family

Family Pictures

Monday, December 29, 2025

Happy Monday! It’s the last week of 2025 and I realized that I never shared our family pictures that I used for our Christmas cards! My sister, who is also a photographer, took our pictures one Sunday afternoon in her front yard and they turned out perfectly!

Dustin and I just grabbed clothes from our closet and Harrison’s shirt is actually one I bought him last year that was on major sale from The Oaks Apparel. Everything else came from our favorite local children’s boutique, The Robin’s Nest! (Click on that link and you might see some familiar faces modeling the cutest clothes 😉

Now I just need to print a few of these pictures and get them hung up in the house!

This was on the front of our Christmas card!

Christmas Happies

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Happy Tuesday! It’s TWO days until Christmas!! This Christmas season has flown by (as it always does), so I’m soaking up the last couple of days watching all of the Christmas movies and listening to all of the Christmas music and doing anything Christmasy I can 🙂

Today I wanted to share a couple of things we’ve done this Christmas season that’s made me happy!

Our town’s annual Christmas parade is always a highlight. I have such fond memories of going for as long as I can remember–and I was even in the parade one year! This year we met up with my mom, my sister and her family, and my BIL and SIL and all watched the parade together. Fun fact: Growing up, my grandfather owned a butcher shop downtown and he used to park his truck right in front of his shop, and my sister and I and our cousins would get to be in the back of his truck and watch the parade go by right in front of us. It was always so much fun!

I find so much joy in dressing my kids, and I love a reason to dress them for a theme. I LOVE dressing them for the Christmas season, and I’ve really enjoyed putting their outfits together each Sunday morning. (Merritt has ornaments on her dress and Banks has holly embroidered on his top)

Each year, our church has Nine Lessons and Carols on a Sunday evening. Using Scripture, we go through the story of creation, the fall, and redemption and each reading is interspersed with a song–usually a carol. We always end in candlelight. This was also the first year the babies joined us in the service and it went so much better than I expected! They did really well and even had electric candles for their use during the candlelight time.

A really fun thing about having school-aged children is having class Christmas parties to attend! Harrison’s was lots of fun this year and my mom was even able to go!

We recently did our Shaneyfelt Christmas Light Drive By this year. We wore our Christmas jammies and grabbed a treat from Starbucks and drove around looking at Christmas lights. When I was little, we did this every Christmas night, but now we do this before Christmas.

I found this memory the other day!!!

We always go to Polar Express day at the library and visit Santa. This year we learned that Merritt does not like Santa–along with all of the characters at Disney, firetrucks, and heights LOL

We also went and walked through the Galaxy of Lights in Huntsville again this year. This has been such a fun tradition, and it’s even sweeter now that we have kids. It took us an hour to walk through and then the babies slept the whole way home while Dustin and I sang to Christmas music 🙂

Today we plan on staying home and watching ALL THE CHRISTMAS MOVIES before we have our first family Christmas gathering tomorrow night. Merry Christmas!!

Disney World 2025 Part 2 (Rest Day, Magic Kingdom 2, Hollywood Studios)

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Today I’m back sharing part 2 of our Disney trip! To see my recap of Part 1, click here!

Traveling with young kids is always hard, but this trip was truly the best. I loved seeing them get so excited over things because it made me get so excited! We did a lot of Disney-themed family movie nights leading up to this trip, so the kids were more prepared to recognize characters and movie references–which upped their excitement! Harrison is still talking about all of the rides and Banks is still talking about the monorail ha!

I also want to give a shout out to our amazing Disney planner, Genny Slack. She was incredibly helpful–especially when I wanted to upgrade last minute–and gave us all the tips!

We slept in on Monday, September 22 and then drove over to Disney Springs to do some shopping. We went to the big Disney store first and let the kids pick out a toy! Toy Story is a huge favorite in our house, so Banks picked Buzz and Merritt picked Woody and then Harrison got his toy the previous day at Animal Kingdom (Simba). We walked around and explored and I ended up getting 2 new tops from Lululemon 🙂

We at lunch at Chicken Guy and then headed back to our resort to go to the splash pad!

All 5 of us had a great time playing in the splash pad! The pool area was great too, but we stuck to the splash pad since the babies were so young, and it was a good size too.

We cleaned up for dinner, hopped on the monorail, and went to the Polynesian to have dinner at O’Hana!

I took this after and Merritt was tired!

The next day we were going back to Magic Kingdom and we were all so excited about this day because…

OUR BEST FRIENDS WERE THERE!!!!!

Janie’s oldest daughter is exactly one year younger than Harrison, and her youngest daughter is 4 weeks younger than Merritt!

When we first started planning this trip, we originally had fall break week booked (this week haha!). But then Disney put out a discount for trips booked in September, so Genny ran the numbers and when we saw how much money we could save by moving our trip up a couple of weeks, we jumped on it! Then I casually mentioned to my best friend, Janie, how “cheap” our trip ended up being and how they should come, too. She talked to her husband that night and the next day said yes!!! Our dates didn’t line up perfectly due to work schedules, but we at least scheduled 2 parks days together–this MK day and then the next day at Hollywood Studios!!

We both signed up for Lightning Lanes for the trip and then an app that automatically booked the other LL for us, so we didn’t have to stay on our phones. We booked lots of rides to do together, and Harrison even rode Space Mountain with Abigail and Chris!

We were so happy to be back together! (Fun fact: We’ve been best friends since I was 15 and Janie was 14, and then we even lived together for 3 years in college!)

I’ll be using this picture on their wedding slideshow haha!

We were so excited to eat lunch at Be Our Guest! It was so good!

We like rides where we can all ride together, and Dustin finally got to ride Pirates!

This was the one character that didn’t make Merritt cry!

Banks wanted her to sign his autograph book after he finished writing in it himself haha!

We rode a TON of rides and then went back to our resort and ate quick service again there!

The next day…

We went to Hollywood Studios and since we had early entry, we rushed to Toy Story Land so the big kids could rope drop Slinky Dog Dash!!! The line looks super long, but it moved so fast once they opened the ride. And early entry was key for our family since we’re up early all the time anyway!

Harrison loved is despite the picture haha

The sun was bright!

Poor Eloise was a little too short for this ride, so she and Janie watched all of us.

They were so excited to see the Incredibles characters since our room was The Incredibles themed, and they had watched it in the car on the drive down.

We took an inside breat at the Disney Jr area on the last day it was open. If you saw my IG story of this, Merritt was getting down until she noticed Doc McStuffins dancing like her and that upset her lol

This was a dream come true for the boys! And Banks is showing us his teeth 🙂

Because of our family’s obsession with Toy Story, we were so excited about lunch at the Rodeo Roundup.

IT WAS SO GOOD!!!! We all talked and decided it might be our favorite food of the entire trip. And we loved the ambiance of the restaurant and how we had to “freeze” if we heard Andy was coming–the kids were really into that. I highly recommend this restaurant!