The Mergenthaler Family

"Pursuing Growth," Letters From the Nest, August 19, 2024 It’s back-to-school season again, so we are all wondering how we’re possibly going to go all the places, learn all the stuff, and do all the things. Our family has one university professor, one seminary teacher, two college students (maybe three or four by winter), one high schooler, one middle schooler, and one elementary school student. Our lives continue to revolve around the school calendar as they have even before we were a family. It’s not so bad; it provides another opportunity to assess personal progress, reevaluate priorities, and set new goals. We naturally do this multiple times a year--New Year’s Day, springtime, the beginning of summer, school, birthdays, milestones, and more. We are pretty good at thinking about what we want, evaluating what we need to do to get there, and setting goals for achievement. What’s on my mind this morning is how, in our goal-setting, maybe it’s okay to expect both failure AND ...

The world keeps turning. We keep working, watching, wondering, praying, growing, changing, slipping, all the -ings. As July turns to August, our attention turns to back-to-school preparation, fall sports and activities, and new living situations for a couple of kids. Ah, apartment life--an experience I do not wish to relive, yet a valuable experience nonetheless. This year, school doesn't start until the last few days of August. It feels like we have been gifted a few more weeks of together time. I want to make the most of this lull between summer sports and fall chaos, but we're already a tad bored. Just a tad. Of course, there are always things to do like reorganize the upstairs closet that has become the summer dump zone when garage cleaning and outdoor chores took priority. But, who wants to tackle a big project when I can do something small and much more enjoyable--update the blog? The second half of our summer has been mostly delightful. Gavin enjoyed baseball so much tha...

Letters From the Nest, July 19, 2024 https://lettersfromthenest.substack.com/p/family-time Well, we are on a trip together. Only seven of ten right now. We will meet up with big sis and her hubbie later today, while big bro will miss us while he brightens lives being an excellent FSY counselor. We’re headed to Grandma’s house for the weekend, and she, unfortunately, has a new broken wrist to add to her recent adventures becoming a widow, selling her property, being hospitalized, letting the contract on the property fall through, making an offer on a new house in a new state, getting another offer on the property along with a backup.  So many things! And now, a family reunion at her house. Is there ever a time when there isn’t so much going on? Is there ever a time when there’s less to do than time to do it? Life just seems to get more complicated and busier the older we get. We are constantly exposed to opportunities to learn and grow—usually through painful trials that extract the...

 How's your summer going? Summer in Pennsylvania is soooo green and warm and lovely, but no matter where the Mergenthalers live, a phrase the young Mergs hear often is, "Do something active." They have heard it so often that it has now become a justification for screen time: "But, Mom, I did something active." As if we need a carefully calculated ratio of active to non-active pursuits. For example, if you eat vegetables (ewww), you can have a treat (yay). I have heard that justification around here, too. There is a theory in psychology called the compensation effect, which refers to the tendency for people to assume they accumulate moral capital. In other words, performing good deeds balances out the bad, or it's appropriate to give ourselves "breaks" from goodness, like a piece of chocolate, as a reward for completing undesirable tasks. I'm afraid something about my parenting patterns over the years has instituted this sort of transactional be...