Merry Christmas 2014 from The Shoops

Christmas 2014
Dear Family and Friends,

This has been a crazy year with lots of ups and downs. I think the word that comes to mind is bittersweet. I was trying to look up the meaning of the word and the closest definition I got was “both pleasurable and painful”. That definitely describes our year. This year was full of lots of changes. I don’t always like change..

Melissa graduated from high school this year. She took a while to decide what she was going to do after she graduated. She worked for the state and Grandpa’s Ice Cream shop in the summer and the month of September. She planned on going to UVU in Provo in January. (She still is planning on this). We already had plans to go to Utah for General Conference in October and we all decided it would be a good time for her to go, too. Even though I know it was the right choice for her that was one of the hardest things we’ve ever done. I can’t even complain! With modern technology I get to talk to her often and see pictures of her and skype! I just miss her cute face! It has been quite an adjustment in our house! It’s so much quieter without her home. She has such a lively fun personality that it took me probably a month to not be sad every day.

This year has also been the year of the missionary. Melissa has lots of friends on missions for our church. She has been blessed with so many close good friends and they have been gone serving the Lord. It has been fun writing them and hearing from them and watching them learn and grow! I love getting missionary letters! We also have had the missionaries over a lot the past couple of years. A lot of them have gone home now. It has been so fun to maintain friendships with them. We have become close to several of them and consider them forever friends.

One of the best days I have had was with our missionaries. When we went to Utah we got to see 7 of our returned missionaries. There was a point in time where I was sitting in the visitor’s center at the Salt Lake Temple square and my family, Aurora (my niece), and several of our missionaries were there.  I couldn’t quit smiling! It was a slice of Heaven! We didn’t know what else to do around Salt Lake so we just “hung” out and visited and laughed at the visitor’s center. It is one of my favorite memories! That was the perfect day that we needed before we left Melissa. In our Christmas picture, I had to include one of my favorite pictures from that day because it was pretty close to perfect. We also got spend the day with one of our favorite missionaries- JC Price- He’s the one in the picture with us in front of the Salt Lake City Temple. I didn’t have enough room for pictures of all my missionaries and our cute family pictures. (Also in our family pictures is our niece, Aurora. She is at our home a lot so we included her in our pictures.)

Another one of my missionaries made me a poster for Mother’s Day with lots of pictures of missionaries on it. It is probably one of my favorite gifts. We have a missionary wall of pictures!

Can you believe Keagan started High School this year? We can’t! My baby! I don’t even want to say how old that makes me feel. He is getting used to it now and liking it more and more. He especially likes church dances! He has this quiet sweet humor that we love! He also loves going to seminary. Seminary is an early morning church class. It starts at 6:00 a.m.! This year they are studying church history and the Doctrine and Covenants. He has gotten into sports this year and wants to play soccer again next year. Last year in middle school he played basketball and soccer. He is also hoping to take driver’s Ed soon.. Yikes!

Ray is still working at L&I. He loves working there. The people there are nice and the agency is very supportive. He is hoping to stay there for a while, but move up to better positions. Ray had the challenge this year of having shingles! From what I hear, it is one of the most painful things to have. He was out of it for almost a month. Thank goodness for sick leave and understanding employers! I’m glad he is better!

I am still teaching preschool. But this year has been a lot different. I am teaching at my house, which I love. I love not having to drag all my stuff to Marie’s house. But I miss my friend Marie that I worked with for so long!  I have to keep my house clean.. That is a blessing and a pain! I’m also teaching with a new person, my friend Pam. It was a little bit of an adjustment just by being so different, but going well.

We had such a great trip to Utah! It was fun seeing good friends and our missionaries. We got to go to General Conference and see lots of temples! I don’t have space to write all about it. If you want to read about it, I put it on the blog. http://rdmkshoop.blogspot.com/

I am so thankful for family. I’m grateful for this time of the year when we get to see them more. I’m grateful for our Savior that makes it all possible. I can’t wait to hear from so many of our friends at this time of the year! I look forward to it! We are so blessed! Keep in touch!  rdmkshoop@comcast.net

Love always, Ray, Donna, Melissa, and Keagan  

Utah part 5, Sunday morning and goodbyes

Sunday morning, Stewart Kearney's family invited us down to watch conference with them and for some yummy waffles and homemade syrup. We went and picked up J.C. from his uncle's house and he came with us. Kearney and Price were companions in the MTC and went home at the same time. I have been facebook friends with Kearney's mom and was excited to meet her! He has such a nice family!

