Will the dishes please shut up

So its 10:30 or so at night, its been a busy day and a crazier week. The kids are in bed, F and I just finished a movie and he headed up to bed. I'm very very tired. But the dishes are calling me. Really - I can hear them calling "Ordinary Idiot we are dirrrrrrrty. You cannot leave us in the sink all night long. We'll breed diseases and bugs will come live in your house. Come wash us before going to bed."

Your dishes don't talk to you? Mine do - but they are decidedly nocturnal. They only feel up for conversation when I'm thinking of going to bed. I'm tired (did I already mention that?) and I know that they will be waiting for me in the morning. I'll wish they were clean in the morning when I wake up. But worse than that, I really have trouble sleeping with dirty dishes in the kitchen. I'll wake up some nights after loading the dishwasher and going to bed and realize with a start that I forgot to start it. So I crawl out of bed to start the dishwasher at 2 AM so that I can sleep better.

Some evenings I attack the dishes aggressively - rinsing off everyone's dinner dishes as soon as they put the last bite in their mouth. Getting irritated with F when he has a soda after supper and puts the dirty glass in my CLEAN sink. But some nights, especially on the weekends, the family just sits around the table after dinner chatting and laughing and then all of a sudden the kids are tired and its time for bed and upstairs for diaper changes and pjs and bedtime hugs and then I'm suddenly without the motivation to do more than walk past the kitchen with a guilty look on my way to the sofa or the computer.

But the dishes don't forget about me - they wait patiently until my eyelids start to fall and then they engage in a shouting match with the bed - each warring to get my attention and win the battle over where I will choose to go first.

Maybe I need sleeping pills. Maybe I need earplugs.