Hopefully, it's easy

The plumber JUST pulled back in my drive....he is bringing a new sink to replace the one that was "shot" (Old sink, had been re-sealed at some point before I even bought the house, so it's dead).

He's also replacing the faucet, which was a fake brass finish that peeled off badly- the new one is going to be chrome, which will match the tub fixtures. (Still going to be a two-handle faucet, which is good - I have had bad luck with the single-knob ones - leaking and breaking, and also my parents had trouble with them in their house. Hm. Maybe these guys just know the two-faucets are better, they seem to be knowledgeable about much other plumbing stuff).

Hopefully in a little while, I will have a new sink. Yes, it's going to be expensive, and I twitch at expenses at the moment given the insecurity on campus and also the rising prices of everything else. But then again: if the Worst Possible Thing happens and I have to take a job elsewhere and sell the house, I'd need to replace the sink before I could do that, so.....

(Really hoping that does not happen. I would take on an unpaid overload to get my department over the hump before I did that.)

I did also arrange for my niece's birthday present - another expense but I feel like gifts are unavoidable, and anyway, it makes me happy to think of making HER happy. I ordered a Melissa and Doug magnetic fishing game - wooden poles with magnets and then numbered fish that can either be used to learn numbers or colors (well, she already knows her colors) or the numbers also would work for point values. She's a pretty active little kid and it seemed to me like something she'd enjoy.

I also am sending her a few Little Golden Books I picked up earlier - Richard Scarry's Best Little Word Book Ever (I loved Richard Scarry as a kid and want my niece to experience his stuff, and also, this seems like an ideal "just barely beginning to think about reading" book because it's lots of cute pictures with the words - like "raincoat" or "bus" - next to them.) And I found a copy, in board-book form, of "The Monster at the End of This Book" - a much-loved book of many Gen-Xers, including me. It features Grover, who, upon being told there is a monster at the end of the book, does his level best to sweet-talk, threaten, cajole, and physically prevent ("building a brick wall") the reader from getting to the end. (Also an early lesson in Pinkie Pie-style breaking the fourth wall!)

Of course, at the end, the monster is just good ol' lovable Grover....so there is no threat, no bad surprise. I loved the book as a kid partly for the fourth-wall-breaking but partly because of the idea that what you thought was going to be a bad surprise turned out to be a good one.

I hope she likes the books as well as I did when I was a kid. (I still have my personal copy of the Grover one but it's a more-traditional Little Golden Book, not a board-book). I also hope she doesn't have copies already, this is always a challenge in a family with lots of books.

My sister-in-law commented about my niece that "right now, books are some of her favorite things." I suspect that part of that is that there's the "magic" of them providing a story - hopefully that magic will continue once my niece learns to read; I remember really loving books a lot as a kid, library trips were a big highlight of my week.