You used up all the glue on purpose!

Last night we had a traumatic event.

Gark broke one of his favorite Bionicles.

There was so much wailing and gnashing of teeth that I couldn't, at first, even ascertain the problem. Which used up my wailing sympathy pretty fast. I mean, I try to be sympathetic for wailing, but when the wailing produces so much noise and tears and flying spittle that the child can not tell you it is over a toy he accidentally broke ... and when the event is at bedtime when my patience is already thin, and when another younger child is crying for reasons that seem much more legitimate to me ... let's just say you better play into my sympathy while it lasts, because it's going fast.

So I brought Hakann downstairs to try to glue him. If there's one thing I learned from my mom, it's that a good mom glues things.

My first thought was SuperGlue*. Because, well, it's super.

Except I couldn't find any. Which actually doesn't surprise me.

Because I'm married to a man who hates gluey gooey tubes. And Super Glue invariably falls into that category. You use it once and, no matter how careful you are, the tube glues itself shut before the next use.

Now, growing up, I learned that this was a time for the careful exercise of multiple pairs of needlenose pilers, pins, and perhaps teeth. To carefully remove the top of the glue from the easily-crumpled tube, and carefully resurrect the hole in the end of the dispenser tube for gluing. But apparently The Grand Lunar's family had different rules, such as "if it's glued shut, throw it out." and "if you risk gluing things to your fingers and other appendages, throw it out."

So, in our marriage, we have used the first drop of about sixty tubes of Super Glue. And then, it gets thrown out on next attempted use.

So last night, when I needed Super Glue, there was none to be found. The Grand Lunar suggested that's what I use, but cheerfully agreed he probably had thrown it out. Even faced with a Super Glue-needing crisis, he is glad he threw it out. Me, I'd be cutting the end of the tube carefully open and gluing Hakann and myself to the microwave. But alas. There is no Super Glue.

I tried Contact Cement. From the web, Contact Cement sounded like it might be a good glue solution for some kind of bendy-rubbery plastic. (Because it's Hakann's spine that's broken) but no. It appeared the bond well until you actually touched it. Then it came apart.

I would've tried Gorilla Glue, only, reading the package, it didn't sound like rubbery plastic spines were the type of thing it would really work with. Plus it would've been pretty impossible to clamp a rubbery spine together, broken top to broken tip, for the binding period.

I also found wood glue and elmers glue and a glue stick deceivingly called "SUPERiorGlue" but it didn't fool me for long. Just for a moment I was thinking, "They make SuperGlue in stick form? And it looks just like regular kid glue sticks? That seems unwise." But then I came to my senses.

So.

No glue for Hakann.

No mom gluing miracles in the middle of the night.

Which, maybe, is a blessing in disguise since one of the children asked, "will the glue be visible?" - reminding me of myself as a child, and the fact that, no matter how miraculously your mom glues things, if it alters the appearance or use of the item, the persnickety child may be aghast and insist that said miraculously glued item, which mom stayed up all night to fix, due to the misery of the child who owned the broken item, was better broken than glued ugly.

Apparently that tendency is genetic.

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*huh. The glue at that link doesn't look like the kind I was thinking. Could it be that my glue tube issues are because I use an inferior, similarly-named, Off Brand? Or is it that the Official Standard (at least in my mind) for the product has, sadly, been mis-named in general use??