How to Buy a Toilet

1. Buy a toilet.  Preferably at 7:30am after you have been out late playing games with your friends.

2. Bring it home for your wife to tell you that she doesn't like elongated toilets and so this one is not okay.

3. Take the toilet back to Lowe's (with a 4 year old in tow) and buy a round toilet.

4. Go home and take it out to find that it's actually smaller than the one you currently own.  This is a problem when you are 6'6".

5. Take a nap while your boys are napping so you can go back to the store as a family when they wake up.

6. Take your entire family (2 small boys) to Lowe's and spend at least 45 minutes and 3 different sales clerks in the toilet aisle.

7. Convince a sales clerk to allow you to use their "employees only" ladder to measure various toilets because they are all conveniently displayed 10 feet up.  In the meantime your older son will be crawling around amongst the toilet boxes playing peek-a-boo.

8. Go back and forth between toilets and lids trying various combinations.  Make sure you sit on them in the aisle.  Don't forget the display models out in the main aisle where everyone is walking by.  Your wife will tell you to turn around while she sits down just like she does at home. She is still fully clothed.

9. Watch your older son push your younger son down the aisle in the cart and run it into something so that your younger son gets whiplash.  You will be too far away to do anything about it.  Older son is now relegated to cart sitting as well.

10. Finally decide on a toilet and seat combination that you and your wife think will be acceptable... with some getting used to.  For the record, it's an elongated toilet, but not the one you first brought home this morning.

11. Buy the toilet.  Realize that it is almost 6pm.

12. Go out for dinner at your favorite Mexican restaurant (El Abuelo) to celebrate that you have successfully purchased a toilet without a marital meltdown.

13. Watch your 17 month old son dip his chips in the hot salsa and eat them because you are doing it.  He acts like he likes it!

14. Get home and put the toilet in the garage.  The project will now have to wait until Saturday and daylight (because this project is actually precipitated by having to get into the wall behind to the toilet to repair an outside faucet that is broken - hence the need for daylight).

15. Realize you have spent the entire day buying a toilet.  Happy Labor Day!