40 Day Renewal

Austin is officially 6 months old today!  What a big boy!  He is happily jumping in his Jumperoo, looking outside, and gnawing on his fingers.  I'm sure we've got similar weather to you, unseasonably warm and beautiful.  We'll definitely be going for a walk this afternoon to soak up the gorgeous rays!  If you were here, you'd see us looking like this walking down the street:

I think I forgot to mention last time about Dave's latest project to help our community.  He is co-hosting, along with our pastors, a 40 Day Renewal series at our church.  It goes through the 40 days of Lent.  You can check out the daily blog here to take part (sorry I dropped the ball, we're already on day 22, but it is never too late to make changes to bring you closer to God!).  While it is about losing weight and regaining health (or whatever changes you need to make in your life - meditating more often, reading your Bible, talking to God, organizing your weeks, etc), it also isn't at the same time.  The bigger focus is on your "Big Why" and the changes that need to be made to renew your focus and bring it all back to God.  We're also diving into what is your Purpose.  Why are you here?  You can read about that at the bottom of each daily post.   Hope you can plug in!  We've got people from all over the world taking part -- it's really neat to see the impact that can be made from what started as just an idea earlier this year.

While the little man is occupied for a few more minutes, I just wanted to upload a few recent videos we took of him.  Hope you enjoy!  He has changed so much since the last round of videos were shared.  And thank you for the emails last week, loved to catch up with some of you guys!  Lots of changes for so many great families in the last year.  :)!  What an exciting spring and summer to come!

 

Austin is about 3 months old here.  This was the first time he really had an all-out giggle fest.  Our friend Justin is facilitating the giggles.

 

4 months old

5 months  -  learning to crawl

  

5 months -- ready for a nap, slap happy

5 months  -  night of his baptism

Healing Cuisine

Hi All!

I wanted to introduce you all to my new blog dedicated to food and fun!  I launched what I've titled Healing Cuisine after Dave and I started eating a more healing diet this past fall.  I needed something to keep me focused while we transitioned into this lifestyle.  While we're still learning and experimenting with new foods, I am also constantly getting questions on foods and ingredients, meal planning, and all the whys that go along with eating foods by God.  So this is my effort to help educate my patients, friends, family (and anyone else who takes a peek) of the importance and power of eating.  I have about a dozen of my recipes posted so far and look forward to sharing more!  Healing Cuisine is about all natural cooking with foods that were put on this earth for you to thrive on.  My goal is to bring a whole new meaning to healthy eating for a better YOU, a better life and better planet.  Check it out:  http://healingcuisine-elise.blogspot.com/.  I just finished my Valentine's Day three course menu!  If you try the recipes, let me know what you think!  And I'm always looking for tips and advice, too, so please please share if you have some insight to a recipe or topic!

Read it and eat!  :)

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