her dishes; her Fiesta dinnerware is neatly filed away — blue, red, blue, red — in her kitchen cabinets, just like my mom's Fiesta.

But these wives aren't as extreme as I am. Every night after dinner, when I'm gathering up the carnage left by my family of three, I envision myself loading our used plates, bowls, cups, and even silverware into a bag and hurling them onto the curb for Mr. Garbage Man the next morning.

Someday I'll do it. I mean, how's it possible that such a small family could make so much work in the kitchen? My husband spends lots of time tackling them too, but... I just cannot with the dirty dishes anymore. I'd like to use our cleanup time in other ways. Of course, one-pot wonders, like The Pioneer Woman's Cast-Iron Pizza, cut down on messes too.  I'm still perfecting meals like these. In the meantime, the dishes have got to go.