Seeing Red

Happy Monday!  I didn’t know how to capture all the good, and less good, from the past few days and seeing red seemed to sum it up.

First up, drum roll please, a NEW FRONT DOOR!  I have wanted a new front door since I moved into this house in May 2006.  We have a gray house with black shutters and less than inventive landscaping.  Our black door with an inset glass middle featuring a 1980s style etched palm tree drove me bananas.  But new front doors are expensive.  And my dream door was impossible to find.  Why my darling hubby finally agreed to a new front door this Christmas, after years of asking, I’ll never know (though I think that his father may have helped), but I sure am grateful.

I found the slab at a home building company that was the style I wanted.  From there, I selected the black hardware I wanted for the door as well as the cherry red I’d wanted all these years.  It took several weeks for the handyman we hired to sand, paint, and install the door but HERE IT IS (molding still to be finished)!  And just in time for our fourth neighbors table; literally, he was cleaning up the porch as neighbors began to arrive for our Valentine’s celebration!

Next up, while Bray and I had a nice dinner out Friday night, the gift card I had for the restaurant was declined!  I was furious and seeing a whole different kind of red.  A company here in Houston owns several high end restaurants, and I was told the card could be used at any of their establishments.  Yet when we went to pay the bill (I’d picked this particular restaurant because we had the card), they said that it could only be used at the place it was purchased.  What!?!?!  Yes, I’m on a mission with their corporate headquarters today to fix what fast became a dinner pricier than we had budgeted.

Bray headed out Saturday morning, and we woke to a festive Valentine’s Table.

The festivities didn’t last long; the eldest took a serious turn for poor health.  Every symptom you could have, he got it.  Fevers and shakes all day, throwing up to the point of dry heaves on the way to Texas Children’s Saturday night, headaches, back aches, stomach aches.  The doctor was wonderful.  She ran every kind of test and saw how pitiful he was just laying there.  We couldn’t pinpoint what it was, but she got us on zofram for the nausea and called in Tamiflu because he was so flu symptomatic even though the initial test came back negative.

This was my Valentine’s date:

I joked that I spent Valentine’s Day like I did when I was 16 – at home with my mom, except this time I’m 30 pounds heavier and have three kids 🙂  Thank heavens she came so that the other two weren’t completely neglected.

Finally, we decided since Valentine’s Day was such a bust, we’d celebrate on the 15th.  We couldn’t go to church since the eldest was still contagious, so we did church at home and then made a big yummy lunch (the big guy had so quickly improved my Sunday morning that I never even started the Tamiflu), and we baked a cake and the kids decorated it.  We were seeing red with our big red sugar heart in the middle.  We played outside before the rain hit and ate well and redeemed the weekend.

How about you?  How was your weekend?