I thought I held it together pretty good.. I didn't even cry, but all I could think about was that after this we are saying goodbye to Melissa.

We then drove back to Logan to meet J.C's mom. I barely made it out of his house when I started crying..Ray said a family prayer for us and then we hugged J.C. and Melissa goodbye. And then Melissa drove to her new home in Provo.

I can't even start to explain my mix of emotions. Of course I bawled! We all did, Melissa did pretty good, but when Keagan started crying she had a hard time.
As we were leaving, I kept thinking about Ray holding her right after she was born and being so excited about having her! He got lost in the hospital, trying to find my family to share the good news because he was so excited. I thought of that song, "You're going to miss this" by Trace Adkins. (this song has always made me cry, but now especially)


I don't think anything ever prepares you for this. All your parenthood is talked about being a good mom/parent and then it goes by so fast (like everyone says) and is wonderful and then you have to let them go. I cried more for the fact that our life will never really be the same, we are now a family of 3 at home. I'm so grateful for forever families!! I love having her around. She is fun to be around, smart, sassy, and funny! (I miss her friends, too!) BUT I absolutely know that this is best for her. She needs to be around young people like herself that have strong values and standards. I know she is going to have fun! I remember her age as being so fun and having some of my best memories!

This quote from Sis. Hinckley has been running through my head. So I'm trying to laugh and I'm getting better at it... I'm tired of having a headache!


So, Melissa, I love you! Have fun! And be good! I know you will do great things! I'm excited for this new adventure of ours!

Isn't she beautiful!!! Inside and out!!!

Utah part 4, Saturday 10.4.14

Saturday was probably one of the best days. If we weren't so tired and knew that we had to say goodbye to Melissa the next day, it would of been perfect!
We started out by leaving the Herbert's at 7:30 a.m. It was hard to get going! We went and picked up J.C. Price from his uncle's house and got to go to Saturday morning conference in the Conference Center! We sat up in the balcony, but luckily in the conference center there really isn't a bad seat. This was our 2nd time going to conference. I feel so blessed to be able to go. I love watching our apostles visit each other before it starts. You can really tell how much they love each other. One of my favorite parts is right before it starts, everyone is quiet and stands to show love and respect to our prophet as he walks in. It is an amazing feeling! I know that President Monson is a true prophet of God!

 

Conference was amazing and I loved how we got to hear for the first time someone speak in their native tongue. What a blessing to those who speak that language!

After conference was over we headed over to the visitor's center to meet up with our missionaries. We walked out on the balcony to leave. It was beautiful outside! It is fun to see so many LDS people gathered together, too.

 
And then we got to see our returned missionaries! I can't say enough about them! I love them! And it was so awesome!! Here is my blog post about that.
We had so much fun just visiting and joking around! We went over to the food court and had lunch and really just couldn't decide where we wanted to go. None of us really knew the area and we had 2 cars and I really didn't want to separate to drive anywhere. So we just "hung" out at temple square.

 I took this picture of the sister missionaries because someone with a very fancy camera and name badge took a much nicer version of this picture, so maybe it will end up in the conference edition of the Ensign? If it does, we can say that we were right there, visiting on those couches with our returned missionaries. :)

 Various pictures of us all goofing around..

 My favorite picture

 I know this isn't a great picture, but I love it because Aurora is laughing in it.

 The picture of the Prophet Joseph Smith has a little bit of a story.. The week before we got our family pictures taken and we were all wearing the same color scheme. I don't know who said it, but it was said, look Joseph Smith is wearing our colors, he could of been in our family pictures. I know we're dorks... I don't know how long we laughed about this.

 We found a spot downstairs in one of the visitor centers that had 2 benches that was pretty quiet and we just parked there and visited and laughed. Every once in a while someone from our group would go push the button to play another video. haha

One of the most amazing things was J.C. telling us about his experience changing the carpets in the Salt Lake temple. It was pretty cool to listen to him tell us all about it. He is pointing to the window that they had to remove to remove the carpet. (I know, Aurora looks thrilled... haha, her feet were killing her and she ended up walking barefoot).

 Below is a close up of the replica of the temple they have in the visitor's center. This upper room is where J.C. got to change the carpet and we stood in front of this as he told us in more detail pointing things out. It was an amazing experience for him and I loved hearing all about it!

