Wild Curves!

It is weird how life throws you all sorts of curves to see how you will react to them. Each time a new one comes you have to come at it with a different approach. Recently I am taking on a big that life is throwing at me and I am having to take a completely different approach to it than anything I have ever done. I know that this time is the last time this type of curve should ever be thrown at me and I am going to try my hardest to keep it that. I can only think that I am human and I have my faults but there are some things that I should not falter on.

The one thing I feel I was put on this earth for was to be a great family man. I am to take care of my children and make sure they are raised properly and in my life at all times and that they are one of the centers of my life. The other part of that is to be the best husband to my wife and show her the love and compassion she needs everyday. These are all hard things to live up to but if you put yourself in the right spot and the right frame of mind then it can be done. The one thing I am learning over again is that God needs to be at the center of my life and I need to rotate around him and count on him to carry me through the rough times. No matter how bad things get he will always be by my side and be my rock to hold on to. I need to remember that now more than ever in my life....

Vacation!

So we made it to to California for a vacation of sorts. I am happy that we made it here in one piece but the experience was fun to say the least. My wife wrote a good article about it on her blog Busy Bee Mama. So go check that out and see what fun we had. I will write soon after I get home on the 15th.

Something Greater!

Have you ever just sat around and just wondered how everything has happened. I mean this world we live in is so diverse and everyone has some theory about how we got here. I just wonder about the people who don't believe and what runs through their minds to make them not think that there is a God that created this. That we are here for a purpose and not just some random beings wondering around.

One of the ways I remind myself that we are part of something greater is every time I walk into my kids room when they are sleeping and see how wonderful a miracle they are and knowing that God has giving me this wonderful blessing. I like any other parent would die for my children and do whatever it takes to raise them right. I just hope I can do it right the first time so that they don't have to go through the things I did.

May God bless you all with love and happiness,
Johnny

How cute they can be.

No matter how frustrated I become there are always points in my day or night when I can look at my kids and my frustration goes away. I will take last night for example. My daughter threw the biggest fit before bedtime to where I just wanted to walk out. I didn't want to deal with her anymore and I left my wife to calm her down and talk with her. Later that night we went in to close their window and my wife called me in to look at them. When I went into the room they looked so peaceful sleeping there. They were sort of laying on each other and snuggled up. I can only thank God for those precisou moments. I know they will grow up and understand more and more each day but at time I am so frustrated that I am not sure what to do. I am learning to just back off and pray so that I can calm down and take a better approach to the situation.

It is amazing how just simple step back and prayer can work in any situation. It doesn't matter who or what you are dealing with and if you feel like you are getting to heated maybe you should just step back and pray.

Does anyone else find themselves frustated with what they're kids do or don't do? I hope I am not all alone on that front.

Mothers are Great!

Mothers day has come and gone but this year was really good. My kids are actually old enough to help prepare Mommy breakfast in bed. So I prepared the pancakes with my little helpers mixing up the batter. Once that was complete I poured her some Orange Juice to which my 20 month old son carried and my daughter carried the pancakes. I of course carried the present and the cards. She had been talking about wanting a baking stone so I finally found one that had a 10 year warranty. She loved the gift and moved her food to the table so she could eat with the family.

Later in the day we were out at Wal-Mart getting a few things and ran into this couple who absolutely fell in love with my daughter. She thought she was the cutest thing. We came to find out that she had 3 boys and was expecting another child. She doesn't know what it is yet but they are hoping for a girl. She also let us know that they owned a Pizza place right down the road and it was called Pies on Pizza. So we went there for lunch today to find out just how good it was. The couple was there and remembered us which was nice. They also switched the TV to cartoons for the kids to enjoy. The pizza came out and it was probably the best pizza I have ever eaten in my life. We will definitely go back there again. You just can't be great service and great tasting pizza.

Fun in the Sun!

So we decided to get a small plastic pool for our kids to enjoy for the summer. They are 2 and 3 years old so we figured they would love it. They already had a slide swing set combo and putting the pool at the end of the slide just made sense. Then daddy would hold the water at the top of the slide to make a water slide. My daughter fell in love with this idea and it has been great watching her.

