Gunella Pass/Blue Monday/Love is.../Aw...Monday/

We took a quick road trip with Rebekah and Zach today and went to Gunella Pass (Thanks Mark Harvey III). We loved seeing so many of the beautiful Aspen trees turning gold. What a fun adventure.

Someone Sharpie'd their initials into one of the trees. So sweet and a beautiful view.

We enjoyed walking through an area of trees. Gosh the weather was picture perfect today.

A girl who loves her daddy.

I know Sally and the Blue Monday Crew will notice all the blues in these photos.

A sweet girl and her beau.

When we were married my mother gave us an iron. She had received it as a free gift at her bank. She gave it to us. HaHaHa! He did the ironing, I watched from the doorway. True story! I dislike ironing intensely. This Love is....has our names written all over it!

A FaceBook fine. I am laughing out loud at this one! Dogs are so trusting and cats are so bossy and arrogant. Look at the way that cat is sitting around demanding attention. Thanks to Sandee at Aw...Mondays for sharing with all of us each week. Makes my day S M I L E ! 

Sadness for My BoJon Heritage Phamily

Today was a really difficult day for me. I spent a lot of time in prayer and was thinking about so many folks that I know who have experienced loss recently. Loss is never easy. No matter, young or old, we are sad and we miss the person who has passed away. Larisa and Trace waited anxiously for their tiny boy Caleb and he was taken from them in a few short hours. Yankee great Yogi Berra passed away at age 90. He is sorely missed by so many  but he had lived a wonderful and full life. He was a New York Yankee. Quite an accomplishment in this old world. My nephew lost a high school friend this week . My nephew is 22. Today the good Lord took my cousin Sammy. He was a great guy, a fun kid growing up. He was 57 if my memory serves me right. I don't like to meddle in private business. Especially at a time when phamilies are hurting. My heart breaks for Beth. Although I have not had the opportunity to meet Sam's wife, she and I have had some great conversations. She was excited and enjoyed learning bits and pieces about our BoJon Heritage. Sam shared a great childhood story with me, telling me he remembered watching baseball with Grandma Kocman on Sunday afternoons and Grandpa Kocman making them root beer floats. He said he remembered so clearly how ill grandma really was.

I need to sort through photos but I do not have any recent ones of Sam. I can tell you this, he had a smile that lite up a room. Always so kind and funny too.

He loved auto racing and had raced cars himself. He was a good guy and loved his phamily dearly and he never forgot his BoJon heritage.

He served his country well. He and Beth lived in South Carolina. Although Sammy grew up in Pueblo, Colorado and Fulton, New York he never lost his love of phamily or his roots. His heritage was important and Beth was learning all about these wonderful BoJon stories from all of us.

My heart is aching for Beth and Sam's phamily tonight.  I know he is watching down on us and probably enjoying catching up with his folks, my folks, all the BoJon and Italian relatives gone before us and even smiling at some of the great racing legends who have left us too soon as well. I just hope he will tell Yogi Berra I said "Hi" too.

Loss is difficult, it is hard to understand. We spend so much time running away from those we should love first that often it is too late to say those final goodbyes or "I love you's". I am going to continue to pray. I pray for the hatred and bitterness many feel towards their phamilies. The difficulties, the regrets they will feel once it is too late to say "I am sorry". People think life will keep going. We live in such difficult times and I am giving my heart to God. I hope you will too.

Goodnight my dear hearts, until next time. Ms. Jenny my "S" post is quite sad today.

Running with the Hulk for Blue Monday/Aw...Monday/Love is..

Those blue skies over Missouri made for an excellent photo. The Kansas Wesleyan XC Team had just taken first place in the Men's Race out of 20 teams. The ladies took 16th out of 20 teams. We were sad because the university website posted times and made zero mention of the KWU team that won the men's race! We thought that was tacky and rude. Nonetheless, we L O V E D seeing these young men and women run their best. The men did work so hard to take their first place spot and those ladies work every bit as hard and each race, 8k, is a huge improvement from the last race they ran. I thought I would share "R" for running at Ms. Jenny's and Alphabe Thursday. Nick is in the back row, toward the center with his cap on backward. One of the freshman on the men;s team took third place. There were 142 runners. Go Yotes!

