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

More Videos

Videos of the Little Man

Happy Thanksgiving!!  Hope you are all enjoying the break from work to take time with family and (hopefully) good food!  We are doing our first Thanksgiving for just us, no friends or fam this year.  It's kind of fun so far, but we would love to be near family today.  We are doing an Advanced Plan dinner this year, and we decided to skip lunch and eat a later meal today, around 5pm.  I also decided to wait and make everything fresh today.  So far hasn't been a bad decision, even though I could have made just about everything the night before and baked today.  I was in the kitchen for three hours so far making breakfast, side dishes and dessert.  Taking a break now, then just two more hours to go and our meal is complete and ready to eat!  I'm only using two recipes from my Season's Eatings holiday cookbook, the rest are new and will be posted on Healing Cuisine in the next week or two.  The menu at Chez Schwartz:  Individual Cornish Hens with Dijon Mustard Herb Glaze, Homemade Gravy, Garlic Mashed Fotatoes, Caramelized Sweet Potatos, Green Bean Casserole, Sunshine Broccoli Salad, and Blueberry Crumble.  And we had Baked Apples with Praline Whipped Cream and Pumpkin Muffins for breakfast.

Can you tell I'm excited about today's meal??  :)  Go figure.  Always excited to try a new recipe and make it "Advanced"!  Dave is playing Mr. Mom today and doing a fabulooous job!  We can tell Austin is loving his extra Daddy time.

As requested by Grandma, we wanted to share some videos of Austin.  He is growing up so quickly!  He turned 2 months old this past weekend.  The weeks have certainly flown by.  He is getting chubby and starting to giggle and coo now.  His temper is also starting to show when we move or stop bouncing him, anything he doesn't want to do.  Dave reminds me, while it might not be fun at times, we are blessed with an independent child from the start.  Here is the first video, more to come as i have the time to upload them...maybe later tonight or tomorrow.

We are so grateful for Austin, and all of God's blessings onto us this last year!!  Lamentation 3:22-24:  The faithful love of the Lord never ends!  His mercies never cease.  Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.  I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

A Suprise Party: Congrats and Farewell Dave!

I can finally talk about it!  For the last four months or so I had been planning a top secret surprise graduation and farewell party for Dave.  We held it on Saturday afternoon, July 31st.  Family and friends came from ALL over to attend and aide in the surprise! :)

Dave's official graduation date will be November 19th, 2010.  But with the chance that we won't even be attending the graduation due to his final externship dates and the risk of poor driving conditions come the fall, I figured it'd be best to throw him a party now rather than wait til who knows when.

And so the planning began.  I'll spare you all the behind the scenes details of decorations and site selection.  The biggest challenge was getting Dave out of the area for the night of the 30th so I could take over the apartment and cook up a storm.  I developed a few plans with various friends...all day golf outing, holding a garage sale, back to back movies at the theater..but none got him out of the apartment overnight.  Then I talked to Chris (Dave's brother Chris) and he thought of taking Dave camping for the Fri-Sat.  Perfect!  And to solidify his story even more, there was a triathlon in Bemidji on Saturday morning.  How perfect was that??  Well, Chris is a trainer and regularly does triathlons!  So he called Dave to make the "plans", signed up, and off they went to Bemidji.  What a trooper Chris was!  Not only did he run the triathlon and got first in his age division (!!!), but they also got rained and poured on Friday night AND had a gallon of water leak all over the floor of the car.  The video below is all of Chris's hard work to keep the secret paying off....it is Dave and Chris arriving straight from their 4 hour drive home.  And thank you to all who helped behind the scenes, most of it I still haven't had a chance to tell Dave about!  I had a ton of help from family and friends all around!  Thank you to everyone who pitched in before and after!  It was definitely a group effort!  And we did it!!  Dave was successfully SURPRISED beyond belief.  Check the video.  Joel's behind the camera.  My favorite part is the high five between Chris and him.