Now I had to convince my son to try it out and that he did. I was so proud of him for what he did because I didn't think he would do it but the look on his face afterwards was priceless. My son is a true warrior.

Now that they both had a turn and daddy was already wet from them splashing me I decided to give it a try. We had the water setup on a sprinkler under the swings so they could still get wet as they swung but it was also creating a stream on the slide. This was my opportunity to give this a try. Why should the kids have all the fun?

Now that was some fun!

Some times I wonder.

I wonder about my family sometimes and where I went wrong. I wonder how long my wife will hold on to her sanity after taking care of our two children. They seem to find a new button to push every day with her and just drive her up the wall. Where did we go wrong that our 3 year old daughter takes off her cloths and then pees on her brothers bed? I know she doesn't watch this kind of TV or anything so where does she get these crazy ideas? She then proceeds to helping her almost 2 year old brother take off his onesie, which we put on him to keep his diaper on, so that he can take his diaper off and join her in peeing around their bedroom. The added bonus if he ends up poopy and then she has to deal with that.

Now I am home during the morning to help her relax because of the current pregnancy and some minor complications with it. So we put them down for afternoon naps so that I can go into work for 4 or so hours and they end up pushing my wife to the breaking point. So the question always rolls through my mind in what did we do wrong or what are we missing that she is trying to reach out and get attention for something, anything at all. I guess time will tell how we end up doing in raising our children and hopefully the new baby will not be able to pick up on the bad habits of its older siblings. I guess I can only pray and hope God can guide me in the right direction. I do not want to make the situation worse but something needs to be done. I just don't know what that is yet.

Starting All Over!

Now we are in SC and starting all over. We have no family near by to help us out or watch our kids if we want to get away. This has been tough for the last 6 months. I think our family has grown stronger together and have come closer as well because we know we do not have a safety net just down the road. Being out o the military is a lot different for me too. I no longer have a uniform set for me to get dressed in everyday. I get a choice of what to wear which is nice.

It has been six months since we moved out here and we still have not settled all the way in. We bought a house after being here for like 2 months so we have been in it for 4 months and loving it. We have added to our family with a dog as well. We just got her so she is still a pup and need a lot of attention and care. The house training is going well but will take time. Her name is Lila and she is a beautiful Cane Corso (Italian Mastiff). My daughter just adores her and my son is starting to open up to her as well and get use to her walking around with him.

That is good for now and I will try to post more frequently. These long in between points don't work to well.

Love finds me!

So now I am in Cali and through my second engagement. I really didn't want to jump into another relationship. I just wanted to make some friends and get to know some people who weren't really military related. Have you ever heard the saying when your not looking for love, love will find you. After Julia and the short period of time with her, I met my Wife. We started talking online and then decided to meet. She only live like an hr away and I went to visit her. After meeting her and talking to her we became good friends. The first night we went out some other guy showed up and I guess really liked her. He never made a move on her and I went ahead and made the move myself. We started to see each other more often and we both stated that we didn't want a serious relationship. We were just looking for a friend to talk with and have understand one another. This is how we first started out and it went well for awhile. Soon we both found ourselves falling for one another. Even though we both weren't looking for love, we found each other and ended up in love. After talking one late night after about 2 months of casual dating, we decided to date exclusively.

We ended up going to a new years party where we both got drunk as ever and all hell broke loose. We ended up having a huge blow out fight that ended me up to driving like a crazy man and wrecking my car only 100 feet from the hotel we were at. A friend of hers ended up driving my car back to the parking lot and parked it before the cops showed up. They gave us a warning and left for the night. Later that night while we were both still drunk and talking everything out we agreed to get married. We had originally planned for a summer wedding but Cass ended up pregnant. We then went to the courthouse and got married there on 24 April 2004. We have been happily married ever since.

My daughter came on 26 December 2004 and has been one of the best things in my life. We have also had a baby boy who was born on 20 July 2006. yes my kids are less than 2 years apart but that is the way we wanted it. I have been living a life as a young family man and continue to grow as a parent and a husband each and every day. I could not ask for more than what I have in front of me each and every day. I am blessed to have my beautiful family and wonderful in-laws. I have since left the military and moved across the country to SC. We literally moved from coast to coast.

