Love and Cookie Cake

You all are so lucky I didn't post yesterday. I was a nervous WRECK. A neurotic, hand-wringing, floor-pacing, mass of nerves. I couldn't focus, couldn't work- couldn't even read my celebrity gossip/fashion blogs. The house we fell in love with got an offer Sunday night. In a frantic flurry of phone calls and emails and little calculations on post-its, we found we were able to make a non-contingent counter-offer (the only kind that would be entertained) by Monday afternoon if I moved up my start date to March 12, closed on March 15, and accepted a generous offer of temporary loan from a family member (should our house not sell in time for closing). In between these phone calls with various agents and lenders (and JP, who was in meetings all morning), the SEC called to request more firmly that I move up my start date. I deflected, saying I just couldn't get my family out there before the end of March, and then had to call 10 minutes later and say, "never mind! I now need to start March 12th, see you then!" And then I waited, a tense ball of nerves, until this morning when we found out that WE WON.

The residential love of my life will be mine (ours) in a month. It is in a fabulous neighborhood, half a mile from the school, five miles from my office. It was built in the 1940's, but has been completely re-done on the inside (including knocking down a few walls to make it more open and adding a master suite, while maintaining the original charm). It has a pool. It's on a third of an acre. It is my single-dwelling soul mate.

Sneak Preview

Now we just need to sell our house in Austin. Lovely as it is, I do not want a vacation house in the Austin suburbs. Our agent expects an offer by the end of the day, so we'll see. I'm hoping we have multiple reasons to pop open the champagne tonight.

Because there will be champagne. I know most people like to harsh on Valentine's Day, but sex, lingerie, and champagne are three of my favorite things, so I'm a fan. Plus, we now share a heart-shaped Mangia's Chicago-style pizza and a heart-shaped cookie cake with the kids, and you know how I feel about pizza and cookies, so really, it's one of my favorite days of the year. Yes it's over-commercialized and it's stupid to make people feel they need to drop a few thousand dollars on diamonds over a Hallmark holiday, but JP left a post-it note with "I love you so much" on my purse this morning when he left the house at 5 a.m. to swim, and a lovely bouquet of flowers just showed up on my desk with an even lovelier note (that I won't embarrass him by sharing), and it's perfect. We say we love each other every day, but I don't mind a day that reminds me to put it in writing and drop it in his swim bag the night before. And taking the kids to pick out their $1.99 store-bought Valentine's, and then spending last night carefully selecting the perfect color power ranger card to give to each kid in Landon's class was surprisingly sweet. I think I'm the only mom that didn't add something homemade, but again, we keep it simple. And Landon thought very hard about which color should be matched to each name. I can't say Claire cared which "Tangled" Valentine went to her friends, but she did enjoy their PJ party this morning.

So it's a good day. I've giving myself exactly a week before I FREAK OUT about not yet selling our Austin house, but for today, I'm just feel loved and overwhelmingly excited about our beautiful future home. And wearing my ruby red shoes (and black dress; an outfit planned last week especially for the holiday because I'm cheesy like that) and looking at JP's post-it note stuck to my computer monitor is just icing on the Valentine's Day cookie cake.