The Jimmer Jammer Stories

These are "The Cheeksters and this is how they all came about. I just wanted to give you a little history on them. This idea was first conceived when our son Jimmer was born back in 1989. My other son TJ was 7 at the time and when we brought Jimmer home, TJ was intrigued by the cheeks that Jimmer had and commented about them frequently. One day, because TJ knew that I liked to dabble in making different craft items, he said to me "Mommy you should make a doll that looks like Jimmer with his big cheeks, then you can call them "The Cheeksters". Well at the time I just laughed and said it was a cute idea but didn't really consider something like that until years later when Jimmer was about 5 or so and he still had those cheeks! I decided to give it a try just for fun because I really enjoyed trying to create things. They first started out as a sock that I stuffed with cotton and drew a face on them. Then I decided that I wanted to put his big feet on them too so then the doll looked like a face with big cheeks and big feet (if you've seen Jimmer's size 14 feet you'll know why I wanted to add those on to the doll) and of course we used TJ's idea for a name and called them The Cheeksters. The difference of how they looked back then and how they look now is how far I've come at perfecting them just the way I wanted them to look. When we started we thought of 7 different characters. They were Jimmer Jammer, (of course for baby Jimmer), Talented TJ, Lovely Lindsay, Mischievous Michael, Sweet Suzy, Neat Ned, and Rapper Roberto, . When my son TJ was in high school and I had revisited the idea of trying to do something with the Cheeksters, I asked him to write a little poem that went along with each of those. Then we added Messy Marvin, Cool Calvin, Moviestar Monica, Curly Q Carla, and on and on. I probably have about 20 or 30 characters now and the sky is the limit with them. Finally I decided to write a series of books about The Cheeksters. The main character is J