My photo won; turn but my cute lil nephew Zander turned three and he had a Super Hero party today. Although we were unable to attend, all the kids were dressed s their favorite super hero. I bet you guessed who Zander was? Love this Hulk cake. 

I miss my dad every single day that goes by. He loved that Texas ten gallon cowboy hat. It looked nice with his blue shirt. Gosh this photo is from the 1970's. 

Is anyone ready for this? I Know I am not! But the books I will take. I am waiting for my newest book to arrive it is here:

I love Jan Karon and all the wonderful Mitford series that she has written. Her latest book even has a blue cover. I should have it Tuesday September 22nd. It was  pre-ordered thanks to my awesome

son Jeremy. She even added a blue cover for Sally and the Blue crew. I am hopeful she won't sell out to Hollywood like Debbie Macomber. I was so disappointed that she allowed her series of Cedar Cover books to be turned into a Hollywood "Peyton Place". Truly disappointed how the characters were changed according to Hollywood's stanards.

This is so funny, I had to share it with Sandee and everyone at Aw...Monday. I think  this kitty was quite unhappy that "someone" put poprocks in his litter pan!

My friend Lorna shared this one, isn't this kitty precious holding tightly to those she loves best? Pawsitively precious!

I am right there rooting with my honey for our Bronco football team and tonight, after we peeled two bushels of Pueblo and Anaheim chilies and put them into 22 quart bags, we sat down to watch a few minutes of the Seahawks/Greenbay game.  We love our football.

Always someone in need of prayer. I thought this image was perfect to share. Please pray for Noelle  as she flies to Spokane tomorrow for a two week training session with her new position at work.  Please pray for Larisa and Trace during this difficult time in the loss of their newborn son Caleb .

Enjoy a good week and please visit as many participates of each of these wonderful meme's this week. Thank you.

Blue Monday/ Love is.../Aw...Monday/

Some orange and blue after a Win yesterday for their first season opener. Our son Jeremy was at the game, sitting club level with a friend. He lived the good life for a few hours. Although the game was not exciting, it was good to watch with my love, my husband. The house has been quiet, no one around so we enjoyed our time and took a break from the hectic house chores we have to finish. I added the blue and orange for Sally

A Love is....share. We love walking and enjoying time together. This was a perfect share today.

What a precious kitty. I love black cats and my favorite was Boots. he was my boy and I lost him three years ago March 16th. Rose had turned 7 that day and she is still here with us, wheezing and sneezing and suffering from asthma and allergies. Boots was a gentleman and the best cat friend a girl could ever have.' Here is Rose with her gorgeous green eyes and Mr. Boots, looking dashing as he always did even with his milk mustache!

I will always love and cherish this big boy kitty. He was a dear to me.
Visit Sandee and say Aw...Monday.

"Q" is for Quagmire"/ The Irish in my BoJon Heritage

I was excited when I decided to use this word for my  Alphabe Thursday  "Q" post! Although this word, quagmire, has a dual meaning, I am using it from the definition stating "an awkward, complex or hazardous situation". Some synonyms for this word include muddle, mix-up, mess, predicament, mare's nest, can of worms, quandary,tangle, Throughout this rather unusual post, you will get the meaning of this word as I tell you a very sad and difficult story. The story is awkward, it is complex and is involved many hazardous situations. We have been in the middle of a muddle and a mess with more can of worms then you would untangle with a mare's nest. I was in a Quadry over writing this and I heard my mothers voice inside my head, sometimes you just have to let go and let God....

 

Do you know the expression

It is true! Some say God gives you family as a gift! That is a tough one to take. Between my hubby and I we have some real  "boobey" prizes for relatives! I won't go into great detail but my husband is the kindest man I have met, next to my own father, and he is just solid, dependable, honest, truthful, kind. I could list traits this man has that are a mile long, he is just that decent but he was born into a phamily, that, well, frankly does not deserve him. As the middle child, my sweet man had to deal with an older brother who everyone favored because he had some sort of illness. His sister was favored because she was their only daughter and the younger brother was favored because he was the youngest. As much as I loved my late father-in-law, I don't think he did enough to cherish my husband. His mother was busy answering to her own bully of a mother that she often overlooked my sweet man. He adored his parents, both of them! That speaks volumes about his character. The man should have his picture next to the definition of "integrity"! He is just the right amount of everything that is good and decent in this world. While I am emotional and tend to get upset quickly about situations, he is quite level headed and he tries to figure the best way to handle something without going off the deep end.

