DL here. I was thinking about what I should write in my next post. There wasn’t anything very interesting going on lately. But then I thought of a few things.

I was sitting, listening to the sermon on Sunday, Feb. 15th, Todd was preaching on Psalm 6. It was written by David and he called it a psalm about David’s depression. I never would’ve thought of that if I had just read the psalm myself. He was talking about depression, the 3 Ds, disapproval, despair and desertion that David experienced. He was telling about clinical depression, what depression does to you, mentally, emotionally and such. I found it very interesting since I don’t know anything about depression except that it’s not good and it makes you sad and mopeyish. I don’t think that that’s a very good description of depression but that’s all I knew about it until I came to His Mansion. I just thought about how most kids wouldn’t get to hear a sermon like that, preached on something such as depression. It helped me learn some things and just made me realize how much that I could learn from living here if I wanted to and kept my eyes and ears open. I could learn many things that most kids my age wouldn’t get to know about. I don’t know very much about churches in general, but I don’t think that in general, preachers don’t preach about depression. But that’s what makes His Mansion unique among other things. :) 

Let’s see. What else have I been learning lately. My dad had a rough week, just with stuff that’s going on in the community. He can’t tell us everything since we would know who he’s talking about and some of it is personal stuff. My siblings ask, “What? What’s going on?” or “Who? Who is it?”. I want to ask too. But some things, my parents just can’t tell us. I think that it’s hard for my siblings to accept that sometimes. I think that all of us kids are learning how to be able to accept that we can’t know everything. Mom and Dad can’t tell us everything all the time. 

I’m also learning how to accept changes and people who leave, either by their own accord or they are asked to leave. I don’t normally like change, I like routine and the way that things are and will be. Obviously, moving to His Mansion was a huge change. I’ve been taking my time adjusting, fitting in and getting used to the different changes. It’s hard to see people leave around here. From my perspective, it seems like people are doing okay at least but they leave on their own accord. Dad has another perspective because he hears most of the inside stuff. That’s all for now. Signing off. -XE

XE here again. I just thought that I’d write a shortish post on our snow sports party thing last Saturday. Every week we have a Family Night on Saturday night, which is a fun activity for the residents and short term staff. Long Term Staff (which is our family) can join in if we want. So last week’s Family Activity was ice skating, sledding and snowboarding out by our pond. It wasn’t at night since it would be too dark but it was during the afternoon. All of us 3 older kids tried ice skating for the first time. All of us got the hang of it. It’s not too hard but it does take practice. Just trying to push off and glide and not fall over. There were 6-8 guys who were taking turns snowboarding over a snow jump that they had built. Most of them were first timers, only a couple of guys knew what they were doing but all of them enjoyed it a lot. We had a small bonfire going as well. We actually didn’t do a ton of sledding, we did do some, it was fun to watch people go down on sleds or snowboards. Kind of like watching live sports instead of on TV and none of these guys are professionals. When we got kind of cold from being out so long, we could head over to the nearby LTS home of Dave and Diane who graciously served hot chocolate, coffee and treats. It was lots of fun and I can’t wait to do it again!

On a totally different subject, our family is testing in Tae Kwon Do next week. We’re all white belts and if we pass the test, we’ll earn our red stripe for our white belts. I’m kind of nervous about it, we saw the last testing and you had to break a board. We’ll see how we do. We have to memorize two forms to pass and some info about the Korean flag and what it symbolizes. Mom said that she forgot one of the forms because she’s old. I don’t know about that but all of us are trying. That’s all for now. -XE

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