Hello again, friends. We last spoke at the time of our babymoon. Just so happens that now, we have approached the 365 day mark of our marriage. That's right, 1 whole year. Hard to believe how quickly it all went by. Turns out, while commemorating and contemplating old memories, we decided to create a highlight reel for all our loyal fans! So here ya go... Our top 10 favorite highlights of year 1 (in no particular order).
1. Making the Coop a Home
G: Just weeks before our wedding, we closed on our first home. I moved in prior to the wedding, awaiting the union of my bride. Since our best day ever, we have had quite the amount of additional best days in this home, affectionately called, "The Coop". In addition to being our dwelling place, this Coop has been home to a host of events, people, and lovely memories. It's one of our greatest joys to welcome people into the Coop to celebrate, rejoice, socialize, pray, and feast! The Coop also comes complimentary with a garage home gym!
A: Making the Coop a home has entailed all sorts of wonderful wacky things. A few include an innumerable number of trips to the antique store, some bickering over the speed of the fan or the air temp (cold feet vs sweaty boy), and one time where the heat went out on the coldest night of the year causing a pregnant lady to yarf because it was 42 degrees when we woke up :-) But we love it here in this home.
2. Traveling as a Couple
G: It's official. We've travelled more places in our first year of marriage, than I've travelled in my entire life. We've gotten to experience beautiful parts of the country, exquisite cuisine, and make lifelong memories with some friends along the way. Although we don't plan to leave the Coop anytime soon, it's always fun to do some real estate shopping with each new place we visit. Top highlight places have been Indy, KC, Bozeman, Scottsdale, and everywhere along the Northern Colorado corridor. Plenty of world to see... Might as well see it with a beautiful bride at your side! She's my favorite travel buddy!
A: It is SO much more fun to travel with a buddy, especially when the buddy is super cute and super fun and a cowboy with an old man sense of humor. My favorite place? Bloomington Indiana, honestly. However the favorite travel memory is Greg "trying sushi" for the first time in Montana and ordering fried chicken sushi. What a guy.
3. Getting Chickens
G: Hi my name is greg and I'm addicted to having chickens. One of my key search criteria when looking for a house was space to put a chicken coop. We just so happened to find a house that already had one on site. So, naturally, it needed filled. In October of 2020, our chicken journey began. We started with a small flock mixed with laying hens, and meat birds. 8 weeks later, the meat birds ended up in the freezer, and the laying hens were left to roost in the coop. Sadly, one of our hens decided to be a rooster, so we had to re-home him. Shortly after the girls began laying eggs, we decided to grow the flock of egg producers and added 6 more birds to the family! Chicken chores, egg harvesting, and bird watching are some of my routine joys. Anyone wanna buy some organic bird meat? Another harvest is on the docket this fall!
A: I have significantly less to say about this other than that I think it is super funny we have chickens and I love how much Greg loves owning them. He's a great chicken dad. I am a medium chicken mom and when I try to do nice things for them they 1. fly at my face and sort of semi attack me or 2. run away and I have to go on a 45-minute chicken-chase (pregnant no-less). But, they lay some tasty eggs and are goofy as all get-out. And they make Greg so happy :,)
4. Snacks
G: Needless to say, the grocery bill for 2 people is substantially larger than the bill for 1. But, no regrets. We eat a ton of awesome snacks at the Coop! I have a newfound love for perfect bars and popcorn chips... No idea what I'm talkin about? Then you're missing out. If you're in the know, then cheers. Cause, dang! The snack game in marriage has been strong! Life's too short to eat bad snacks... Just sayin.
A: I am snack queen. Greg is "eat an astronomical amount of food" king. Together, my fancy snacks and Greg's appetite are a recipe for a heck of a snack party. I only take partial blame for the grocery bill. Snacks r life.
5. Discovering Quirks
G: One of the greatest adventures in marriage is learning about your spouses little quirks that you've never before seen, or the new ones that develop as you join in.a life together. I've always known about most of my wife's.quirks. Her sayings, her voices, her pet peeves. But I never knew how much of an ice fiend she was. Unfortunately, our ice maker in our freezer doesn't work, so we buy bags of ice instead. Endless bags of ice. If I don't know where my wife is, its likely she's near the freezer, opening another bag of ice. We also fight over the temperature in the house. I'm sure this is pretty common. But every time I turn the thermostat down, you can bet it magically increases 5 degrees by the next time I check it. And the ceiling fan in our room, the poor switch has never been so abused and confused. High, low, high, low, high, off. The battle goes on...
A: The quirks. Too good. To be honest, I wasn't really sure about Greg's roommate quirks until marriage, but they are pretty tolerable I'd say. Most immediately noticeable? Water cups. Everywhere. All the dang day long. In the closet. On the counter. In the bathroom. Downstairs, upstairs, on the stairs. Also, every night the question pops up.... "Dinner and a show?" said in the cutest Greg voice with his eyebrows raised like a kid asking for 10 more minutes or a cookie or something. Super cute. Also, the dude is obsessed with NCIS. And Psych. Both I will take credit for introducing him too. However, his obsession with Leroy Jethro Gibbs is all his own.
6. Dairy Delite
G: Well, we already talked about snacks. So lets talk about dessert. Dairy Delite, anybody? Yes, its still our favorite ice cream joint. Yes, we took our engagement photos there. Yes, we're obsessed. But seriously, can you blame us? Its the best soft serve ice cream on this side of the Mississippi. And probably the other side too. Its just the best. Why it it a top 10 highlight? Because its always been a top 10 highlight. Always will be a top 10 highlight. If you ever come visit us at the Coop, Chances are we're gonna take you to Dairy Delite. Saddle up broncos.
