Happy November Birthdays

We've got plenty of birthdays happening this month from both sides of the family!

Happy birthday on Wednesday, Nov 4th to Mom V!  We sent her a lovely arrangement of flowers, but she had taken the day off work so she had to wait until Nov 5th to see them!  Oops on our part...   Happy belated birthday, mom!


Alanna's birthday is on the 19th, Angela's on the 21st, and Cedric's on the 26th.  Happy birthday to each one of you coming up!!!  I'm sure we'll be in touch later this month.  Hope you each have a great day!  xoxoxo!

Apples Apples Everywhere!

We should start by wishing our brother Andy a very happy birthday!

This was the only picture I could find on the fly of Andy!!  Thought it was funny though, so we're posting it!  This is at Dave's Bachelor Party 2 summers ago.  L to R: Joe, Dad S, Dave, Andy, Mike, Aaron.  These were the winning teams from their golf outing and here they are posing with their prizes: growlers from the KBC!  Enjoy this memory, Andy!  We hope you are having an awesome birthday!!!

 We FINALLY sold Trixie!!  She left us officially on Sunday.  A young couple purchased the Matrix from us Sunday afternoon, after taking it for a spin the Thursday before.  It was their first major car purchase, too, just like it was for us.  We're glad she's in good hands, but will surely miss her!  It was one of the best vehicles we've ever had!  Now we've been using just the one car for this entire week, and let me say it is extremely hard to do when we work at places on opposite ends of the Metro.  So this Sunday we'll be out looking for a clunker -- that's right, looking to BUY a clunker, not sell it.  ;)  We'll just get a crappy little car to get us to and from and junk it whenever it dies.  We'll only need one car in about a year or 2 anyway, so this is the best plan to help us eat up some of our debt and work toward getting our office open!

Last weekend we also took some time to do something fun for a change.  We hit up the biggest apple orchard in the Cities called The Harvest.  It's only a few miles south of our apartment in Jordan.  They had free admission, which is key!  We didn't have much time to phyically go on the tractor and pick our own apples (we had to get back to the apt to sell our car! plus it was super cold and rainy!), but we walked around a bit then went inside the clubhouse to taste.  Okay, so who has ever even HEARD of a Honeycrisp apple??  Better yet tasted one???  SO GOOD!  We'd never heard of that type before.  The University of Minnesota actually created it by cross breading 2 other types, and what resulted was the Honeycrisp.  They taste just like the name -- like a crisp, honey sweet apple!  THE best ever!  So after sampling all the apples, we grabbed a bag of those and also a bag of Haralsons (another breed famous to MN).  We also got to taste some of the other products the apple orchard makes: salsas, sausages, cheese, and CIDER!  Yup, grabbed a half gallon of their cider, too.  On our way out, we also got 2 warm cups of cider, a slice of apple pie and an apple dumpling.  DElicious!  We'll definitely go back next fall and take more time so we can do our own picking!  We're thinking of making our own apple pies this weekend.  Maybe some other apple things...any ideas out there??  Possibly one of our favorite fall soups for dinner Saturday night -- Curried Apple Soup.  If you can think of anything else Apple, send it our way!  We have so many apples sitting around!!

This was the first thing we saw after following the signs to the orchard.  I guess the old barn looked cooler in person, but I wanted to take a picture of it.  Didn't turn out so great on here though.  Oh well.  I just really liked  how the apple looks, where they put the state of MN on there to look like the bite was taken out.

We had to drive up this muddy, mucky road to get to the main grounds.  All along the way, the road was lined with the various breeds of apple trees!  Haralsons are the ones in this picture.

 Driving up the mucky road to the Harvest!

These were all over the place.  This was close to the entrance and it was very kid oriented with all these apple characters and other pictures, stories, etc.

 

A little glimpse of the clubhouse.  This was the bakery section.  It was quite a unique place!

 

Yum!  Pie!

Stay warm everyone!  We hear snow is on the way later this weekend!!

-E

June Birthdays

Where did May go?? I just realized we never posted June's string of birthdays and it's already the 7th!! Just read through Joel's recent blog post and we agree with him -- we overloaded ourselves in May with Dave's new semester, my new job, and still trying to enjoy the early days of summer! From the minute we both finally get home (close to about 9pm most evenings), we hit the kitchen to cook a decadent meal, then pop in a RedBox $1 movie rental and cozy up with some wine while we eat. It's kind of our "thing" lately.. We're cutting back big time on spending in order to prepare for the business loans in the (near) future, so that means A.) no more eating out, and B.) no more cable TV. But if you know us, you know we love food! So we still induldge by trying new ideas in the kitchen every night, and lately we've been making fancier meals than usual. It's been a lot of fun the past couple weeks, but I think we've watched just about every movie in the RedBox machine!

