2010 is in full swing

Hi all!  Sorry for not posting in a while.  Hope everyone had great holidays!  It is hard to believe January is already half way up!  We have been pretty busy since getting home from our Christmas trip home to Michigan.  We had a quiet New Year's at home this year.  Dave surprised me with a bottle of champagne (cheap from the Cub down the block, but still fun to celebrate!) and we snuggled up in bed to watch the ball drop on our laptop.  I believe it was about 11:30pm EST that our TV cut out and we couldn't find any channel that had any balls dropping, so we resorted to webTV.  The same but on a smaller screen.  :)

After our little break from work and school, we have been in full swing since January 2nd.  Dave has started is T8 training (trimester 8 out of 10).  He is working at an office in Plymouth, about 5 minutes from the office I am currently employed at.  He is adjusting, working on a few marketing projects, networking and getting some of the office training, too.  He picked this office out himself to train in.  He's had 2 full weeks of it so far and is enjoying it, but is also ready for more of a challenge.  I'm sure in the coming weeks the docs will throw more at him once they see his confidence and skill levels!

Work has been pretty busy for me at Revolution.  We have about 4 events planned for this month.  A usual month will hold 1 maybe 2 workshops, so this month has been about double the work load.  I'm not complaining though, I really do love it.  This job lets me use all of my talents while having a blast with patients and all the kids!  So much fun!  I have also begun some training for my job promotion.  Christina is expecting her first in April, so I will be assuming her manager position around that time.  We have been doing a little training so far this month, but that will come full fledged in February where I'll learn the ins and outs of insurance.  Woohoo!  (not)  Even with the insurance side of things, we're off to a great start.  2010 is going to be a great year!  :)

We are still hoping to move up north about 30 minutes.  So get this...  The other night we posted our apartment on Craig's List (finally, had been putting it off for about a month) and the next morning we had heard back from 3 people!  So we set up meetings this weekend.  One couple came by today, super cute, about our age with the same hobbies and interests.  They appreciated that we were also an organic family.  I thought that was pretty cool.  We're keeping our fingers crossed that they contact us in the near future to take our place!  We think they would be very happy here!  Once someone wants our place, we'll have to pick out an apartment up in Brooklyn Park like..in 24hours or something ridiculous like that and get moved, BECAUSE we are attending a Maximized Living seminar in Florida the 27-31.  We are hoping to be moved out before the seminar.

I also just got home tonight from the first day of my last Rakowski Nutrition and Detox seminar.  One more day left to certification!!  I passed my third of 4 tests and got the results a couple weeks ago from that one.  This final test is on the male and female reproductive organs, how to detox them, estrogen toxicity in both males and females, how to treat prostate cancer...that sort of stuff.  I love to learn about this all, but will be glad to be done.  Honestly I can't sit for that long anymore and don't know how I did it in college!  haha, anyone else feel that way??

That kind of sums up our January so far.  Oh yeah, I forgot to put on here that we have purchased a second car.  We bought Dan and Allison's car (our friends who had the cutest triplets recently).  Dan just graduated from Northwestern this December and is now in Florida training in the same program Dave and I will train in next year.  We purchased their Chevy Cavalier after they upgraded to a van (for obvious reasons :).  It will get us through the next couple years at least.  It's good we got it when we did, because car pooling got impossible around that time, I believe the end of November..

Have a great rest of your weekends!  Dave sends his love to all, as do I!

- E

Back to Normal

Hi everyone! Figured I'd get a post in from myself before I've got my head buried in books again. School starts up for me again tomorrow. It will be my fifth trimester out of 10, so I'm about half way through the program, half way to becoming a chiropractor! This semester will be an interesting one. I'll have my first set of Boards exams sometime in March. There are a total of four Boards I'll need to take total over the next two years. I'll keep you all posted on here as to how well they go and when I'm (finally) done with school! Anyway, I have a mixture of excitement and dread for this semester. I'm excited to learn more adjusting methods and techniques, but am not really looking forward to having to study so much for the endless amounts of exams and Boards. But just like my past four semesters, I just have to push through it. Time to get back to our normal life, normal routine.

Our New Year's club outing wasn't as exciting as we had hoped. Like Elise said in our last post, we went to a club in downtown Minneapolis called The Lounge. It's right across the street from the Target Center. We were not impressed with the club at all. The drinks were amazing, but the club atmosphere was not what their website said. They claimed to have three different floors/rooms for dancing with different DJs in each room. Well, we only found two of the three rooms and they were tiny..music wasn't the greatest either. We didn't really dance at all and neither was anyone else. With the admission, we had been told a champagne toast would be included at midnight. Well that didn't happen and there was barely even a midnight countdown. So we were pretty disappointed and left at about 12:30am. Here's basically the one picture we got from the night. Sorry, no night time city pictures yet either. It was hard to get some clear ones while driving on the freeway.

Elise and I hope you had a great New Year's experience this year! Happy 2009 everyone! Let us know what you did to celebrate by leaving a comment at the end of this post. We'd love to hear what you were up to. More from us later!


- Dave

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Well we made it home from the U.P. alive! It was actually a gorgeous 7 hour drive home. The roads were clear the entire way and we got to watch the sun set against the trees that had a light dusting of snow. So pretty!*

Here is a short video clip of us departing to the U.P. Dave decided to capture the atmosphere of our trip: our packed car, the music, and my humming (gag!). Little did I know that this was being recorded, and I just found it now as I'm editing our Christmas pictures..