Some good friends of ours gave us a Olive Garden gift certificate, they told us that it would be nice if we could have a nice "last" dinner together. I tried to not think about that and tried to just enjoy it. (and we earned another one with our shopkicks.- we only had to pay $5 with tip and everything, We agreed that was the best $5 meal we ever had!) We went to Layton to go to Olive Garden. It was homecoming that night so we had an hour wait, but it was fun visiting and some of it was fun.. seeing all of the dresses that the girls wore. Some.. not so great..

The food and company were awesome! A perfect ending to an incredible day!

Eternal Friends: Shout out to The Reddings and Herberts

Our whole married life, Ray & I have been blessed with some amazing friends! Unfortunately a lot of of our friends are in various parts of the United States. Whenever we get to see them or talk with them, it is like nothing changes, we just pick right up where we were. I'm not going to name them, they know who they are and I wouldn't want to accidentally forget someone, either.

For our trip we got to see two of these families that are life long friends!
We got to spend the night with The Kim and Angela Redding Family and The Shaun and Cathy Herbert Family. I love both of these families so much and it is so fun to visit and catch up on life together and to laugh and cry together. I love that we can just open up and visit! I wish I had pictures of these families from our trip, so I will have to share some from the past!

First of all the Redding Family! They moved in down the street from us the year before Melissa went to school. That year was so much fun! We knew everyone on our street and the kids would go back and forth between the houses. We started our own little preschool group with the 4 girls as pictured below -Brooklyn Lauren, Melissa, and Maleah going to the pumpkin patch

 On our vacations we would even meet up! We visited them in Wyoming coming back from our PA vacation.

 We had each others kids over. Kelli and Melissa making us a "fancy" dinner.

 All of our many girls nights out and sleepless nights! Laughing and crying together.

 Lauren, Melissa, and Maleah getting dressed up together for some girls night out.

 Mackenzie's baptism

Another Girl's retreat. I love this picture! We had a lot of us there! 

Tiffany Rackham, Carol Maughan, Angela redding, Jennie Klumker, Kylie Kincaid, Donna Shoop, and Darri Guinto. We all have started out in Lacey 2 ward, sadly I am the only one left. :(

 At one of our trips to Boise to visit the Reddings, they took us to a friend's house to ride horses.

 Lauren and Mackenzie visiting us, with Aurora

 One of our stops in Boise visiting, me & Ang

Another girl's retreat, Darri, Sue, Jen, Donna, Ang, and Pam

I know the girls don't like this one, but it makes me smile every time I see it! Lauren, Melissa, and Maleah.

 
And then the mom's trying to recreate it with out remembering how the picture looked. HAHAHA

 I love the next 2 pictures of Darri, Angela, and me! Darri and I flew out to see Ang. I can't even remember if there was a reason? (Does there need to be?!)

And The Herbert Family! We knew them before they were a family. Ray grew up knowing Cathy, they were in the same stake. Shortly after his mission he met Shaun from some of his good friends, The Jaster family. Shaun went to Ricks. Ray & I & Shaun were all in the same ward. I have a picture in my hallway of Shaun from college days, but it isn't scanned. Shaun and Cathy are both from Pennsylvania where Ray is from. They both came to our wedding at the WA DC Temple. Shaun was one of our witnesses. The next year we went to their wedding at the WA DC temple! Sadly we haven't seen them much over the years. We moved to Washington soon after they were married. Whenever we went back to visit PA we would visit them. 

Here is all the "men" that were at our wedding, Shaun is 2nd from the right in the back. 

Dan Carter, Dan, Ray, John, Shaun, Dwight (in the shorts) Ray's dad and grandpa in the front.

 Here are all the women at our wedding, Cathy is 2nd from the left.
Theresa and Laura in the back, Donna stalter, Cathy, Jackie- Ray's mom, me, Aunt Darlene, Gma Stambaugh, and Gmas sister Pearl

In 2005, The Herberts had already moved to Utah. We just happened to both be visiting PA at the same time. They were nice enough to come visit us at Aunt Darlene's house. Here are all of our kids together.

 Our family

 The oldest four

The Herbert family

This is from a April 2013 when we visited Utah and stayed with them.

 April 2013, their family (it was conference morning, so they are all still in the their pjs and I insisted on getting a picture)

Now their oldest son, Seth is on a mission serving in Renton WA! We're so excited for when he is done, the Herberts are planning on coming to visit us to pick him up!

A big thank-you to both of these families for letting us crash at your homes! We love you both and are so grateful for your friendships that have lasted through the years and I know will continue to last forever! We are so lucky to have such good friends!