For this party (and any future party of ours) I vowed to make a complete spread of Healing Cuisine foods, meaning ALL of our family and friends could eat (organic, sugar free, grain free, gluten free, dairy free, etc).  Well, with the exception of the cake.  I wasn't about to open my kitchen to making a completely gluten free/sugar free cake for over 100 people AND deal with the stress of keeping the surprise from my hunny..!!  As the party got rolling, all of my creations were a hit!  I love to make people happy and help them realize healthy eating can be absolutely delicious!  If you were looking for a recipe from the party, I've begun posting them every other day for the next two weeks!

Here are a few pictures that our friend Kenny took.  If anyone has any others, please send them or tag us!  I forgot my camera in all the rush!

Walking in to the room full of loved ones.  Shocked..Eyes welling up!

A thank you hug!

Some of the kitchen ladies!  My mom and aunts headed up the food set up and refilling!  FABulous job ladies!!

Hugs for his fans.. :-P

His cakes:  vanilla and carrot!

 

Suzy, Dave, Elise, Paul, baby Sophia and Christina!

 

Us with Kenny  <3  Our party photographer!

To those that weren't able to attend, we missed you!  There were so many faces Dave asked about, and I shared all of your emails, letters and voice messages with him!!  We are SO BLESSED to have a strong support system!!

And aside from the party and pictures, an update on our phone situation.  We've decided to go without phones for at least the next 4 months (thru Jan 2011).  This is mostly because Dave is leaving for Canada the end of the month and, gosh, Canadian service is thru the roof!  We've also been super cutting back on spending for the past two years...this is another way to save each month and put money into savings for opening up in NORTH CAROLINA!  Did I mention that part yet?  In our last post...but in case you didn't hear, it's NC for sure baby! :)  Book your winter vacations in advance.  Our spare room will fill up fast! haha

Love you all!  XO!

Saturday Morning Activity with Dave

So there had been this pile of sheets sitting on our livingroom floor for about a week. I was planning to wash them this weekend, and as I gathered them up on Saturday morning, Dave said, "Wait, those are clean!" I looked at him, confused as to why these clean sheets were even on the floor, let alone why he let them sit there for this entire week. He said, "Well I don't know how to fold them! That's YOUR job." So here's how to educate your husband on the how-tos of fitted sheet folding and a perfect example of how to shatter the gap between "wife only" chores and "husband only" chores. Teach them how! It goes both ways, like how Dave taught me how to use the drill when we moved in, and while he was at school I was able to hang up shelves and put together wedding gifts. Enjoy the video! :) - E

Oklahoma and Texas Wednesday-Monday

Wow, sorry for our delay in posting and this post's lack of pictures! Dave and I have been quite busy here in Texas! We're currently driving from Dallas to Amarillo. We'll be staying with Dr. Eric Narrell and his family tonight and tomorrow night. We're looking forward to a fun couple days with their family!

So where do I need to pick up... On Wednesday we left Kansas and headed for Oklahoma. Dr. Georgia's office was pretty sweet. She is currently doing some construction/updates to the layout of her office to make the flow better, so it was neat to see that process in the works. She also had a lot of unique products as she is highly trained in nutrition and detox. And she is a very practiced adjuster, having studied several of the different techniques out there. We're happy to have stopped by her office in Wichita! We ended up camping in Wichita Wednesday night then headed out in the morning for Tulsa, OK. We stopped by Dr. Lance Bailey's office in Tulsa, which was also pretty sweet. He uses a mixture of techniques in his office as well, so it was good for us to see, in two different offices, how using a mix is quite possible and more productive for the patients.

While in Wichita, we had a few hours to kill before Dr. Lance's opened up, so we decided to GPS some parks close by so we could lay out in the 90 degree weather and sun. Dave picked out one called Swan Lake Park. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? Well, unfortunately we didn't bring our camera from the car when we got there, but it was possibly one of the coolest parks we've ever been to, and it was right in the middle of a residential area, houses all around it. Basically there was this random lake (more like a large pond, not too too big) which had a fence around it. There were walking trails all along the fencing, so we just started walking thinking it was just a lake with fountains in it shaped like swans. As we walked along, all kind of cool animals and plants showed up. First we saw the real swans. There were only a few, but they were so beautiful! There was a family of ducks, most were mallards, but one was just like the Aflac duck. Pretty cute! We made it to one end of the lake, and from a distance I saw these long orange figures in the water.. I pointed and asked Dave what they were. We had no clue, so we got closer. They were these H U G E goldfish! HUGE! I'm talking like the size of a salmon or something. There were at least 4 of them that we could see, who knows how many more populated that lake. That's what we wanted to take pictures of for you all to see, but the car was so far away at this point in our walk. We also saw a gray heron, tons of turtles, and some normal minnows and larger pond fish. All in just a couple miles worth of habitat. It was quite a cool park! If you're ever in Wichita, look it up! You'll enjoy the walk. :)

