Reckless Recreation: When Daddy is Out of Town

I married a very logical, practical, linear man.  Aaron married a very live in the moment, learn from your mistakes, throw caution to the wind woman.  What ends up happening is a lot of, "I know!  Let's_________________(ride our bikes to the church, hike Mt. Mansfield, make cookies for 300, buy a hot tub, drive to D.C. next vacation, build a tree fort etc...)

 Followed by, "That isn't_____________" (Safe, possible, economical, rational etc...) along with a very logical reason why it isn't any one of those things (you are 8 months pregnant and haven't ridden a bike in 2 years).  True story folks.

So when Aaron chaperoned the senior class trip to Boston for four days, I was excited to proceed with life/plans, uninhibited.

"I know!  Let's build a camp oven and bake pizza over the campfire!  

We started the campfire so it could burn down to a nice bed of coals and I got the pizza dough rising.  Then we grabbed a cardboard box out of the barn and a roll of tin foil and set off to work.

Attempt one was unsuccessful but I thought, that's ok, we have nothing to lose but a free cardboard box and a few cents worth of tin foil.  After our second attempt we were ready to go.  Each of the kids shaped and topped their own individual pan pizza.  The fire still had flames, but I was certain it would burn down quickly.

We had even added a shelf to the oven so we got two pizzas cooking.  I noticed a flap of foil that had come loose so I used tongs to secure it.  The cheese that had fallen off the pizza was sizzling and I was preparing the , "HA!  You aren't always right! speech for Aaron, when I saw a wisp of smoke seeping out from between the foil.  But, I was sure it was fine.  

I reached in with the tongs to rotate the pizza and in that instant, whoomph, the cardboard box erupted into a mass of flames.  I was trying to move the pizzas out so we could save them when one slid off.  One of the kids attempted to save it, forgetting that it had just been removed from burning flames.  The pizza slid off into the grass.  I saved it then rolled it up into a quasi calzone, which as an added bonus now included fresh greens.  The other pizza looked like it was done.  The crust was grayish gold and the cheese was crispy, but it was all the exterior that had rapidly cooked leaving the innards gooey.

In the meantime the Sophie ran to get the hose to put out the box that continued to burn.  The spray of water hit the tin foil and with a sizzle and a whoomph of steam, and Sophie gleefully exclaimed, "Whoa!  I want to be a firefighter when I grow up!"

Undeterred, we set the pizzas on the griddle and flipped them over and over until they were cooked through.

They had a nice "smoked" flavor, but they all got snarfed down.

Now, here is where the real lesson about marriage comes in.  We meet in the middle.  Aaron has learned to throw caution to the wind occasionally and because I have been married to Aaron for almost 12 years I have learned to take heed to his wisdom.  In this particular instance I:

• Started the whole process really early in the afternoon, knowing there could be some set backs
• Reserved a portion of the dough in the house "just in case" things didn't work out

All of us ate our fill, we had a grand time, we learned a lot, and we made a memory, and we missed Aaron immensely.