The days keep steadily passing by, whether seeming fast or slow, despite how much I do or don’t get done in them. Susanne at Living to Tell the Story invites us to pause a moment and recount the blessings of the week lest we forget them. So here are a few of mine:

1. Valentine’s Day is always a highlight at our house with “meat hearts’ (mini meat loaves made in heart shapes) as the main course and heart-shaped cupcakes and peanut butter cookies with chocolate heart centers for dessert.

I make Valentines for the family, which I usually share in my end–of-month post. This year Jason and Mittu and Timothy made Valentines, too! I love them.

Did you notice that Friday’s Fave Five made it in my card? 🙂

2. Saturday at Jason and Mittu’s. Jason had a leak in his downstairs ceiling, and Jim went over Friday night and Saturday to help fix the leak and patch the ceiling. They invited me over for lunch Saturday, and I hung out with Mittu and Timothy while the guys worked. We painted, colored, and watched YouTube videos of Ryan’s World science experiments—Mittu and I may have dozed during the latter. 🙂

3. Landscaping. You might remember that our utility company had to replace the lines in our neighborhood that go to this big ugly box in our yard. To do that, they had to tear out the landscaping we had there. Jim took a day off last Friday, and it was warm enough that he could work on this area. He dug up some bushes from the back yard along with a few daffodils, which for some reason a previous owner planted behind the shed, of all places. If those daffodils survive the transplant ok, we might put the others in the space between the sidewalk and street. Or we might just plant new ones—Jim said they were hard to dig up. The rocks were a part of the previous landscaping, and the utility people had left them piled up on the edge of the curb. Jim said the hardest part of this was bending over to pick up rocks and then bending over again to replace them.

At some point, he’ll put a removable fence in front of the big box itself, so they can get to it if needed.

You can still see some of their writing on the sidewalk. Hopefully it and the dirt stains will wear off someday!

4. Good timing. I placed an online order at the grocery store for a 4 p.m. pickup. But in the process of creating the order, that time period closed. The next available time was 5, which is when I am usually starting to make dinner. But I had dinner in the crockpot that day, so I figured that time would work out. Then the store called and said the order was ready at 3:30. Then my husband texted and asked if I had any prescriptions ready at the drug store: he was going to swing by there on his way home from a meeting. I didn’t, I said, but I did have a grocery order ready across the street from the drug store if he had time it deal with it. Thankfully he did, so that worked out well all around.

5. A good CAT scan report. Nine years ago this coming Sunday, Jim had surgery to remove a cancerous kidney. He didn’t have to have chemo or radiation because we were told they weren’t effective for kidney cancer. He had a CAT scan this week which showed everything was fine, no signs of cancer. We are immensely thankful. We were told this kind of cancer doesn’t usually spread–but they couldn’t say it never would. And if it did come from the original cancer, chemo and radiation still wouldn’t work on it, even if it ended up somewhere else in the body. So a clean CAT scan is a relief in many ways.

Bonus 1: One of my sisters sent the rest of us and my brother packages this week, and I got mine Thursday! I can’t show what it is yet, though, until the others get theirs.

Bonus 2: Signs of spring! Besides the daffodils mentioned above, these mini ones are coming up in the flower bed by the front door. The mini tulips are starting to sprout behind them.

I hope your week has gone well, too!