Remembering

***This is a layout I did of Andrew's graduation from college earlier this spring.  I did it as part of a challenge over at Scrapdango. ***

Last night I had the best evening.  After the last weekend's medical issuses with my dad, the sister's decided it was time to pay a visit.  By sister's I'm referring to my dad's sisters.  And as age would have it, they are also now in a place where their kids need to bring them for long travels (both live 6 hours away in Indiana and in Canada).  The bonus is that I also got to see my cousins! :)

My Aunt Faith brought an album full of old photos and we sat and talked for hours.  They were the really old pictures from the early 1900's and ended with my father just being a baby (he was the youngest of a family of 9).  Oh the stories I heard! 

Now I do remember a lot of my Grandma's sister's and other family, but to see them when they were young was really neat!  And I have to say, the pictures my cousins Connie, Beth & I didn't know....we made up the stories we thought fit, just for a few laughs. 

I wish life wasn't so busy.  I wish my family didn't live so far away (at six hours, they are the closest). I wish we had more time to share photos. 

A few months back I needed to clean out an upstairs bedroom so that we could make room to put mom and dad's bed up there in preparation for him getting a hospital bed.  What I found were boxes of photos and stacks of albums.  The albums were neatly put away, but the photos were haphazard at best.  Scattered from years of projects and albums for people (my dad was a scrapbooker & creator of all things with photos).  So I boxed them up and brought them home to sort through at a later time.

After last night, I'm realizing that a big part of what I want from my photos are the stories behind them (the real stories).  Some are quite sad stories, but even they make life what it is.