On to business...We've already missed saying Happy Birthday to two special people in our families, who actually share the same birthday it turns out!:

Grandpa Vertin's birthday was Friday June 5th!! This is sort of an old picture from 2006. We love you Grandpa!

Scott H's Birthday was also June 5th. Here he is with baby Ella!

Hope you both had an extra joyful day! :)


Nick W. will celebrate his birthday on Monday, June 8th. Hope you have a great day (work free?), Nick! And looking forward to seeing you next weekend!

That's it for June birthdays..another light month. We are definitely looking forward to next weekend. The Wagner's will be coming down on Saturday for a short visit. Friday and Saturday, the Schwartz's will be in town. So we're planning to hit up the COMO Zoo, which is the free zoo in St. Paul that I mentioned in a past blog post. I like to bring kids there that I babysit. It's an easy way to kill time..and did I mention it's FREE? Besides all the animals, they also have a huge nature conservatory, which was pretty amazing to walk through. Next weekend should be a pretty fun time, especially for the younger kids!

Ant that's about it for an update on us. Nothing too exciting enough to write about as of late. We were supposed to go out to Grand Ole Days in downtown St. Paul today, which is an outdoor festival on Grand Ave with a parade, food, all sorts of activities, but it's pretty crummy weather with rain and 50 degree temps, so we're hanging inside all day. I babysit at 4pm in Burnsville and Dave has a huge exam to study for. So until then, I'm going to continue cycling through our DVD gallery, of which I've watched just about every movie twice in the past few weeks. It's going to be a boring day... :) But that's okay, it's good to have some down time for a change!

More later!


- Elise

May Birthdays!

We need to wish miss Eva Schwartz a very happy BELATED birthday! She is the only family member who has a birthday this month (that we know of). We knew it was on Friday, but just didn't get a chance to hop on here to post it. You'll have a little something special in the mail soon, Eva! I'll be mailing it on Monday!

Eva S - May 7th. LOVE THIS GIRL!

Jay D's Birthday is TODAY, May 10th!


And finally, Matt M's birthday is May 14th. Here is a picture of him (the giant) dancing with me at our wedding - red shirt with his back to the camera (sorry!). This was the only picture I really have of you, Matt!

We hope you had a great birthday, and Matt - wishing you an amazing day to come! We love each of you!!


- Elise & Dave

Recovering from Weekend Events

This past weekend has been nuts, in great ways! We both got a lot of work hours in Thursday thru Sunday, so that again means more cash to pay bills. It was another one of those weekends where we didn't really see each other because whenever I was babysitting/screening, Dave was schooling/screening and the other way around. But it's all good! We saved a lot of lives this weekend!!

CONGRATS to Dr. Pete and Lisa on the birth of their newest daughter, 8 lb. 8 oz, 20.5 inch long, #6 for the family! She was born on Thursday, April 2 and is unnamed so far. I had the opportunity to help out their family on Friday instead of screening for Dr. Pete with Dave in St. Paul. What a treat for me! I don't think I'd ever held a two day old baby before. She is beautiful! Perfect really! My main responsibility was taking care of their two younger children, Rachel (5) and Gabriel (3). All of their kids are so well behaved, polite and outgoing. It's always a blast to hang with them! In the afternoon, we dropped off their oldest brother at track practice and stopped at the school's park for a little while. I couldn't resist snapping a few pics on such a gorgeous day! Summer's on its way!

Gabriel going down the slide on his stomach, he "had to do it that way" :)

Rachel on her probably 8th time down

Rachel swinging Gabriel

Their FAVorite -- tire swing! SO much fun!