Now that the history is done and my life is going on, I will start to talk about the things that happen in life at the moment.

The Continued Background Story

It has been awhile since I posted. I have been busy attending my school and work as well as making time for my wife and kids. It has definitely been a challenge to manage all these things. I am not sure how I came about doing all of this at one time. I knew I wanted a family while I was young and knew I wanted to finish school as well. It is weird how things play out in the end and we always have to remind ourselves that we will not be made overnight. I have to continue to tell myself that everyday.

So I left off with being dropped by my fiance and having my world crumble around me. I went up to a buddies room and told him what happened. He immediately told me to get my swim gear and call up another buddy of ours. I asked him what for and he told me that were are going to the beach to get drunk and forget about all of this. I don't usually condone all of this type of action but at the time I didn't care and just wanted the pain to go away and this seemed the best logical approach. I ended up getting pretty drunk and fell asleep on the ferry while coming back from the island we went to. It was good times and it helped me get the process of grieving started and over with.

After all of this happened I went back to talking with some old friends and an old girl I used to talk to but never dated. We talked the rest of the time I was at Tech School and when I went home on my 2 week vacation in between my duty station and tech school we met up and started dating. I thought I was falling in love all over again and wanted this to work so bad that I made myself believe it was going to work. So we ended up dating for awhile and I even flew down to see her and ended up proposing to her. She accepted and everything was happy until I went back home and felt all alone again. I have probably only one fear in life and that is of being alone. She also became controlling to the point when I left my dorm room I had to call her and let her know where I was going. This was not what I was wanting and it showed me that she did not trust me in what I was doing. So I called off the engagement and she reacted probably about the same way I did when I was dumped just a year before that. I realized I didn't love this girl and that she was a rebound from my ex and that I needed time to heal first. I had to take time for myself and get my life straight to move on. That is what I did and made a new friend along the way.

In my next post I will talk about who I met and where things went from there.

Moved

So I just moved into my very first home that I actually own and not rent. I will talk more about this later as I will pick up with where I left off from my other post. I will try to get back in the groove up updating this as often as possible.

After I graduated high school, I went on to Oklahoma State University and majored in Electrical Engineering Technology (EET). I enjoyed the college life even though it was expensive and I was the first one in my family to attempt to finish college. I was the one who was suppose to as well and it kind of felt like if I didn't everyone would be disappointed in me and it would hang over me for a while. I learned from growing how I did with my father and everything else that people expected a lot of things from and none of them came true. So this was nothing new for me and I have learned to blow it off so it doesn't bother me any. While at college I still surfed the net and played an all text based game called Arctic MUD which is where most of my time was spent. I also spent a lot of time the Oklahoma yahoo chat room where I met who I thought was an awesome girl for me. I had the reputation back home to date the younger girls that were usually 2 to 3 years younger than me and sometimes even 4 years younger. When I was a Senior I was dating a freshman girl from another school, but the girls my age didn't seem to have interest in me and were kind of stuck up. So I talked to this girl online for about a month and we decided to meet up at a restaurant in Stillwater. She was from Tulsa so she was bringing her mom just in case I was some kind of killer or rapist. Which was all perfectly OK with me since you can never be to sure on the Internet. I met up with them and we hit it off right away. It was going great and I finished my year at school and moved to an apartment off campus to work for the summer. We decided to get married so I joined the Air Force to help support the family we were about to start. I left Stillwater at the end of the summer and went back home to work in our local grocery store that was opening up since our old one burnt down 3 years prior. I was now all the way across the state from my Fiance and took frequent visits to see her as I was living back at home waiting for my date to enter basic training came up. I left for basic on Jan 28, 2003 and said my good-bye to her and promised to write her when I got a chance and we wrote letters and talked on the phone all through my basic training. I thought we were in love and planning to get married and start our life together. This is a big reason why I joined the military, but also to help pay for school. So I get done with basic and head to my Tech school to learn my trade I was going to be doing for the military. While there I got my assignment to Japan and immediately called up Sonja to tell her we would be going to Japan. She said she really didn't want to leave the states and wondered if I could get my assignment changed and I said yeah I guess I could. I had a friend that got California and he really wanted Japan so we traded assignments. The day I got them finalized and called up Sonja to tell her that we would now be going to California, she tells me she doesn't want to get married anymore. At this point I am furious and pissed I gave up Japan for the girl of my dreams to then shatter my whole world. The one person I was suppose to trust and provide for just said sorry I don't want to anymore. I later found out that she met another guy online and he came to her house where they had a make out session while I was in Basic Training. This is how you treat the guy your suppose to marrying and is going to serve the country and fight for you. I know everyone hears all the stories about military spouses cheat all the time and so do the military people, but that is a small percentage of the actual military population and a lot of people stand behind their military spouses.

