We visited Jasper in August and saw an elk beside the road as we drove home.  He wandered closer and closer to the car as he grazed, not bothered by us but I'm sure keeping one eye on us.  They're massive creatures who can stomp a human to death quite easily and I respect that.

The big guy and I are both stuck at home now on isolation.  Last week our grandson stayed with us for a few days and he had a runny nose.  Now we both have coughs, sneezes, runny noses and the big guy had a low grade fever for a few days.  He gets tested today and I get tested tomorrow for COVID before we can go back to work.  I'm not complaining.  I don't feel really sick, just not 100%.

My middle daughter turns thirty in December and I wanted to give her something special and I settled on a photo album filled with my photos of her from birth.  A couple of weeks ago I started going through my photos and it turns out I've taken a lot of photos and of course pre-digital, the photos were all printed.  I have boxes of photos I've been going through, bringing back a lot of memories, most of them good.

What really surprised me was how happy we were.  It wasn't all bad.  Of course I remember all the bad stuff but we had a lot of fun and a lot of good times as the kids were growing up.  I'm going to make myself an album as well so that when I'm an old/er lady I have something to flip through to remember.

I'm also knitting her a shrug which I hope she likes.  She's talking to me again.  It's funny because I kept journals as the kids were growing up and wrote in them with the idea of giving each child their journal as adults.  I was going to do that but I read through my middle daughter's journal and apparently we had a hard time getting along even when she was only two years old.  There are a lot of references to how fierce she is.  I pulled the photos and artwork out of the journal and will just burn the writing.  It's not helpful for her to know how often we butted heads even when she was so young but it did help me rereading my words.  Apparently our relationship has always been this way.  It would appear she has been angry with me for a long time.  I know having Miss Katie as a little sister was difficult for her but I can't change that.  She has to figure out a way to let go of her anger about her family.  

I was talking to a coworker the other day about teenagers in general and my kids as teenagers in particular.  I told her about each one, my son's drug and alcohol use, my daughter's rebellion and Katie's behavior and violence as she hit puberty, alongside my ex-husband's drinking.  She said, "Oh Lily, you had it hard."  Maybe I did but I did my damnedest to give my family as normal a life as possible and I need to appreciate that.  I tried, and then forgive myself and love myself because I did try.