The Mergenthaler Family

From Emily January 20: We asked our cool young friend tony what his bracelet means and the title of this email was his answer. It didnt look like the other voodoo stuff I have seen, so it caught us off guard. Voodoo is sketch people. Always remember to wear your protective bracelets. This week we...... -almost died because i was really sick but the elders brought this whack juice and it literally healed me. Cant explain how. Prayer works though because I told Heavenly Father we had too many lessons the next day and I couldnt afford to be sick and boom genezen. I was super grateful for that. -found a super cool girl named exantha. We actually gave her a Book of Mormon a few months back and went to follow up. We finally got a lesson. When we were asking her who god is for her, she goes "You know, I want to know who he is better. I dont really know right now." That touched me a ton because her humble answer of I dont know led to a super spiritual lesson. Humility is really the d...

Recently, a school teacher called because one of my children had behaved unkindly toward a fellow student. The incident was bad enough that the other child left class crying and requested to be removed from their reading group. I'm not naive. I know that my children aren't perfect, but still, I was shocked. I thought I had taught him better. My first reaction was reinforced when his teacher (who I love, by the way) said, "*** hasn't behaved like this before, and it surprised me. Is there anything going on at home that might have set him off?" I responded. "No, nothing out of the ordinary here. I'm sorry you saw that side of him at school." I joked, "Usually he only treats his siblings that way." That sounded bad, so I backtracked and said, "Trust me when I say, that kind of behavior is not allowed at home." After the call, I felt sad that another child had a bad day at school and my son was a part of that. I felt like a bad mom....

Emily’s New Year email is below. Maybe you have noticed with other emails that I don’t take time to adjust the formatting or edit. You get the same version we get. I like it because it shows how tricky technology is there.  Whats uppppp friends and family! It was another great week. I realize I've been awful at sending emails of substance lately and you all are probably missing my hilarious sense of humor, so get ready for a good one because this week was straight up funny. Some stuff: --in Suriname, we have what we call old year and new year (new years eve and day). Everyone lights up about every firework they can get their hands on in their front yard. There's basically nonstop fireworks for two days and it's AWESOME. Sounds like a war zone, which it probably could be because Suriname's president got arrested for murder a couple weeks ago so yaaay. We are pretty accustomed to noises at night though (thank you to the neighbor's cats who mate at weird hours), so we ...