My husband and I grew up in a town called Fall River, Massachusetts. Our home town is popular for Lizzie Borden & Emeril Lagasse. It is about 1 hour South of Boston and about 30 minutes East of Providence, Rhode Island. We first meet while we were both working for Walmart. He was a department manager for Sporting Goods and I was a frontend supervisor and then moved to the Jewelry department.
We moved to Waynesboro, Virginia in October of 2002, and started to plan our wedding for the following June back in Fall River, MA. We got married on June 27, 2003, which is also my grandmother's birthday. She passed when I was 19 years old and I was very close to her. Our wedding took place at one of the parks along the waterfront that also is home to the USS Massachusetts battleship.
We have two beautiful daughters, our youngest just hit double digits this year. Looking at them both and I see how fast they both have grown. They both love it down it and have come into their own persons. We have 1 dog, 2 indoor cats, 6 outdoor cats (they are our neighbor's cats to help with field mice, but they adopted us as their humans) and we have a lot of fish in our outdoor pond. We started to hand dig our pond and then we found out I was pregnant with our first so it became hard for me to help.
Speaking of animals, I love the Beagle breed. When we moved down here so bought a pure breed Beagle that was tri-colored. Her name was Brandi and she was so loved. We got her when she was 11 weeks old and she had so much spunk to her. I didn't know that I would only have her for a short time. When she was 6 years old she had gotten cancer and we didn't know she had it until it was too late. I noticed one day that she was bleeding from her nose. I thought it was her allergies because she had a very bad food allergy. She could only eat fish-based products. We took her to the vet and they noticed that she had one tooth that was bad and needed to come out. When we did, they found that the root of the tooth broke through the bone and was interfering with her sinus cavity. After some tests, they concluded that she had bone cancer and it was spreading at a very fast rate. We made the hard decision to not make her live in with the pain of suffering. It was the hardest decision we had ever had to make. We did adopt a very loving dog from our local shelter who picked our youngest as we were walking by his cage. He has been a great addition to the family.
We first started Valley Scents as a candle company, buying them in bulk and selling them. After a few years of doing this, I realized that this was not the road for me. I do love candles as the next person but most of the time they would just sit on the shelf and I would remember that they were there when the lights went out. So how could I sell something that I wasn't truly passionate about? During a time when my husband and I had hit a hard patch in our marriage, we decided to do something together as a family and get back to know each other. I had done some research around the area and noticed that there were not any homemade bath companies. I had seen a lot of groups on Facebook and loved looking at the pictures of what everyone was making and got hooked. Soon I was finding myself getting materials to start to try making some bath bombs. We loved it and not to mention the smell of our kitchen was better than a candle. We got different molds, colors, and scents to try. Our girls loved mixing the scents together to create new ones.
We had started strictly bath bombs and now have grown into soaps, room sprays, lotions, dog paw balm, dog dry shampoo, shampoo bars and we have so much more that is on our list to try to make.
We currently sell for our local farmers' market and with our online store. My dream is to have my own storefront where customers can come in and just feel the relaxation as they walk in the store, see where and how the products are made, create their own scents and even sign up for some classes to learn how to create their own products.