After getting home on Friday night, I unfortunately developed an eye infection. I knew something was up the whole day with my sinuses and eyes, but it really flared around about 8pm.. It's definitely got to be due to not keeping up with my upper cervical traction exercises. I know the curve in my neck is going back to the way it was 5 months ago. I (we actually) were doing great at consistently doing our spinal exercises, but we slipped off around January and I really haven't been very good about doing my neck at all since then. So I'm certain my curve is back to the -2 that it was in October (For a healthy spine and healthy, maximized nervous- and immune systems you need a perfect curve in your neck which is a 42 degree curve. My neck is straight. Is yours?). I haven't had allergies, a cold or headaches, let alone eye infections for MONTHS, over half a year since having started correcting the curve in my upper cervical. Before finding chiropractic, I used to get eye infections at least once a month due to non-functioning tear ducts since age 2. I also had quite severe allergies to both cats and pollen. For a few months, I was able to have a cat in my lap without any symptoms -- this has now come back to wheezing and itchy eyes, which can be linked back to my curve reverting. Anyway, the point of this whole story is 1) I need to start doing my exercises again for the sake of being healthy, 2) EVERYONE needs to get the curves in their spine checked. You'll never know what your symptoms are due to until you get x-rays done and locate your subluxations. You CAN live a symptom free, drug free life!, and 3) my eye infection got worse on Saturday, so I had to miss the screening with Dave on Saturday as well.

We did try something new for my infection though. Since discovering how bad antibiotics are for your body (learn more here: http://www.drlwilson.com/Articles/antibiotics.htm), we've made personal choices not to use them anymore. So, what options did we have to try to cure the infection? Well, we did some searching online, and the link above suggests some good all-natural and safe options as well. We found quite a few recipes using different herbs and minerals. The one we picked was the most simple based on what we had in our kitchen. We boiled 2 cups of water and mixed in 3 tablespoons of honey (organic, of course!). Let that cool to room temp, and then you just put a few drops in each eye just like eye drops (we just used a straw to do this). Honey and bee pollen has naturally occurring anti-bacterial properties, so it's a no-brainer why it WORKED so well! I only wish someone had told me about this as a kid so I could have avoided so many hospital visits and prescription drugs. The diluted honey gave me instant relief when we did it Saturday night -- just amazing! We continued the honey through the weekend and Monday, and I must say my eyes feel great and are almost fully recovered. I recommend anyone at least try the honey recipe (ahem, brother Mattew!!!) the next time you or your child has an eye infection.

The event Dave screened at was a m a z i n g as he told me. Dave put in 5ish hours on Friday and 9 hours on Saturday. It was at the RiverCentre in St. Paul. Dave said it was a constant flow the entire time he was there, which is rare to have a non-stop flow like that while screening. This event was mostly for parents and most of those parents had tons of questions for Dave and the other doctors, especially about body detox and vaccines. It was a great opportunity for Dave and use all of his knowledge on vaccines and chiropractic to tell people the truth to the public. He came home from that event and told me he cannot wait for us to open and be out there, saving lives for our own office. It is indeed going to be a great time, Dave!

This week and next week are finals for Dave. Thank goodness this trimester is almost done! He can't wait to get through each one of those finals. He's already been studying a bit this past weekend, but there're so many more hours of studying to come. I know I won't be seeing much of him these next two weeks. At least we'll have Easter on Sunday to look forward to together!

We're hoping to head out for an Easter brunch buffet after church -- and hopefully with Scott and Laura! *If you guys are reading this, call or email us back!!* We realize they are busy with their new little Ella, but we do want to stop by to meet her and to include them in our Easter celebration. If that doesn't pan out, we'll meet up with a few friends from around here for a nice Easter brunch. Looking forward to it either way! :)

We spun through downtown Minneapolis a few weekends ago on the way home from a screening event and happened to have our camera with us. So here are a few taken by the hubby. He's proud of his photography skills!

This is a cute little church toward the edge of the city, so small compared to all the other buildings near by.

We have no clue what this castle-esque building actually is, so if anyone knows please comment so we can figure it out. It was really cool! We couldn't find a sign on the building as we drove by, but we're thinking maybe city hall?

Some cool sky scrapers

This was the best picture we could get of the construction of the new outdoor Twins stadium that's set to open next year. They've made tons of progress in just the last month alone!

This one's really cool -- very artsy, Dave!

Think that's about it for now. OH YEAH! Happy birthday TODAY, 4/6, to Craig B., Ashley's husband!!

Hope you don't work to hard today, Craig! Give Dally a kiss and hug from both of us!

Sorry for such a long post! We'll be better in the future, promise!


- Elise

April Birthdays!

It's a new month and that means a new string of birthdays!

