Passion

The one thing I have learned in my life is to be passionate about what I do. If you do not wake up in the morning excited to start your day, looking forward to being productive in your job, accomplishing your goals and interacting with your co-workers then you are not passionate about it. Passion makes people do well in life. Passion leads to good child-rearing. Passion is using everything in your soul to accomplish something. Dictionary.com defines passion as:

·  Strong and barely controllable emotion.

·  A state or outburst of such emotion.

It's all about emotion and the drive you put behind that passion to develop something great. It's the most amazing thing to wake every morning and have so many ideas and be so excited about something so small. Who knew that the largest retail giant in the world would push my husband to be so passionate about something other than retail and help him decide that being your own boss was much better than being someone else’s. Who knew that something so small would invoke such passion in our children and make them just as excited as we are? Who knew that when we realized that we would only have one paycheck that it would all be ok and even brought our whole world back into perspective? We are so passionate about making our customers happy with the product that we have that we have worked almost 7 days a week for the last 2 months to assure that we can give you the best experience possible.

I am passionate about being a great mom, wife, nurse.

Joe is passionate about being a great dad and husband.

We are passionate about ice cream.

Holiday Spirit!

Lake Guntersville Ice Cream Shop is well on its way to getting ready for our customers!  I wish we had a 100 flavor dipping cabinet to serve everyone's favorites.  We are hoping for a big opening day in hopes that everyone can come out and try our ice cream. Creamy, smooth, rich delicious super-premium ice cream....!  The holiday's are around the corner and we want to be a part of your dessert plans by offering ice cream pies for your family, work or church gatherings. Cookie or graham cracker crusts with fresh ice cream, ho-made whipped cream and chocolate or caramel drizzled on top, yum!

Soon, we will add cakes to our menu which will be 2 layers of cake with creamy ice cream in the middle and butter cream frosting! We cannot wait!!  See you Saturday, December 3rd!

Joe, Kathleen, JD, Austin, Bronson and Madison

Hard work is, well....Hard!

I never imagined how much work went into starting a business.  From the first conversation my family had in the car from our trip to Massachusetts in July to now there has been reading, researching, traveling, tasting, more researching, talking, meeting, faxing, planning than I ever thought possible! Joe has been the best business partner I know, as well as a great best friend...we tend to disagree a lot while making decisions but know that in the end we will have made the best decisions through that process for our business to be successful!

If you could see my house right now, you would have an idea we were about to start something BIG.  We have all the recycled chairs, the large spoon (many of you saw during Halloween), boxes of this and that, cash registers, apron material, paper, vinyl and many other necessities needed for our shop that fill up our home!  Now mind you, we will be doing more to our shop inside and out after we open but for right now, we are mostly concerned with getting the best product out there for you!  Decorations and a lighted sign may have to wait a few months.

Some wonder why it is that we are opening in the dead of winter. What better time to teach my family how to make and scoop ice cream? We will have a few months until it gets warm and perfect all our ordering and making of ice cream.  I also am a fan of ice cream year round unlike a lot of ice cream shops in my old home of Massachusetts that were only open from the spring til fall. I never understood the rationale of closing during winter!

We have a lot of flavors and ideas for the coming months and I think we will start with some ice cream pies that you can special order for your Christmas get togethers.  We will pre-make some of these for opening day and think we will have these:

Grasshopper Pie-Graham Cracker Crust, Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream with Whipped Cream and Chocolate sauce drizzle
Coffee Toffee with Caramel Pie-Cookie Crust, Coffee Toffee Ice Cream with Whipped Cream and Caramel drizzle

Wish me and my family luck over the next 3.9 weeks....we are going to learn the words 'hard work'!!

p.s. Madison wanted me to mention her specifically in this blog post..and how much money she can make by WORKING at the shop ;) Love ya Madi!