Meet the Shaneyfelts

memories

A Saturday Tour of Belle Chèvre Creamery

Happy Monday, friends!  
Today marks the official one month countdown until the last day of school for students 🙌🙌  I know that this last month is going to fly by, and then we’ll be heading into summer vacation!  I know I sound like I’m wishing my life away this last month of school, but I’m just really excited about what this summer holds for lots of reasons…and I’ve got some plans for this blog, too!

All last week I had been looking forward to the surprise date that Dustin was planning for us on Saturday.  He’s such a great husband, but he’s not great at planning dates.  Because of this, I was so excited to see what he planned.  He told me to be ready to leave the house by 9:30 that morning.  It turns out he had been listening to me talk about how I wanted to take a tour of a local goat cheese creamery and had booked us an 11 AM tour.  I was ecstatic! 

I don’t have many pictures of the tour because I wasn’t sure if pictures were allowed, but if you’re ever in north Alabama, I recommend a tour and tasting at Belle Chèvre!

The creamery is located inside of an old cotton storehouse.



Dustin snapped this as I was coming out of the bathroom.  Don’t I look so excited?

Behind that wooden and glass door in the background is the area where they make and package the cheese.  There are only 5 people employed by the creamery and they rotate jobs sometimes, so not all 5 people are always making cheese.  We got to watch them make a pimiento cheese spread and it’s one of the popular ones.

The tour also included a history of the building, seeing some of the goats that provide milk for the creamery (and petting them!), and a video on the current president’s history with the company.  

The tour ended with a tasting of all their products, so obviously this was my favorite part since I love goat cheese.  Their spreads are their most popular and we tasted original, coffee, pimiento, cinnamon, fig, and honey.  Then we also tasted the log and a cheesecake made with goat’s milk.


 We walked over to the restaurant for lunch and both enjoyed a sandwich with goat cheese. Dustin got a pimento cheese BLT and I got a grilled turkey with honey spread.



Our fun little date ended with a trip to Starbucks for my favorite drink of the moment: cinnamon almond milk machiatto.
Linking up with Biana

#MeetTheShaneyfelts: Pre-Ceremony

I’m back with another wedding post!  These have been so fun to create because I’m enjoying going back through the pictures.  

To see our proposal, click here.
To see the rehearsal dinner, click here.

We were married on Saturday, July 26, 2014–so cliche but literally the most beautiful day.  I wasn’t too worried about the weather that day since both our ceremony and reception were inside.  All of our pictures were scheduled to be outside, but I knew we could always do pictures inside the sanctuary since it was really pretty, too.

What I was worried about was fitting into my dress!  I had so many nightmares about my dress not zipping up on wedding day to where I tried my dress on almost everyday before the wedding.  It also didn’t help that I ended up having so many fittings for my dress because they were also having a hard time fitting it to my body perfectly–in hindsight, if I had to do it all over again, I kind of wish I would have chosen a different dress–maybe something that wasn’t strapless.  I could go on and on about my dress, but I won’t for your sake 😜

The morning of the wedding, my bridesmaids, my mom, future mother-in-law, and I all met at the hair salon.  While everyone was getting their hair and make up done, my best friend’s mom (basically my 2nd mom) provided breakfast for us AND pimiento cheese which is my favorite!  I had the best morning hanging out with my girls before we had to be at the church at noon.

The following pictures were taken once we got to the church to start getting dressed for pictures.  Dustin and I chose to get pictures taken before the ceremony and I’m so glad we did!  I’ll share those in the next post.


 Lounging around waiting on someone to tell us it was time to get dressed



 My mom had a gift she wanted to give me before everything started.



 I know my mom looks super happy in this picture, but she’s really holding back tears 😊  She started crying right after I hugged her 😘😘 Love you, Mom!



 The guys had the tiniest room to get ready in, but they made do 😀



 My handsome groom trying to figure out the buttons on his top.  I was very particular about having the black buttons on the tuxes–Dustin probably could have cared less ha!



 My mom made sure we had plenty of food in our room before the wedding, and I’m not sure if even half of it was eaten.  Everyone did make me eat a piece of turkey before walking down the aisle to make sure I had some energy haha!



 Rachel took Dustin his gift



 And Dustin’s brother Wes brought me my gift…does the blue box look familiar?  😜😍



 And then I had to put on my glasses in order to read his letter to me–to have young eyes again ha!