First off, it is Mr. Eric V's birthday today! (The "V" is to differentiate our brothers, as we both have an Eric!) Happy birthday, Eric V! Hope you had a fun surprise party last weekend (thrown by loving girlfriend Holly). Sorry we couldn't be there, but hope you are still enjoying you birthday present from December time.

We hope all of you with upcoming April birthdays have a GREAT DAY! And a happy Easter to all our readers!

Eric Vertin - April 4th

Eric with Dave and Elise (we were pretending to be his proud parents at his high school graduation in 2007)


Melissa Schwartz - April 7th

(Just like Eric S, we don't have any pictures of you, Melissa!!)

Joel Vertin - April 15th (Tax Day)

Joel and Dave at Joel's 23rd birthday party 2 years ago


Joe Schwartz - April 17th

Joe with his lovely wife Angela and daughter Eva (Looking forward to seeing you all soon!!!)


Becky Wagner - April 19th

Sorry for the side shot -- hope you have a relaxing birthday!!


Kevin Wagner - April 21st

Kevin being himself. <3


Nick P. - April 27th

Sorry for not having a better pic of you, Nick (on the left)!

- Dave and Elise

Birth, Birthdays, Death.

First of all, I forgot to include this in our last post -- Zack and Johanna had their baby boy on Wednesday evening, February 25th. Congrats to the newlyweds on their first addition to the family! I don't have his weight and measurements, so feel free to include those as a comment to this post!

Henry Dean Stout
picture courtesy of Chris

There are quite a few more birthdays coming up in the next few weeks, so just wanted to wish all of those people a happy day!

Allison K's birthday, a friend here from the Cities, celebrates on 3/3!

Allison and her daughter Ocean dressed up for Halloween '08

Eric Schwartz celebrates on 3/6!

(We need some pictures of you, Eric!:)

Jake S, another friend from the Cities, celebrates on 3/9!

Jake (on far left) with Vern, Dave and me

Elsa Schwartz celebrates on 3/11!

The lovely Elsa

Johanna Stout celebrates on 3/19!

Johanna - the new mom!

and Melissa Wagner (the cutie in our January 13 post) celebrates on 3/22!

Missy Melissy

So there are A LOT of March birthdays! We hope each of you have a GREAT day!!

Lastly, a friend of ours, Larry, passed away on Sunday in Houghton. Dave and I enjoyed visiting him, his wife Lorraine and their dog Josey for dinner and good conversations. Please pray for Lorraine and the rest of their family. We know you'll be strong Lorraine..we'll miss him too. Rest in peace Larry. We love you.


- Elise

Happy Birthday Dad S!

Wayne's birthday was yesterday (technically on Feb 29th, but he still had a party yesterday!) Dave and I hope you had a GREAT birthday!!



For today, we don't have too much planned. Had a pretty lazy weekend I guess. Last night, Dave, Nick and I went to see Slumdog Millionaire at the theater -- which was amazing by the way! We recommend anyone go to see it! We had tried to get in there a few weeks ago, but it was sold out. Instead we went to see Revolutionary Road (*yawn*), which was quite depressing.. Slumdog is a much better choice. We can see why it won best picture and all the other Oscars this year!

Then this afternoon, we went to the Original Pancake House for the first time ever with Nick and his parents, Mike and Sam. They came to visit Nick for the afternoon. It was so nice to meet them and spend some time getting to know them. And we're now hooked on the OPH (for short). Especially Dave, who had Nick and Mike's favorite -- the baked apple pancake. It's huge. It's delicious. Enough said. Try it your next time there!

I'm just about to head out to babysit for a Burnsville family for the rest of the night. And Dave's going out to study with Vernon somewhere for the rest of the night..

On that note, we have a few pictures to share with you. Finally we took pictures of the city!! These are of Minneapolis. We took them on our drive home from the Freeze Your Bunz Run a couple weekends ago.

The city with the Metrodome!

This is the newly finished I-35W bridge! You see the wave going up to the sky -- this is a memorial for the lives lost on the bridge collapse. They light up in blue florescent at night.

Just a general Minneapolis city picture.

We love living here!!!


- Elise

Our Birthdays Extravaganza

So, when I asked Dave about posting his skinny, he said he's still "getting to it." It'll be done probably this weekend -- don't worry, he didn't forget. Just has a lot of stuff going on last and this week! Busy busy boy!

