Jenks - One Rockin' Family!

So Halloween is easily one of our favorite family holidays. We love dressing up, especially me and Brooke. This year I was Moses, and Brooke was Moses' lovely wife, Zipporah. I wore my costume all day at work, and when we took the kids out trick-or-treating, I made a point to encourage people to keep the commandments. It was hilarious how some people reacted. Some apologized for not being as diligent in their righteousness as they perhaps should be! Along with our costumes, the girls were three belles. Maddie was a Southern Belle, Sharlie was Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and Gemma was Tinkerbell. Moses and Zipporah Sharlie as "Belle" Madeline as a "Southern Belle" Gemma as "Tinkerbell" Sharlie got this witch finger at school, which she insisted on wearing all the time. She continually poked us and scratched us with this evil device. I'm still having nightmares about this thing! Gemma discovered the compute...

Holy cow, it's been a crazy couple of months.  So to end off our summer we headed to Whitney & Karen's home in Beaverton to celebrate Labor Day weekend.  We had a blast with them, eating amazing food, goofing around with the kids, playing ping-pong, doing a Jenks concert, and re-living the Special Guest glory days.  Whitney can still rock our 1999 hit song, Wet Dog! We had an awesome time at the Portland Zoo, and you can see all our pictures by clicking  HERE ! Whitney and Gemma had some great bonding time! Parker...deep in thought. Cooper threatened to throw his cup at me if I didn't do what he wanted! It is so cool to have Whitney and Karen living so close.  I can't believe we'll get to see them more often now! In September the kids headed back into school.  Their school district received additional funding this year, and Adam's Elementary got rid of the half-day kindergarten program, so Sharlie by default enrolled into all-day kinde...

Okay, so we're enjoying our summer.  A lot!  We've been swimming a whole bunch, as the Spokane Valley pools only cost $1.00 per person.  Sharlie & Gemma get in free, so we pay a whopping $3.00 for an evening of fun!  Awesome!  We've been digging the diving boards at our pools, and I've re-mastered some of the dives from my youth.  Take a look: Another awesome thing we did this summer was making a video for the Spokane Valley video contest.  We ran around to our favorite parks, and got sweet ice cream cones at Ron's.  There are even some sweet prizes.  We'll find out which videos won at Valleyfest on September 21st, where I'll also be performing. Check out our video: Last but certainly not least, Brooke and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary in July! How cool is that. For Brooke's gift I recorded me playing and singing her favorite Beatles love song. We also attended a totally amazing family reunion, and I'm ...

We celebrated the best thing ever on Saturday, July 6th, when Maddie was baptized! It was an incredibly special weekend. We were surprised by having my oldest brother Whitney and his wife Karen come to stay with us for the weekend. Now that they moved to Portland we'll be seeing them much more often. While they were here we spent lots of time playing in the backyard. Saturday morning we had a little swimming party, which was totally cool. We had a slip n' slide, a sprinkler under the trampoline, and I lead the kids in sing-a-long songs while relaxing in the kiddie pool! Singing, "Hi, my name is Joe!"   In the afternoon on Saturday we held a big backyard BBQ with the family.  We had cheeseburgers, salads, and amazing dessert courtesy of Annie (she's seriously taken over my title of master dessert chef)!   Brooke made an absolutely gorgeous baptism dress for Madeline.  She spent a good amount of time on it, and stayed up past midnight the last few night...