 I am talking about him because it still breaks my heart that as a kid his grandmother, hateful and spiteful and unkind as she was, always told him he was worthless and he would grow up to be nothing and would probably end up in prison! Boy was that old gal off her rocker! My sweet husband has several cousins, who belong to the LDS church. The majority of them have married and stayed in their marriages. But all the favorites their grandmother had, have done nothing but make mistake after mistake. Multiple marriages, littering children across the country and never forming any sort of relationship with them. This sweet boy who grew up to be the best husband a girl could ask for, is the total opposite of what the mean old grannie thought of him. He was a typical boy, running around, playing hard and getting into a bit of mischief. He certainly was not a criminal and am I finally understanding the dysfunction of his mother's entire phamily from her parents to herself and her 4 siblings. I truly understand why my husband's siblings were and are so screwed up.

Avery Alan Robinson was the grandfather of my husband. My father-in-law was orphaned by age five as he lost both of his parents who were quite young. This grandfather was 34 when he died from complications from diabetes. I am thinking when he passed away there was very little known, if anything, about this disease. My hubby is proud to have been named after this man and his maternal grandfather too.

Avery Alan Robinson and his wife Ivy Murphy Robinson. She was a school teacher and she passed away quite young as well. I think that as a result of my father-in-law being orphaned at age five, that he was not well prepared to deal with his wife and her mother when he became a married man himself. My own mother would tell me quietly, never speak ill of the dead, but I find it very difficult to speak of my late mother-in-law. She was never very kind or caring to me and I always felt like an outsider. In fact, the only kindnesses I ever received from the immediate phamily of my husband was from his late father Carl.

My husband, being the kind of generous man that he is took in his oldest brother after his 8th marriage failed. The details are sad and shocking and all of our children learned a valuable lesson, expensive Irish whiskey and pain pills make a deadly combination. When his older brother passed away this Spring, he died alone with only their sister at his side. For her, it is all about the dramatics, so don't feel too badly about her.My husbands brother had nine children, five biological and four adopted. He had no relationship with any of them and none of them came to visit before his death. We have gotten past the chaos the man brought into our home. We have the battle scars of broken and ruined household items which we can not afford to replace. He stole from us, his made our lives difficult. He gave my husband his old car telling him what a gem it was. Ask our oldest son, about the $6,000 gem of a car he poured repair after repair  into  and the car hangs on by a thread.

I wish this had been attributed to a BoJon/sLOVEnian proverb! The words written here say  it all about my husband's sister and three of her four children..

I doubt any of these siblings would ever feel uncomfortable. Their entire lives revolved around themselves and getting what they wanted from whoever was conveniently in their path. Catchy words like "enabler" and "user" and "addict" come to mind when their name is tossed out at us.

I am uncertain you would be able to make any of these three cry in their lifetime. Unless theatrics were involved.

This is the truth. You can not make this stuff up! I have not even begun to get into my phamily dynamics!

The younger brother just packed up one day and left. After my husband had welcomed into our home, not once but twice. He is the kind of person who will leave you with a lasting memory. The first time he betrayed my Sweets he left us with a $472.72 phone bill. Calling his "supposed" model girlfriend in some foreign land.  Burned uo my brand new sofa with his dope. My mother-in-law said we hurt his feelings. Last month he stuck us with a $600 phone bill. The hubby thinks he was angry because we bought him a brand new bed to sleep in, and he thought when our youngest headed back to college he was going to take over his T.V. When Nick went to college three years ago, our older son Jeremy bought his little brother a T.V. So it was not our T.V. to giveaway. When your mother coddles you , the U.S. Navy provides your housing as well as clothing and all amenities you assume it is something everyone owes you! When your friends are drug addicts and alcoholics and you have a stroke, one has to wonder, why was poor Johnny having such a run of bad luck? Neither he or the older brother attended their own mother's funeral. It is something that picks at my brain everyday. You have to remember these were mama's favorites. They were her golden sons. My husband was the loser, the nothing, the nobody. Yet he was asked to give a eulogy about his mother and many, many times he paid out of his own pocket for legal documents needed to settle her estate while the others were searching high and low for more money, more money.  You may get the money, you may find the money but if you die tonight, they will not take that money with you to your grave!