This past weekend was SO much fun! Our Birthdays Extravaganza was a complete success! We rented the clubhouse at our apartment complex (which turned out to be completely free in the end!) and had 22 friends over for dinner, drinks and games.

We tried to have an all-natural and organic meal. We were successful except for the cakes! We wanted to do a pasta meal, so I made three different types for some variety. We had Vodka Sauce over whole wheat pasta, Bachamel Sauce with chicken and roasted bell peppers over whole wheat pasta, and Cheese Stuffed Jumbo Shells with a homemade spaghetti sauce over top. And a green salad and roasted garlic bread on the side. Jenna and Marcus were brought a fruit salad to round out the meal. It was all so good!! There were little leftovers.. And for the cakes, I made Dave a 5 layer Black Forest cake and just a simple yellow cake with chocolate frosting for me. We just finised the last of the cakes last night. Yummo!

Thanks to Amanda for taking all of the pictures for us!! We forgot our camera in our apartment. Luckily Amanda came prepared and was so nice to post the pictures for us the next day! We appreciate it!!!

Nicole and Shane struggling to light the candles. :)

The rendition of "Happy Birthday" wasn't necessarily the best we've heard.. but it was thoughtful none the less!

Make a wish! Dave is 24 and Elise 22

We followed up dinner with a great game of Partini.
Who know it would be such a fun time! We'll definitely be playing it again in the future. For those who haven't tried it yet, we highly recommend! It's sort of like Cranium, only better! And it's made for play with large or small groups. There are various types of mini games to play, like in Cranium, but it's an all out contest between boys and girls as to who wins the overall game. And it's especially fun with wine and beer. :)

And we just want to say T H A N K Y O U to everyone who celebrated with us, who wished us a happy birthday and who were most generous with gifts this year. A special thanks must go out to Mom V, Mom & Dad S, Aunt Mary & Uncle Dave, Aunt Debi, Aunt Claudia, Aunt Rebekah, Joel, Allison and Vern, Nick E, Amanda and Loretta!!! To each of you: thank you so much for everything you did to make our birthdays so special! We loved everything!

So I must brag about the gifts we got eachother. Since we didn't get eachother Christmas gifts this year, we decided to get eachother small birthday gifts. Now I thought small meant $40 or less, so I spent a few months researching some really neat but affordable gifts. First, I got Dave a set of Dominos with the game Mexican Train -- because every year we spend Thanksgiving with Scott and Laura and Scott's grandma brings her Mexican Train game with her. LOVE it! Dave was surprised to get that gift. But, I also got him a mini speaker for his iPod: http://www.vat19.com/dvds/ipod-lego-dock-speakers.cfm?adid=gbase. Now, you can get these on just about any electronics site, but this one has the cheapest price I could find -- just $19.95!! That's right, super affordable!! And the quality is amazing for what you pay. It's basically the only thing of its kind out there right now, and yes it's in the shape of a Lego, but soon they'll probably be coming out with different models..? It's a cordless and battery-less speaker, about the size of AA battery or a standard Lego. The sound output is great! The speaker has its own adjustable volume besides the volume on your iPod, so you have lots of control. I wanted to share it with all of you because it's a great idea for anyone who owns an iPod!

And for my birthday gift from Dave..he apparently assumed small gift meant, more litterally, small...because he got me an iPod!! Joel went in on it with him, but holy crap I was so suprised! He took me out to dinner on my birthday and presented me with a gift card to the Apple store. I about cried from excitement. He knows how badely I have wanted one for, oh, years! We went to pick one out on his birthday (Saturday) and I chose the green iPod Nano. Loving it so far! It's nice to have it for when I'm cleaning houses or working out. Thank you so much Dave!

Hopefully Dave will be posting again this weekend. I'll get on his case. He's actually suffering from a 4-day weekend since it's his school's homecoming right now. So..we'll see. Hope you all have a fantastic weekend!!


- Elise

Happy Birthday Brother Phlap!

Happy 21st Birthday to MATTHEW tomorrow!

We'll be traveling all day tomorrow, so we wanted to wish you a great birthday today while we have the chance. Hope you can take a break from classes, work and studying to relax a little bit, Matt!

So tomorrow morning we're leaving for a chiropractic seminar in Orlando, Florida. We'll be back Sunday evening. We cannot wait to get out of this cold weather for a long weekend! Now I just need to get about 5 loads of laundry done and pack our suitcases! :)