A: This is all truth. However, we recently have become such regulars that we actually befriended one of the employees and now she is a close friend/coffee dealer/ice cream buddy and that, to me, is living. We've made it. And if you're reading this, hi and we love you.
7. Lifetime of Sleepovers
G: Wanna know my least favorite thing in the world? Having to leave my wife (then fiance) at the end of the night during engagement. Yes, for 8 months, at the end of the night, My fiance and I would pray, I would tuck her into bed, and then I had to go home. Without her. When we got married, that nonsense stopped. And permanently. We get to celebrate a lifetime of sleepovers now! Ive truly never slept better, or more consistently than I have when I'm laying next to my beautiful wife. I never have to leave again. I get to stay... with my wife... by her side... forever. My least favorite thing turned into my most favorite thing!
A: ^ cuuuuute. I definitely had the better end of that part of the engagement deal LOLZ. Truly, I fall asleep way earlier than Greg does, and always have, but ESPECIALLY since I've been preggo and exhausted 9/12 months we've been married (also lol). So the routine now usually still kinda looks the same from my end. I get tucked in, we pray, I am OUT, and Greg watched (you guessed it) NCIS and then sometime around 11-2 am finds himself in bed, But here's the deal, I love the slumbies and I definitely don't sleep as well when we are apart. Marriage is fun.
8. Meals/Cooking Together
G: It's fair to say that food is kind of a big deal in our house. We cook together, a lot. And we LOVE good food. Most of the time, our cooking is on point. However, Ive had my moments of utter failure. But first, lets talk about the good. We love smoked BBQ, italian beef sammiches, gourmet burgers, fancy salads with candied nuts and fresh fruit. Its likely that if you come to stay with us, we will indulge with some mouth-watering food. However, there was that one time. I tried to use a pressure cooker (for the first time) and was following a recipe (for the first time) and needless to say... It turned out awful. I mean horrendous. Just an embarrassment of a meal. And to make matters worse, we made it for a dear friend. I was mortified. Thats the last time im following a recipe and using this weird techno stuff to cook food. I'm just gonna rely on my ratatouille senses and old school frying pans to get the job done.
A: Good food is a staple, here. We believe in its power to bring people into communion with one another and in its deliciousness, it communicates God's creativity and His desire to give good gifts. Like, he didn't have to make it taste good, ya know?? Anyway. Some notes: Greg is sauce king and spice guy and makes his own flavors and recipes and does what he wants. It always turns out good. And I am learning, while also using my mom's kitchen tricks (if you've had our food you ALSO know that Lorrie's tips and tricks make for a mean side dish... as Connor Dolan says "I've learned to never doubt anything Lorrie does in the kitchen" although he has, in fact, never seen my mom in a kitchen except for maybe one time). I digress. Come for a meal sometime.
9. Procreating... (this one was Greg's idea ok everybody)
G: If you didn't already know, Anna is pregnant. Cats out of the bag now. And I mean, like, really pregnant. Like about to pop any day/hour/moment now. We cannot wait to meet our little baby girl! One of the greatest gifts of our marriage, was our ability to be open to life from day 1. We were able to allow God to lead us in His will, and it didnt take Him long to ask us to co-create with Him. Seriously, what an amazing gift! When God created this world, his first commandment to his beloved was to be fruitful and multiply. He literally asks us to join Him in the beauty of His creation, by the fruit of our procreation. We are so blessed to be the parents of this beautiful soul, and pray all young couples (called to the vocation of marriage) get to experience the goodness of partaking in God's design for co-creation! Seriously, the world needs faithful soldiers for the spiritual battle we're in. The world need holy babies! The future belongs to the fertile...
A: Ya as we speak this girl is kicking the crap out of me. Time to go, sis. But also like whenever ur ready I guess. It has been a serious gift to experience Greg as a dad and to grow as a mother. Already I can tell that the Lord is using it to make us into the best versions of Anna and Greg that we could ever hope to be - more patient, more understanding, more willing to suffer for the other. I will admit, Greg is far less worried about being a parent than me, and has from day 1. But praise God for that, because I need that kind of hope and joy! And I always will, it seems. Dude keeps it fresh and light and joyful and hopeful around here.
10. Pregger Kegger
G: Just what is a pregger kegger, you may ask? It's an awesome gathering of amazing people to celebrate the gift of life in the most joyful and childlike manner! There was games, there was hot dogs, there was music, and swimming, and dancing, and cheerfulness all around! As mentioned before, we've fallen in love with hosting and gathering, and this event was the climax of parties in our short tenure as a married couple. We have such an incredible community of family and friends who have overwhelmingly rallied around us with immense acts of love and support! We're building a village of young disciples, and celebrating the beauty of their existence while exercising our childlike innocence and full trust in the Lord. Pro tip in marriage, find the community who will throw you a pregger kegger. Those are the friends that will walk alongside you on the road to Heaven. Pro tip in life, be the kind of friend who throws pregger keggers for a pregnant couple. Celebrate the fruits of their love and support them in their journey of parenthood.
A: I TRULY don't even have much to add to this. Greg said it all. We are saturated in blessings. The gift of life is so stinking good, and it is a joy to bring a little one into it. With community like this? A true foretaste of Heaven. No doubt. Just read Greg's again. His is rlly good.
Alrighty, Friends. Thanks for hangin with us. That's the top 10 highlights of our first year of marriage. Honestly, we made most of them up cause theres about 1000 different highlights that could have made the top 10. The point of it all is that God's graces are so abundant in His sacraments. He reaches out to us in tangible ways, and grants us the gift of His divine love in manners which we can engage with, sense, experience, and know. He is the best father, and the best lover. He is eternal in His goodness and desires the same for us. These highlights are a reflection of just a fraction of the ways God has shined His light of love and mercy on our souls in the first year of our marriage. So cheers to the memories, and here's to the manny more to come!
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