Dog Love Scrapbook Page - Lasting Memories

When I made my May Counterfeit Kit Club Challenge kit, I added a set of Kaisercraft stamps and a few stamp pads. And then it was so perfect because the theme of this month's Lasting Memories challenges are all about stamps! 

So for this two-pager, I created my own patterned background using two of the Kaisercraft stamps - one was a frame and one was words. I'm submitting this one for the specific alphas challenge because of the words that I stamped.

Does this design look familiar? It's one that I just keep using over and over again in different ways! Originally it had one vertical photo, but because I only had horizontal photos, I just cut them down to size. Then I added in a 13@rts cut-apart to break up the photos.

I let the American Crafts Thickers words in my kit make creating a title easy. The "love" banner was the perfect sentiment for these photos of my daughter playing with her "dog aunt" Pooh last summer.  (Pooh's "sister" was named Winnie.) And then I grabbed the alphas sheet that I pulled and put the word "dog" above the banner. And there you have it.

The sentiment of the stamps is "You are always in my heart", and it was so bittersweet scrapping these photos at this point in time because the dog is actually no longer with us. And it got me thinking about a scrapbook podcast I was listening to a few weeks ago (one that I didn't like, by the way), and the hosts were talking about scrapbooking the past within the present. When you write about your photos, you're not writing as the person you were one year ago, five years ago, etc. You've had experiences since then. From this vantage point, you might be thinking about things differently knowing what you know now.

So when I did the journaling for this one, I thought, "Do I write about this experience from where I am now?" Because what these photos mean to me now is different than what they meant to me back then.

Ultimately, because this is going into an album that is in chronological order, I decided to write some brief journaling about how much my daughter loves Pooh the dog and the phrase she just kept repeating to Pooh: "Don't worry, Pooh! It's just me!" As though that was truly reassuring to poor old Pooh who had no idea what this small being was sitting beside her, petting her, and talking in high-pitched squeals.

How would you have handled the journaling for a moment like this? Do you journal from where you are now or do you keep things brief and cover only what happened then?