Our New Arrival

We welcomed a new addition to our family home this week. One that we have waited for for a very long time. One that I looked forward to with anticipation since getting married almost five years ago. We welcomed... a dryer. Dryers are shockingly uncommon and expensive here, so we have been going without for some time. Each week I painstakingly lay every article of wet clothing to be dried on a rack that folds out in my kitchen. It usually takes two days to dry all our clothes if I am being efficient, a few more days if I miss rotating a load because of an errand or if we have to dry bigger items like tablecloths or sheets. This takes up a lot of time and a lot of space in our kitchen. In all honesty, I'd gotten used to it, but when our friends, the Waibels, told us they were leaving Moscow and offered to give us their dryer, I was ecstatic. I even went so far as to wrest it from the greedy hands of a mutual friend who tried to secure the covetted device for himself. Saturday Timm Waibel and Andrew brought the dryer over and Timm even stayed to install it for us (good thing, that might have been a dealbreaker for us). I read the instruction manual that weekend (it's a condensation dryer, so it works differently than the typical ones you find in the US). On Monday, I tried it out. I did all of our laundry in just one day, without any hanging or racks.