Music Video

I made this for a class last semester. My teacher loved it, I thought you all might like it too.

Holiday Cover: Away in a Manger

So I'm doing a cover a day the holiday break and Jess helped me out with one of the songs. We actually did this in primary today for sharing time. Jess was great.



To see them rest of the covers go to http://www.youtube.com/TheSweaterFriends.

Hey.

Church was good today. Our boys were pretty funny to teach, as usual. The primary presidency brought up how we will be changing classes here soon and it made me sad... but that's okay.

Anyway, I decided to give a like real update about what's going on with Jess and I. We are doing well and looking forward to not having school for a month or so. Jess has been getting awesome grades and is such a good student. It's really cool to see how much she cares about learning and getting the most out of a class. She is defiantly one of those people who go to school for self betterment and not just a piece of paper.

As for me, things are about the same, just tons of home work and Sweater Friends. Our new EP is really almost done (entitled Dear Abbey). I will post where you can hear it soon. I'm actually using one of the songs as a creative project for a class so get ready for a music video about Saurssure!

Anyway, here is some Star Wars stuff. love-Jake

Number one dollar bill.

Today in sharing time we were talking about prophets. Our primary president assigned each class an old testament prophet to talk about for a minute of so. We received Adam, as in Adam and Eve. We formed a huddle of sorts with our boys and asked them if they knew who Adam was. They said yes, after which Jess proceeded to tell them Adam's story and importance. She said something about Adam being the first prophet that the Lord set up His church through. Jonah in our class turned to us and said "oh yeah, his head is on the number one dollar bill, I know about him."

We laughed.

Jake

Health Care Reform

So I was taking a little break from studying last night and came across a video blog featuring our Vice President Joe Biden on the Organizing for America site (you can find it here). In this short clip, Biden asks what health care reform is to you and posts a quiz that makes the whole process even more personal. Also, he invites us as Americans to post a video response to the clip on youtube. Jess and I, feeling strongly about the matter, accepted his invitation and did just that. Here is what we posted:



Jake

He's in the forest, sleeping.

Thanks to our alarm never going off (even though we set it right before we turned in), we were late to church but still managed to make it to all of primary. We only had Tate and Gavin Cash today, which was a nice break from the 14 kids last week.

As soon as I sat down in our class area, Tate (who does everything in his power to be the first one there every week) pulls out a few colored pieces of paper cut in to quarter size. He asked me if I wanted to read his book and handed me the papers. He had drawn several pictures on the pages with swirly lines and stick figures. As I flipped the pages I asked "what is your book about?" to which he responded "it's about bad." Further questions only led to more confusion but I must say, it was the best book about bad I have ever read.

After we separated for class and were sitting with them around the table in our room, Jess asked were everyone else was. Gavin piped in saying, "I know what happened to Gavin Little." Jess and I looked at each other both thinking that usually a sentence like that is referring to something negative. Gavin continued "he's in the forest, sleeping". Jess asked if he was talking about camping, which he was, and we both breathed a sigh of relief.

Jake

Hippies on The Mount of Olives.

We had a ridiculous day in Primary today. Yesterday we got a call from the teachers of the Girl CTR 5 class wanting us to teach their kids today too. We said yes thinking it wouldn't be too bad. Well, all our boys came, along with all their girls and two visitors. Yeah, 14 total! It was a mad house, I got hit in the crotch three times, one of which was with a belt. Wha wha. Thank goodness for my angel of a wife or else someone would have died and I'm not thinking about the kids.

Today's story comes from sharing time. The lady who was teaching held up a photo of Jesus teaching the Sermon on the Mount. This one to be precise: Anyway, so the lady asks the kids who the picture is of and they all said "Jesus", which she followed by "and who is he teaching?". David in our class, who I didn't even know was paying attention, yells out "Hippies!". Yeah it was great. I guess we all need the gospel, even hippies, right?

Jake and Jess

Sharing our time.

Today was our turn to do sharing time in Primary and I will just say that it is good that it only comes around once a year. As I have mentioned before, our boys are quite the handful. Not to say we don't love them and enjoy being their teachers but it is hard to keep a room of kids quiet when the ones in front helping you are being the most rambunctious.

We taught about missions and missionaries, which did go over well. We had 2 boys and 2 girls dress up from different parts of the world and then the rest of the children guess where they are from. For a few weeks now when the boys were bad, Jess would threaten them with having them wear the girl's outfits. Anyway, when Jess started to hint "This is a country in Europe and you eat it for Thanksgiving", they shouted out "hot tamales" and "pancakes". I want to go to their Thanksgivings. They also guessed "Montana" for "It starts with M and is in Asia". Cute kids.

We ended it with having them color little missionary badges we made and telling them what missionaries do. Despite the chaos, it went pretty well. Sometimes riding out the chaos is the only way to manage it.

Jess and Jake.

A Not-So-Octupus' Garden.

Jess and I have been growing a garden this year and it has been coming along quite nicely, as you can see by the bouquet of radishes. Too bad Jess says they taste like "salty dirt" (like that would even be a bad thing).


Our tomato plants are huge! We have 23 of them, celebrating my 23 years of life here on planet earth. We are excited to eat nothing but tomatoes here in a few weeks but in case we get sick of them, we are more than happy to share. Just holla if you want some. We also have squash, peppers, beets, carrots, corn and some melons growing. Anyway, here is a photo tour around our garden. Enjoy :)

Big thanks to everyone that has helped so far. No garden is an island, or something like that.

Jake.

Oh boys.

So for a while now, Jess and I have talked about blogging our stories of teaching Primary. We have had so many funny and touching experiences taking care of Jonah, Hunter, David, Tate, and the two Gavins. We are not going to attempt to back track (though I wish we would have started this a while ago) but simply relate a few things we take home with us each Sunday.

Jess- Our class is in charge of Sharing Time next week, so we're going to talk about missionaries. We're going to have our boys dress up as children from around the world, but we also have girl costumes so I kept threatening them with that. They were good so they won't have to dress up as girls next week.

Jake- Well going along with the Sharing Time, when I asked the boys what they wanted to teach about, Tate yelled out "we could teach jump on Brother Workman" and proceeded to do just that along with two other boys. Now, these boys are all five or almost five so they can be quite the handful sometimes but I really enjoy how they feel comfortable around us. Every week during opening exercises they have the need to tell us "I'm getting a dirt bike not tomorrow but the next day", or "I know how to erase my brother's saved games on the Wii whenever I want". We, of course, do our best to direct their attention to what is going on and try to keep them reverent, but I like that they want us to know what is important to them.

Jess and Jake