August Project 12 {Echo Park: Life Is Good}

I'm entering this layout into this week's challenge over at The Paper Variety to use stickers. The flourish and flowers are all stickers. The blue flower & brown circle w/pink flower are stickers that I took the sticky out of before adding dimensional stickers to the back. I also used stickers for the date and title. 

I actually finished this layout a while back but haven't felt motivated to post it. August was a hard month here. I had spent the summer preparing to go on a 10 day vacation to Oregon and Washington to visit family and also get to meet an online friend. I worked so hard to be prepared for the trip and then the school year starting right as we returned. Two days before we were to leave, and the day after we told my daughter about the trip, we lost a very important family member. I am still glad that I prepared so much in advance for the school year so that I wasn't thinking about that while also dealing with the trauma of loosing a loved one.  So August wasn't what I thought it would be and that alone made it difficult to scrap. I didn't want the focus to only be on what we lost, but I also couldn't scrap just the happy, beginning of school times.

I realized toward the end of the month that it was a month of beginnings and endings so I went with that for a "title".

 With the obvious ending of a life, we also ended karate lessons for my oldest daughter. In just one more month, she would have been in it for 2 years. In turn, she was able to start a new gymnastics class, which she LOVES. She also started Kindergarten and we had a special dinner the night before to celebrate (idea for that stolen from here, but not quite as fancy!). We celebrated one birthday in this house and at least 2 birthdays for friends...ending one year and starting another.

I originally thought I would use a different sketch...because how could I fit everything in with just 3 pictures? But then I decided that the most important part was documenting the girls at this moment in time, and not every picture from every event. If an event is important enough to me anyway, it deserves its own layout.

I really did want this layout to focus on how much this month has changed our family and the heavy emotions that we have felt all month long. This is partly why I chose to print the pictures in black and white - to create more of an emotional, somber feel. However, in my journaling, I tried not to focus on the loss so much as get in all of the day to day details that aren't documented in the photos.

So sorry to have rambled on and on so much in this post ;-) and thanks so much for looking (and reading if you made it this far!).