We had a great five days visiting friends and family for Christmas. We stayed with Mom and Dad S for Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, then drove up to Aunt Maija's for Christmas night. Stayed with Mom V for mostly the rest of the trip, spending Friday and Saturday visiting many friends and family.

Christmas morning at the Schwartz house! Elise drew Mom's name this year and Dave drew Dad's. We did the classic box-inside-a-box (times 10) trick for Dad's gift. Good times! :)

Mary had Dave's name and Emily had Elise's this year. (Love the cookies, Em!)

Christmas evening with the Stadius-Vertins! We have 'Sister Power' in the first picture -- Holly made each aunt and Mom a beautiful bracelet. We were trying to be artistic with this picture... And the second is one of the dinner tables at Maija's house. Matt and Joel were cracking us all up, and after viewing the picture, Matt was scared he was going bald (turns out it was just a mild case of hat hair, haha).

This year, Elise had Joel's name and Dave had Eric's. (Sorry, we forgot to get pictures of your gift opening Eric!) We got Joel a new golf bag filled with golfing goodies. The top picture is me delivering his gift. For those who have asked me in the past, THIS is why I use a Junior bag and clubs when I golf... :) And below, Joel was thrilled to find a club umbrella in the bag!

And Holly joined us this year -- She made me a gorgeous necklace and earrings set! So talented!

So that was a brief summary of our Christmas holiday. We hope yours was fun as well! Feel free to share your stories as a comment to this post! Now there's more to our trip that we'd like to share...

On Friday, we went to visit our friends Alanna and Ashley (regretfully their husbands, Tony and Craig were both working...but we got to meet Dallas, Ashley and Craig's new baby boy!). Ashley cooked us her delicious Parmesan garlic chicken pizza for lunch. It was so nice to catch up with the ladies and spend some time with Teija and Dallas. The babies are getting so big! We didn't want to leave them behind either -- they're so cute!

Teija loved Ashley's dish cloth -- in her words, "mmmmm"!

Later that night, Dave and I went to the wedding rehearsal for Betty and Bob's wedding. They asked me to sing at their wedding, which was at Faith Lutheran Church (my old church from when we lived in Laurium). I have known Betty and Bob for about 14 or 15 years -- they are like second parents to me! Betty was my choir director at church (for a group called STARs -- Students Together Always Rejoicing) which I joined when I was about six years old. Since then she and Bob have been there for me for many other things, through graduations, plays and musicals, our wedding, and more to come! Dave and I were just excited to be involved in their special day, that we were waiting over 10 years to actually happen! We also helped to decorate the reception hall and were treated to a pizza dinner that night. Then on Saturday, we visited with Lorraine and Larry in Atlantic Mine before heading to the wedding in Laurium.

The ceremony was just beautiful. Betty really took advantage of all the holiday colors and decorations, having a full Christmas theme. She even made all of the bridesmaids dresses, and they were smokin' hot! Now, some of you know what happens when I get up to sing in honor of people very near and dear to my heart...well it happened yet again, even though I tried not to let it. Problem is they put me singing right after the vows, which at my cousin's wedding, I broke down in tears at the same spot. This time I was fine at the rehearsal, so Dave and I were hoping things would go just as well at the wedding. My mom knew otherwise! I sang a song called "This is the Day," an original wedding song written by a christian solo artist. Dave took video of my performance, which I didn't really plan on posting on here, but he talked me into it. Just please try to look past all of the flat notes, cracking and tears. I promise I really can sing if I can keep my emotions in check.. :)

Besides that happening, we had a ton of fun at the wedding and the reception. We got to see a countless number of friends and even some of the Vertin side of the family at the reception.

Eric actually started the ceremony by playing Trumpet Voluntary! He did a great job!!

Well, I think this about sums up our Christmas trip in Michigan. We went to church with Maija on Sunday, then caught lunch at the Schwartz house before leaving for Minnesota. Got home at about 10pm Central time on Sunday night, so not to bad.

We're getting excited for tonight now -- we have big New Year's Eve plans! We're going to a club called The Lounge right in downtown Minneapolis. So look forward to our next post which will probably have some city pictures. This will be one of the first big clubs we've been to since moving here. We can't wait to dress up and go out on the town!

Happy New Year to all of you from us both! We love you!


- Elise

The Story of Our Lives

Hi everyone!

Dave and I are starting this blog to show you, our friends and family, a little glimpse of our new lives. We decided that using a blog like this will be a lot easier than maintaining an entire website like we had been doing for the last almost two years (www.freewebs.com/daveandelisewedding2008/). We want to keep in touch with everyone, but with most of our time spent on building our careers right now, starting a mass-communication site like this seemed like the most efficient way.

So, what to expect are lots of pictures of happenings and many blog posts about what we're up to over our first year (and more) of marriage! Our goal is to get some wedding pictures online soon and post links to them so you can take a peek. This probably won't happen until after the Holidays, so also keep an eye out for some Christmas and New Year's pics as well. We'll be spending the New Year here in the Twin Cities, so hopefully we'll find something exciting to do by then! :)

Please feel free to either comment on our blog posts or even email us (elise_schwartz@live.com or davidhugh85@hotmail.com). We'll get back to you either way and always enjoy knowing people we know and love are reading our stuff!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to each of you!!

More soon!


- Elise