After hanging out at Dr. Lance's for a few hours, we grabbed lunch at this AMAZING pizza place, local to Tulsa. So delicious, thanks for the recommendation Dr. Lance! Then, we headed right out of OK for Texarkana, TX. We decided we wanted to avoid all the tolls around here, so we set the GPS to avoid tolls and took off on the back roads through Kansas and OK. Let me say it was pretty darn cool! We were able to see real ranches, like what you see in movies. Also a ton of free range cattle, horses, sheep...so cool! We did stop for gas at a quite shady station in this uber small rundown town. True southerners with thick accents, walking around in overalls with no shirts, and carrying beer in both hands. We live to tell about it though, and the $1.75 price tag for our 11 gallons of unleaded.

We spent Thursday at Dr. Randy John's office. Amazing! Eye-opening! Wow! His office is yet another one we will be striving to meet or beat when we open our own. We not only spent the day there, but he also let us sit in on a training session with him and his staff as well as watch his Doctor's Report. Just an amazing chiropractor who knows so much and is totally on the mission to bring real health to the world.

We stopped at a park in Texarkana to kill some time.




This might be a little more Generation Y oriented, but who remembers Land Before Time (the original, not parts 2-16! lol)?? Just pretend I'm Littlefoot!

Our own Tree Star!

We camped out in Texarkana for two nights then headed to Dallas on Friday morning. We were a little behind schedule and ended up missing Dr. Rob Vasquez's office hours, so we didn't get to shadow him at all. But we at least got to stop in the office and see his layout and unique office ideas. We decided to bump Saturday's plans up to Friday, so we spent the day with Dr. David and Dr. Kimberly Erb who are also right in Dallas. Their office had a bit more laid back feel to it than most of the others we'd been to so far on our trip, but we really liked it. They had a unique layout to the office, so the flow from when patients walk in the door, do their rehab and finally get adjusted was a bit different than what we're used to. It was definitely interesting to see and gave us some ideas for our plans.

This is an experiment being conducted at Dr. Erb's office. The sign is pretty self explanatory. Let's just say this is why Dave and I have committed to never eating from McDonalds again (or any fastfood joint for that matter). This experiment started in May 2007. Gross! There wasn't a spot of mold or decomposition of any kind (believe me, Dave touched it all to see!)

We had originally planned to camp in Dallas Friday and Saturday nights, but some how Dave remembered that our friend Colton, who is the Maximized Living President at Parker Chiropractic College, lives right in the area. So he called Colton and he was happy to let us spend the weekend with him. He lives alone so no biggy. It was fun to catch up with him! Hadn't seen him since January!

Driving through Dallas, we drove past the Dallas Cowboy's stadium. (We also just drove past the Texas Motor Speedway on our way toward Amarillo, where NASCAR races are held. Didn't have a chance for a picture though, but it was quite cool to see a speedway in person. They're a lot bigger than you'd think!)

The presidents from Life Chiropractic College's ML club, Blake and Ricky, were also going to be in town, ironically, to do some screening for Dr. Rob. Dave and I were also supposed to screen for Dr. Rob, so all four of the presidents from three different chiro schools were together for this screening yesterday. The five of us screened in 57 individual people! That is an amazing number -- LOTS OF LIVES SAVED YESTERDAY! We were pretty pumped after that, so we went out to celebrate last night. Good times guys, good times. Haven't laughed so hard in a looong time! It was so good to see you all again!

