Pizza – Adventure With Brendan

2021 is wrapping up and I’d say its been a messy one. Diapers are messy! Being a dad is messy! And I love it!

This year has been my year of becoming. For me the idea of becoming is one of letting go of perfection and being okay with the process of life. As I wrote at the end of 2020, I am under construction. I think if I am becoming, I need to be okay with the mess.

Maybe Sofia is in on this life lesson. April and I had all the plans the world to have her four month picture taken in some of her cutest Christmas clothes, but each time we put her in them, she would have a massive blowout. Sofia is a four month old who is learning how to live so I would I not be okay with her having a blowout or two or 50? Also, her smile as we changed her diaper just makes me love her more.

On January first, 2021 I became a dog parent again. On January first April and I brought Phoenix into our house. After bringing Gryffin into our lives in 2020, we decided a puppy brother would be the best thing for him and us. Well, Phoenix is a crazy kid who lives life at two speeds tornado and cuddle. Phoenix is still a puppy and his excitement for life is contagious. But with two dogs, we can’t seem to clean up the messes they leave behind. I can either choose to love my dogs or have a perfectly clean house.

I became an expectant dad. Two days after taking Phoenix in, on January third we found out that April was pregnant and for the next nine months the mess was yet to come. As Sofia grew in April’s womb I tried to keep the house clean, but it was a battle I couldn’t win. I could either clean all the time or spend time with April. This became a big issue that I took to my therapist. He challenged me to be okay with not cleaning. I felt like if I could clean the house for April, I was showing my worth to her. She told me she needed me to be there with her. The house has been much messier since then.

Through the 2020-21 school year I became an online teacher and it was a mess. Not because I taught from my home through zoom, much of the time in my pjs. Not because I had to figure out new ways to connect with my students, which I think I was successful at doing. I loved being home with my dogs and my students loved seeing them. But teaching through a platform I was never trained to use and being evaluated by my administration (who had never taught on zoom either) as if I were teaching in the classroom was stressful. But as soon as I started giving myself grace and embraced the mess of teaching in a way I’d never taught before, I found joy in my job.

I started therapy and I became okay with my feelings, even the anxious ones. Therapy gave me a way to talk through all my feelings. The best part of going to a therapist is being told it is okay to feel what I am feeling. The worst part is when I go to the therapist it seems like I have to deal with the things in my life which means things have gotten a little messy.

God challenged me to go wild I became a backpacker again. In preparing for the trip I became a runner again (I had taken more than a year off of running). I took Gryffin on a backpacking trip that took me out of my comfort zone and into a swarm of mosquitoes. The trip was messy. That’s what happens when you have a group of guys with different goals and then you add in bad weather. But this mess was so good to be in because it was a situation that I couldn’t control. The mess of the trip made me trust God because I can’t control the weather or the mosquitos.

My water bill went up as I became a gardener. Spending more on water was worth it though. In 2020 April and I started a garden and so we decided 2021 we would try it again. Maybe it was because of all the rain we received this spring or maybe it’s because I have a green thumb, but our garden exploded. We had more tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapeños, and other garden varieties than we knew was to do with. Gardening is a mess especially when harvesting time happens right when your baby is due.

We still aren’t perfect pizza makers, but we’re having fun!

My pizza making improved as I became a canner. With all our produce from the garden, especially the tomatoes, April and I decided we wanted to can them so we could make pizza sauce year round. We were also able to make a delicious peach jalapeño jam because we found out we had a peach tree in our back yard. Canning was a fun learning experience alongside plenty of mold and broken glass. We also ruined several pizzas, to the point of tears as we figured out our Ooni Pizza Oven.

I was reminded how much I love working with kids as I became an in person teacher again. In August I went back into the building to teach for three weeks before April gave birth. This was a true mess as my long term sub was taken from me weeks before I was set to go on leave. But as soon as Sofia was born I had to let go of my classroom and know that even if it got a little messy for my students, it would be okay. After my two month paternity leave, my class was a mess, several students had stopped coming to class or had let their grades slip, but time with my family was worth that mess.

Finally, I became a dad! Sofia was born on August 26th. The coolest moment of my year was seeing her enter our world. Since then, being a dad has been filled with laughter and sleepless nights. I am not sure why I feel like things need to be perfect. My desire for perfection has brought on anxiety, but when I am okay with the mess around me I see how God is in control and I am able to relax in his hands.

