I was flipping through this sketchbook today and all of the usual bits were there...pretty pictures, inspiration, lists, notes etc.  Nothing was really standing out to mark those few months in my mind, except the first page...which I kept going back to.  Its surreal looking back on a record of your life...seeing how you regarded those moments, how you recorded them.   Those monumental decisions that now not only seem so long ago time wise, but so far from who you are now.

I never really imagined myself as the type to get married, to settle down and have babies.   Not surprisingly, after being married for a few years, when it came time to have that life, I walked away from because it felt wrong, like I was forcing myself to live a lie.   I think I thought that I would get used to the idea, that married life and families and babies would all grow on me...that the concept would not be so foreign once it was happening.  I was thinking the other day that I am living the life right now that I always imagined I would be when I was a little girl.  Although when I thought of being in my 30's when I was 6, I of course thought I would feel much older then I actually do...but eh, age is relative.

There it is...on two pages that I assembled right around my 26th birthday...I had been married for almost a year...the photo on the left is walking down the aisle with my ex husband, Matthew.  My married name is even written below.  The photo on the right is with my three sisters...two of whom are now about the age I was then.  We are standing outside of the house they grew up in, which has since been sold as our mom got remarried.  The photo on the top right were the wedding favors...of course they were candy hearts...and you can hardly see it, but there are little paper trouts attached (I had a trout themed wedding).  My favorite part of those two pages is the doodle of Manic Trout.  I began Manic Trout in January of 2003...I scanned in the doodle and built the original logo off of it.

Here we are 8 years later, the husband, house and trout image in the logo are all gone...but me...I just keep on evolving towards living the life I always dreamed of.  Nostalgic about the past, regretting nothing and curious about what I'll see when I look back on today 8 years from now.