We made a swing by Parker's campus on Saturday after screening. Nothing too exciting there, but this is a statue of the late Dr. Parker.

I think that brings us up to present time, still driving toward Amarillo. The GPS just said "Continue 210 miles." Ouch. We'll arrive around 6pm CST.

Looking forward to the Colorado Seminar in just a few days!!!


- Elise

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter to our readers! We hope each of you have had an enjoyable and blessed Holiday!

We were part of the Kuznia clan this weekend. We joined Vernon, Allison, Ocean and Ezra for their Easter festivities!

On Saturday, we tagged along on their morning Easter Egg Hunt, which was actually held at the chiropractic school which Vern and Dave attend. It drew in hundreds of people! Below are some pictures from the day. It was a lot of fun to spend time with Ocean and Ezra and see all the kids having so much fun in sun! It was a gorgeous sunny day!

The day started with face painting!

Ocean showing off her glittery hopping bunny!

Ezra looking out at his field of eggs.




So this video is a little humorous. Dave wanted us to record the hunt take place, just to see what happened. First, let me explain how the Easter egg hunt actually started. There was a man on the loud speaker coordinating everything. He was supposed to yell "Ready, Set, GO!" when it was time to start. Well there was still about 4 minutes til the actual hunt was supposed to take place.. Kids were divided up in age groups, a huge square of grass per group. We were hanging out with Ezra in the 3-4 age group. So this family standing next to us was messing around with their 3 year old. They were saying "1-2-3 Start!" to him, and laughing about it when he actually ran out!! This of course created a massive chain reaction. Before you knew it, hundreds of kids in all of the age groups flew into their fields to fight for their eggs. It was chaos. So, I was a little thrown off at starting this video because I missed the "official" start. But I brought you to speed on the point in time when I did start taking the video. Then...I got lost. Literally. Hey, it's hard being short and in a mob of people. It took me a few minutes to find my peeps again!!

A pose with the Easter Bunny.

Poor Ezra was wiped out by the end of the day.

Today we headed to church this morning. This Easter was my turn for attending worship service, so we picked out a new church to visit just a few miles from our apartment. (There are actually quite a few Lutheran churches right near our place, so it's very convenient.) The service was very nice and full of color! It was the first Easter service that I've seen a huge array of spring flowers at! Normally I'm used to seeing white lilies in memory of loved ones, but this church did something really neat. They had the white lilies in memoriam and had colorful tulips, lilacs, irises, daisies, gladioli, etc in honor of living loved ones. I thought this was such a great idea. A lot of families were honoring their moms and grandmas who were probably at church with them. It was just so refreshing to see the church full of such life and color in the flowers! After all, Easter is to celebrate life!

After church we headed over to the Kuznia's for Easter brunch. It was so delicious Allison!! Thank you guys so much for having us again! We really enjoyed ourselves. After brunch, we played games with the kids and just relaxed. Later in the afternoon, Vernon, Allison, Dave and I went to see Adventureland at the theater. Allison's mom was visiting from Fargo, so she volunteered to take care of the kids while we were gone. All in all, it was a very relaxing and fun Easter for me. For Dave, on the other hand...he has 3 more final exams tomorrow, some more on Tuesday and just one on Wednesday. Poor guy. We got home and he immediately left to go study with Vern. I won't see him again until Wednesday probably. Alas...at least we have his spring break to look forward to in the coming week!

Again, wishing you all a HAPPY EASTER SEASON!


- Elise

Plants That Cleanse Your Air

So I came across this link from another blog we follow. It's on our beloved TED.com (amazing speeches and presentations. check it out sometime if you're bored!)

Dave and I have started our own little collection of indoor plants since getting married. So far we have two aloe plants, a spider plant, a bamboo (given to us by Amber!!) and some spiky one that we don't know what it's called. We've been hoping to add to the bunch, which are clustered around our sliding deck door. After running across this video, I think we will definitely be picking up these three types of plants this spring to help clean up and detoxify our air year round!



http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/490


Hope you find this video as informative and helpful as we did. It might be one of the simplest ways to create health in your life!


- Dave & Elise