April and I are celebrating our fourth anniversary! This year we decided to keep it simple. It might even seem like the same as any other day as we have already gone to the Denver Biscuit Company to pick up breakfast (we ate delicious biscuits while watching the Dinners, Drive-Ins and Dives episode that features the restaurant), but it won’t simply be another day. This day is marked by love and that makes it an adventure even if we don’t hike a mountain, travel around Europe, or shelter during covid. I’ve been learning about taking each day moment by moment, letting go of my expectations. So moment by moment on our fourth anniversary I am going to let God take over our plans for the day.

Four years ago, when April and I stood in front of our community and declared our love and commitment to one another, our day didn’t go as planned, but it was beautiful. My car went into lock down after I had accidentally tried to lock my car while the spare keys were in the trunk. It took a miracle to unlock the doors minutes before I needed to leave for Hudson Gardens. I barely made it to the ceremony in time. It was an adventure, but what really made the day was standing next to April, looking into her eyes, and knowing that God had our backs.

Three years ago, we went hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park and ate burgers in Estes Park. I had an Elk burger and she had a Bison burger. She liked my meal more than her own. April had planned out a great celebration of our love. At the time I had started feeling stress about making sure I did my best in our marriage. I thought I had to be the one to pay off our cars, save for our new house, and help meet all of April’s needs. But what I am learning about marriage is it is like hiking out in the outdoors as both are uncontrollable and life changing. When we were hiking in Rocking Mountain National Park a storm rolled in, drenching us, but all we could do was keep hiking. Our marriage only works when I give my control over to God. He is our provider and will shelter us from any storm. As we hiked on through Rocky Mountain National Park we ended up seeing two moose. What a phenomenal day!

Circolo Popolare serves amazing pizza and has more to drink than I can remember.

Two years ago, we celebrated in London! When we traveled to London I was struggling with anxiety attacks. I was worried that my sleep problems would plague our trip. April reminded me that it is normal to be jet lagged and that I needed to start giving myself grace when I didn’t fall right to sleep. This changed our trip. It let God into my most worrisome moments and gave us an anniversary to remember. Especially our trip into London proper to see the Tower of London and our dinner that night at Circle Popolare, a restaurant were you can get a meter of pizza. We saved half of it thinking we would eat it later on our trip. We didn’t end up eating the leftover pizza because we let it get moldy. Letting that pizza go moldy is my biggest regret of the trip, because it was dang good pizza. However, it helped us realize that not every day and not every meal had to be epic. That some days we just needed to take as they were and let a little grace in.

One year ago, during lock down, we braved a restaurant and had a phenomenal dinner. Adventures do not have to be out in the mountains or in another country. They can happen right near home. After months of not leaving home and if we did go out to eat, it was just to pick up the food and bring it back home, we decided to eat in a restaurant to celebrate our anniversary. Linger, our dining choice, was safe, and rewarded us with the best meal we had all year. We could have let fear take over our anniversary but we chose to celebrate our love and God rewarded us with a beautiful evening that He capped off with a spectacular sunset at Jackass Hill.

Today as we celebrate our fourth anniversary we are going to take bits of each previous celebrations. As much as I would like to hike around Rocky Mountain National Park or go back to London, what we are going to take from those places is the idea to let grace into our day when things do not go as expected and allow God to be in control because when He is He tends to outdo our best laid plans. I doubt we see a moose and we definitely won’t walk over Tower Bridge, but we will see His beauty and we will take naps with our puppies. We are going to go back to Linger because they did such a good job last year during the pandemic and we want to eat there again now that things are normalizing. At the heart of all adventures is knowing that they can happen on any day in any normal situation if only you open your eyes to what God has for you. If he has control of my day, then that’s the adventure I want to experience.

Yet, I know that the true adventure in today will be loving April. She is less than two months away from bringing Sofia into the world (this might be why we aren’t hiking today and is defiantly why we didn’t travel anywhere and that little baby girl is so worth staying home for). Throughout her pregnancy she has been nothing short of a rock star. She is kind and patient to me when I am thoughtless and I don’t listen well, like when she told me what she was craving and I told her I didn’t want to eat Cheba Hut. She cried and I apologized and cooked a homemade dinner for her instead. She loves me when I feel broken. She makes me a better man and for that I know that parts of today might feel like any other day. We will wake up at home, take our dogs for a little walk, watch them be goofy, and then take care of our garden. But it will be more than that because I am going to let grace in and watch for God to do something unexpected.

Tag: Pizza

How My Year of Becoming Was A Mess

Anniversary Adventures!