Looking at the Bright Side...With New Sunglasses!

Sigh. We knew it had to be done. We knew the time was coming. And it came a lot more swiftly than either of us would have liked.
I'm sitting in the living room, babies are in bed, and Jeff walks in with his glasses in his hands. "I am not happy right now," he says. I look up, and he hands me his glasses, with one lens popped out. Easy enough, I think, just pop it back...
The frames were snapped.
He had been having problems with them not sitting properly on his face. That's what happens when curious toddlers are constantly trying to bend them out of shape. So after his shower, he was trying to bend them back INTO shape. They broke. In this case, it wasn't a simple matter of the nosepiece breaking in half. Nope. Instead, the frame of the right lens had snapped away from the nosepiece, which is a 90 degree angle. Not something you can discreetly wrap with tape.
The first thing I think of is crazy glue. Well, he has to have glasses, or he can't go to work! He's bat-blind without them! His only other pair are sunglasses, which he really doesn't wear as often as he should, but I'd rather they not be his only pair. People might think he really IS blind.
I check the desk. No crazy glue. Come to think of it, I haven't seen any in the house for a couple of years. Then I remember my bead fixative. That stuff is just about as strong as crazy glue. I should know, I actually glued my fingers together when I first tried it. So I go pull out a new bottle, cut off the tip, and try to apply it.
Nuts. Too old. It dried up in the bottle. I check my old bottle. Same thing.
Drat. Double drat. NOW what?
I'm desperate. So I try seam glue. Those of you that have used it know what I'm talking about. It's a kind of clearish stuff, resembling crazy glue, that you place along a seam of fragile fabric to keep it from fraying.
It's not crazy glue. So I try scotch tape. It looks terrible.
I am so ready to give up. I head back into the living room, and tell him I tried the seam glue, but it's not working, so I taped it. He's more or less resigned to it. He heads for bed, I go back to turn off the office light.
Of course!
Sitting in my tool basket is a tool I haven't even opened yet. A mini hot-glue gun. The tip is small enough to allow for delicate detail work. Lessee, a gun...and about a hundred sticks of glue. Yeah, that should be enough.
I plug it in and wait for it to heat up, examining the break as I do so. It isn't a clean straight break, it's slightly jagged, so I fight with the glasses and get it arranged properly, tightly as possible to hold in the lens.
I apply the glue, leaving about a lentil-sized blob, and hold it, blowing on it to cool it more quickly. I wait, and wait...I look around for a rubber band, then decide to just test it. Tentatively, I let go.
It holds.
EUREKA!
I wrap the rubber band around it anyway, to hold it overnight and allow it to cure. The glue blob is apparent up close, but far away, you don't really notice unless you look for it.
I go in to bed, where Jeff asks where in the world I've been. Apparently, he didn't notice me working in the kitchen. I tell him what I did, and warn him it may or may not hold.
The next morning, he makes an appointment at the glasses shop. One of those one-hour or less places. The tab is staggering. He buys two pair--one regular, one sunglasses--with "flexible" frames and no-glare lenses. Good idea, he stares at a computer all day. Over six hundred dollars.
Eesh.
It would have been cheaper had we gone somewhere else, but...while the repair had miraculously held throughout the day, the lens still kept popping out. The more he shoved it back in, the more it would strain the repair. So we had little choice.
At least now he has better glasses, with a double bar across the nosepiece instead of single, so the girls can't twist it to pieces again. It looks...different. Different color, too. But they are similar enough to the glasses he had years ago, it's not hard to get used to.
As for the old glasses, I hate to throw them out. His prescription has changed, but not immensely. In a pinch, they might be useful. So after examining them, we've decided to take the lenses out of his old sunglasses, which have identical frames, and put the regular lenses in those frames.
Why I didn't think of that the night before, I have no idea.
Still, at least he didn't have to miss oodles of work because of broken glasses. They were expensive, but fortunately, we actually had a little savings this month. We could whine and complain that we had other, more fun uses for that. But the fact of the matter is that he has needed new glasses, and this was a good time to get them. We were blessed to have the money when we needed it.
Next up? Lasik!