Love: You Are the Only One for Me

Scrapbooking has been such a positive thing in my life. Through my love of and addiction to this craft I have recorded and documented so many moments and memories that I am quite certain would have been lost had it not been for my layouts and albums. And this has truly remained my main focus when it comes to scrapbooking - to record memories, to tell the stories behind the pictures through my journalling, and to document my life and the life of my family with a little pretty paper thrown in for good measure.

This past week, while working on my layout for the latest challenge at The Memory Nest, I had the chance to not only record a memory, but relive countless others while I was doing so. Let me explain. This is the sketch for the latest Make it Monday Challenge

and as soon as I saw it I remembered taking photos with my now-husband in the photo booth at the mall while we were still dating. They have been stashed away in a shoe box for years, which has always bothered me, and when I saw this sketch I knew this was the time to dig them out and use them for a layout.  So last Tuesday night, after the girls were in bed, Steve and I sat on the basement floor and sifted through the shoe boxes we had each kept full of movie tickets, concert tickets, notes, letters, and photos from our dating days. We laughed at some of the movies we had gone to see, we teared up as we read the notes and letters we had written each other, and we remembered all the fun we had on road trips, at concerts, at parties. It was an incredibly fun trip down memory lane, reliving all the great times we had when we were young and falling in love.

In the end, we found the photo strips that I remembered, and I put this layout together to preserve these photos.

My layout is similar to the sketch, but I had to layer up some patterned paper in keeping with my current obsession.

Look at us - we were so young, just kids.

So now, after 12 years in a shoe box in the basement, these photos will be preserved in my album. I am going to put this page in my 2013 album beside the layout I did of us on our tenth wedding anniversary - as a 'then and now' reminder of where we began and how far we have come.