1 Timothy 6:10New American Standard Bible (NASB)

10 For the love of money is a root of all [a]sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Proverbs 15:12  

A scoffer does not like to be reproved; he will not go to the wise.

I already had someone at Facebook throw this in my face:

These are all the same people defending gay marriage rights or the ones defending the County Clerk in Kentucky. It is old news at social media sites and frankly I am done with it. I quote the bible because I have read it. I hate that I slip and stumble every single day and I am not the Christian I would like to be. But when I speak my mind I feel free and I can let go of the bitterness and betrayal. Unless it has happened to you, it is difficult to explain.

I want to say I know my husband feels sadness at the loss of these siblings. Although only the eldest brother has passed away, he has severed ties with the other two.  After you have been taken advantage of time and time again, you stop and look at the people around you that love you and truly care for you and you realize these users are the ones that are bitter and angry and filled with grief and denial and hatefulness. My mother would often say "You can lead a horse to water, but you can not force him to drink". You can extend a kind heart and loving hand but when one refuses to be helped you have to breathe and step away. Drug addicts and alcoholics can not be helped unless they themselves want to be helped. It is such a sad disease/

Romans 12:20King James Version (KJV)

20 Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

Ephesians 4:31-32New American Standard Bible (NASB)

31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven [a]you

1 Timothy 5:8  

But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Like my own father this verse means what it says to my husband. He told me he was sorry that his siblings were no longer worth fighting for but he did what he was taught by his own father to do, and it is really all he wanted to say about it the whole ordeal. He thought he had been fair to them and he felt he was proper to try to help them in their time of need.

I am learning each day to let go and let God. I am taking all that bitterness and I am spreading joy and encouragement elsewhere. Do you know the hardest thing you can do? Pray for those that deceive you, pray for the users, the abusers, the enablers, the drama queens, the liars. It is a difficult process but with my Sweets at my side I have no doubt that this too we shall overcome.

If you feel offended that I wrote this I will share some wise words from a very dear friend Chris Weides-Goss, "Having you all for my friends saved me thousands of dollars in long term therapy."

This may not be the BoJon post you expected but once I share the second half of this story tomorrow perhaps you will see the whole picture. Perhaps some of you may see yourself here. People never want to admit their weaknesses. They don't like to share their "phamily difficulties". But sometime when you let it all go and spill it out, you feel free and you feel as if you might just survive and be able to go on.

This post was not directly about our beloved BoJon neighborhood but I am that BoJon girl that married an Irishman, and he is the best man in the whole world.

Until tomorrow:

Birthday Fun/ Blue Monday/ Aw...Monday/Love is...

I love when the sky looks like this. I think fall is going to be early this year. We had picture perfect weather the past two days.

Rebekah and baby Michael. He is the best baby ever! We love being with him.

Jayden and his floaties at the pool. He had a birthday pool party yesterday and although he celebrates his fourth birthday on September 12th it was early to celebrate.

Michael is beautiful in blue and his smile is amazing. Love this tiny baby.

This spider man balloon looks so real. I thought he came to visit the party. He looks great in blue too. It sets off his red web shirt and mask.

Balloons and gifts for Jayden's fourth birthday party. Lots of blue in here.

Lots of spider man things to add to the celebration.

Even SPider-Man as a pinata made the day filled with candy and fun!

A Spider-Man costume is in order for Jayden's fourth birthday celebration.

Jayden had so much fun and he stopped after he opened each gift to thank each recipient and hug them. He has the best manners. Make sure Sally and the Blue Crew see your blues too.

Leo enjoys visits from his cousins, Smokey, Stella and Bandit. He gets so sad when they leave because he loves to run and play all day with them. Please  join Sandee and everyone at Aw...Monday.

Today I wanted to chill out, kinda like this, but instead we worked hard, in the garage and then cooked a huge barbeque for the kids. We had fun but now we are tired. Love is...so precious when spent with those we love.

I hope everyone had a blessed and beautiful Labor Day weekend and you are all safely tucked in tonight. Have a  beautiful week.