Colorado cries Uncle! I believe I am not alone in asking why so much tragedy has fallen on Colorado? I watched my city burn just a few weeks ago and have dozens of friends trying to find a way back to a normal life after losing everything they owned.

I was directly affected by the Waldo Canyon fire in many ways and am still involved with efforts to help my home town recovery from this event. Then I heard about the shootings in Denver and thought what the hell is happening around here. But felt rightly or wrongly that although tragic at least it didn’t claw its way into my life.

Small world after all, turns out my family is affected by the shootings to the north. My cousin was married years ago to a lady who has since remarried. She has remarried and her new husband is the brother of the woman brought her 6 year old to the movie and was killed.

She herself is pregnant and was wounded as well, not sure of her condition or the condition of the child she carries. How dreadful and tragic. As I learned of this fact my first question was why in the world had they taken their 6 year old to a midnight movie in the first place?

I’m not judging anyone here, I am a single parent with three children, all older than this child and I don’t think I would take my two daughters to this movie at all, let alone in the wee hours of the morning. I will allow my teenage son to go with his buddies but not to a midnight showing.

I hope to hear later from family what the circumstances were and will relate them if and when I hear back. Maybe they had a babysitter arranged and had already spent the money on tickets and the babysitter bailed out on them. That would be a lot of money to throw away if you live on a budget like mine. So maybe bring the child along so as not to lose that money. I know when mine were that age they could sleep through anything and maybe that was the plan.

Maybe this is a habit they have as a family, maybe they so love Batman that they just couldn’t wait, I don’t know.

On another note, I have another cousin that works in the jail where the freak show that is James Holmes is being held and is the former sister-in-law of the woman related to the shooting victim.

While the jailers were talking amongst themselves one of her co-workers said that he and his wife were all set to attend the very showing where the shooting took place, but changed their minds at the last minute when his wife got a weird feeling about going to the show and asked her husband if they could skip and go at another time.

Good feeling I’d say. So although I believed I had no connection to the shootings other than being a human sickened by this act it turns out it has had a direct effect on my family and will continue to be a sad part of our families life.