I will pick up from here next time. Come back for more info on how I got to where I am today living as a young family man.

Continued History

I guess I will continue on with the history of how I got to where I am sitting today. I posted yesterday that I had a pretty crappy childhood. I want to make it clear that I do not think I have had the worst childhood. I know there are millions of kids out there far worse than mine. I also know that a lot of people have probably watched their brother get shot. I don't think a lot of people have seen that while watching your other brother stand there in awe because he was the one holding the gun.

Well I was born in Kingman, AZ and raised there for 11 years until my dad was put in prison and I mom took custody of us and then moved me and my brother to a small town in Oklahoma. From there I grew up like any normal kid. I never got family vacations or the latest and greatest toys or cloths. I got what I needed and I guess that is good enough but I always wanted more. I wanted to be like the kids who got to go to the lake with their boats or to Disneland or Disney World. I never did any of those things and made a promise to myself to try and provide that for my family when I grew up.

So while living in this small town and working on the farm driving a tractor some summers then working for the town as an all around maintenance man during the summers was becoming normal. The one thing I still like to tell people is how I burried the people who died in our town. I would go out to our graveyard and dig the whole and then after the service was over I drove the dump truck and dumped the dirt on them. I get some pretty cool reactions from that story. I played the only two sports offered at my school which were Baseball and Basketball. I also became a state officer in a school organization called Technology Student Association. I enjoyed that as I met a lot of different people and had fun with the girls as well. It was kind of a cool thing that all the girls viewed it as a good thing to be hanging with a state officer and such so I got to make out with quite a few girls that year. After that reign was over I was in my senior year. I chose not to run for a national office as I wanted to just enjoy my senior year. I did just that. I enjoyed everyday of my senior year and wouldn't have changed it for the world. Since we were such a small class and all we raised all the money to take us to Cancun, Mexico for our senior trip. That was a blast and is for another discussion.

That is all for now as I will try to update this daily so if anyone out there is reading this be sure to check back if you want to hear about my life.

Introduction

Hey,

I am Johnny and I am a young family man. When i was growing up I knew I wanted to be a family man, to give my family the life I never received. Don't get me wrong I didn't have the worst childhood but I didn't have the best one either. Like millions of other people I wanted my family to have what I couldn't as a child. I never went on family vacations or got the coolest new cloths. I was raised by my father for 11 years until he was thrown in prison and then my mother who was forced away by my father stepped in to become "mom" and raise her 2 boys.

A long time ago we were a 3 boy family. I was only 3 when it all happened and my oldest brother was 9 and my older brother was 6.My oldest brother was shot and killed by a rifle that backfired when it was dropped by my older brother (middle of the 3, I am the youngest). He has had to live with that for the rest of his life and still has nightmares to this day.

We were raised with an iron fist and told that if we wanted something we had to work for it and that is how I acquired most of my things. I am still working for my degree today as I just separated from the Air Force. I have a decent job and love the work I am doing. I am proud to have served my country and I am also glad to have never gone over seas, but I did support the war from home.

I have wanted kids since I could remember to sort of make up for the life I missed out on. Right now I have a beautiful wife who is 21, a beautiful daughter who is 2 and a handsome boy who is 8 months. They are the joys of my life and I plan to give them as much as I can and experience the things I never got to. My wife fully supports me and I hope she will continue to help me follow my dream.

This is why I called my blog Young Family Man. I will write about my life happenings and how it is to be a young family man in today's world. The struggles I will go through as well as the joyous times. The first couple of posts will be about history and catching up with where I am today. Then I will start to write about what is going on day by day.