 My mom pinned her mom’s (my grandmother who is now deceased) cameo to an under layer on my dress.  It served as my something old and something borrowed (which I got to keep!).  My something new was my dress and my something blue was my bridesmaids!  They wore blue gowns.



This was the first time I got to see myself!!  I’ll just go ahead and say, everything about my wedding day was perfect, and I cannot wait to share it with y’all!


Linking up with Jenn and Shelly

#MeetTheShaneyfelts: The Proposal

I started blogging a few months after Dustin and I married, so I never got to blog about our engagement or all of the festivities surrounding our wedding.  Our engagement took me by surprise (kind of) and so if I would have had any clue about it, I would have worn a different outfit haha!

To give you a bit of history, Dustin was still living and working in southern Mississippi by the time our relationship got serious and we were ready to take the next step.  Because of his job field in wildlife science, jobs in this area weren’t readily available.  We I had had lots of talks about getting engaged, and I offered to move to MS after we married to teach there (but inside praying he would say no), and he told me to keep my job since it was in such a great school system (hallelujah!) and that he wanted to move back home anyway because all of our friends and family are still in this area.

I’ll never forget the date of our engagement.  It was June 15 and I had texted my old college minister the news of Kim Kardashian’s daughter, North, being born, and I was going to tell Dustin whenever he got back into town from attending a men’s conference with his church.  #noshameinmyloveforkim

I was expecting to get engaged that summer, but I just knew it wouldn’t happen on Father’s Day weekend for 2 reasons:  Dustin was gone Friday night and most of Saturday.  And Sunday was Father’s Day so I knew we’d be apart spending the day with our dad’s.  Plus, since he still lived in MS, he’d be driving back down there Sunday evening.  I told myself that there was no way he would propose because I would assume he’d want to spend the majority of the weekend with me.  Apparently not.

But one thing did kind of tip me off to something….that Friday night I spent the night with my friend Lindsey and her little girl because her husband was with Dustin at the men’s conference.  So when I got home to my parent’s house that morning, my mom had steamed a dress for me.  Umm what?!  She never did stuff like that!  I had been texting with Dustin that morning to confirm our date plans that night after his nephew’s birthday, and he said we weren’t going anywhere fancy, so I told my mom that I was just wearing shorts and a tank.  Not that dress.  Then my mom and my sister came into my room to talk me into wearing the dress.  If you know me, you know I like dressing up and it doesn’t bother me to be overdressed somewhere, so it made sense that I wear the dress.

Fast forward a few hours, Dustin got to his nephew’s birthday party late and we ended up leaving it (after he finished watching some baseball game which caused us to be behind schedule 😡) and ran to his parents’ for him to change clothes.  He came out of the house on the phone to his mom talking to her about her cell phone that she lost.  He told me that she said she was down by the pond earlier that day and must have lost it there.  (Side note: Dustin’s parents, brother, and Dustin all have tracts of land next to one another…the pond was on Dustin’s land.)

He wanted me to go with him to look for it.  I told him no, that’d I’d wait on him at the house because I had on a dress.  Then he told me that we’d drive out that way so I had to come with him.  When we got to the pond, I told him I’d just wait in the truck (since I had on a dress) and he could look.  Looking back at this, I know he was probably sweating since I wasn’t following his plan haha!  He said we’d find the phone faster if both of us were looking, so after getting out of the truck, I told him it’d be better if we split up around the pond.  

That’s when he moved me to a certain spot and then told me a bunch of sweet stuff that I don’t remember before he got down on one knee!
He had set up a game camera to capture the proposal since he knew I didn’t want people hiding out taking pictures.  I’m checking out my ring above and the donkey wants in on the action, too!!

Dustin chose to propose on his land because we’ll build a house there someday and he knew we’d want that memory 😍

After he proposed, I knew I’d call my mom and then assumed we’d still go out to eat.  (I was really hungry at this point!)  Then he told me that we needed to go tell my mom in person.  My mom and step-dad’s house was 30 minutes out of the way, so I was complaining about being late to eat.  As we topped the hill to their house, I saw a ton of cars and instantly knew that he had planned an engagement party!!  He told all of our friends that they were there for a different reason so none of them knew we had gotten engaged.  It was so fun to be able to surprise everyone there that night!!

He had us a cookie cake to celebrate since he knows cookie cake is my absolute favorite!


And I pulled this off FB from my bff’s page–little did she know that she would be engaged less than a year later!!