Stacey Shoemaker:
CLASS OF 1978
Vestavia Hills High SchoolClass of 1978
Vestavia hills, AL
Auburn UniversityClass of 1982
Auburn, AL
University of Alabama at BirminghamClass of 1982
Birmingham, AL
Stacey's Story
Life has headed us in a direction we never thought we would take! My husband is the child of two college professors and was a 1978 graduate from Mt. Brook. And with me, an only child growing up in Vestavia, we were definitely a typical pair of suburban kids. We met our freshman year at Auburn and married our senior year. After medical school at UAB and residency at UT, we moved to a tiny town in middle Tennessee where Ben is an ol' time family practice doctor in solo practice in an underserved area. I am the office manager and file the electronic medical claims, and our children work as receptionists, appointment clerks, billing clerks, general gofers and stamp lickers. Our oldest daughter plans to join the practice after she completes her schooling. We live on an 85-acre working farm with dogs, horses, cows, chickens, ducks, lots and lots of hay, and a houseful of children -- eleven kids in all! We have seven girls and four boys. Eight are bio and three are adopted. Our bio kids are 24, 22, 19, 17, 16, 12, 10 and 5. Our 6-year-old identical twin daughters were adopted at 14 months old from Guatemala, and our 13-year-old son was adopted from Zelenogradsk, Kaliningrad, when he was just shy of 11 years old. And ... we have a six-month-old little boy waiting for us in Vietnam. We hope to bring him home sometime this spring. That will complete our dirty dozen. Our oldest daughter met and married a young man from Homewood her freshman year in college, now has a 4-year-old daughter, graduated in December from Samford, is working in NICU at UAB, and is planning to begin her masters' this fall. Yep. We were pregnant at the same time -- the stuff silly movies are made of! The next is a fifth year in Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech while supporting himself in a rock band with three of his fraternity brothers. Their band has been pretty successful. They have...Expand for more
won numerous Battles of the Bands in Atlanta, have had their music played on radio stations in South Carolina and Georgia, have performed at the Bluebird Cafe, have opened for several well-known performers and have produced two CD's. Our third is a sophomore in pre-nursing at UAB and hopes to one day be a lawyer, not a nurse. Our fourth is currently a senior in high school and plans to major in pre-med/chemistry. He just can't decide on the college. The fifth is a sophomore in high school and plans to spend her junior in Germany as a foreign exchange student. We home schooled all the children exclusively beginning in 1986 until 1 1/2 years ago when my husband needed me in the office full time. We now only home school two of the children, and the others are in a small private school in a neighboring town, but we plan to return to home schooling in the fall. We love the water and spend nearly every weekend from early spring to late fall at our cabin on Lake Barkley skiing, wakeboarding, canoeing, paddleboating and just lazing around on floats. Our newest project is renovating a house built in 1906 to use as our office. The house had been turned into a triplex and used as rental property the past 20 years by Randy Travis. It had been remodeled into 1980's cheap, so we are trying to "un-modernize" the house and restore the finish work back to the appropriate time period. We are enjoying the challenges of doing all the renovations ourselves. It has turned into a family project. The children think nothing is more exciting than knocking down walls with a sledgehammer! We are about to begin laying hardwood floors -- something we've never tackled before. We may regret taking on this challenge since there's over 4000 square feet of flooring to lay. The tile work in the bathrooms and kitchen is next ... Maybe we'll actually be able to use the house before we retire!
Register for Free to view all details!
Yearbooks
Reunions
Photos
