Flying Toilets

Just kidding.

We had a really exciting Saturday night a few weeks ago. It was great. We finally got to do something we'd been looking forward to since before we bought the house.

We (mostly my husband and our friend) finally replaced the inner workings of our half bath toilet! You're probably thinking seriously? this is what you're writing about?! Yes, yes I am. If you didn't have the pleasure of hearing the toilet before it had minor surgery then you didn't get to hear it doing it's best job to mimic a high pitched rocket launch. You could pretty much hear the toilet flushing anywhere in the house.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure any of us really knew what was going on but what could go wrong with one aerospace engineer and one marine mechanical engineer working on it? They both have degrees in defying gravity!" chimed in one of our friends. Luckily the real answer to that was nothing but I quickly envisioned our toilet growing wings and flying away.

It might not have been the most exciting Saturday but it felt pretty good to check a big thing off our list, make our house a little more ours, and learn how to fix a toilet. If I now tend to imagine the toilet in our hallway bathroom flying away, that's okay too.

The Cool Aunt

I was planning to blog about the house and back-up blog ideas included my thoughts on how it is already over 80 degrees F in Houston most days or how I can't believe that there can possibly be as many accidents as there are every day in Houston. Instead I'd like to blog about a conversation I had with a friend last weekend.

My friend is going to be an aunt for the first time. She, like me, grew up with cousins around her age and we were talking about being an aunt without children. I thought back a few decades, to before adulthood, before I grew disconnected from my family, to a time when my childless aunt was one of the coolest people I knew. Sure my other aunts and uncles had kids my age but that meant that I had a relationship with their children, my cousins, but not necessarily them. My childless aunt though was awesome. She spoke to me like I was an adult, or at least it felt that way at the time. I was able to hang out with an adult (who wasn't my parents) and have an adult friend. It made me feel adult and important.

Interestingly, the whole experience was so significant to me that it has made me actively want to have that childless-aunt time with my own niece and nephews. This time that I have now is so precious to me. When I spend time with those kids, all of my attention can be on them- their concerns and interests, their well-being and happiness. I wouldn't trade it for the world.

So here's to all the aunts and uncles without children who get to focus their love, energy, and attention on their siblings little ones.

And just because it's important to start them early, this is a picture of me explaining to my niece about volcanoes around the world...