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Depression is not a dirty word.

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Fair warning, this is a long, serious, and intensely personal post.
Did you know that today, September 10th, is World Suicide Prevention Day?
Per the International Association for Suicide Prevention: Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the world, especially among young people. Nearly one million people worldwide die by suicide each year. This corresponds to one death by suicide every 40 seconds. The number of lives lost each year through suicide exceeds the number of deaths due to homicide and war combined.
My life was affected by suicide from an early age. My fourth grade teacher at a private school in California's San Fernando Valley took her life during the school year. A close classmate from the public school I attended in 5th and 6th grade took her life in 7th grade after I had moved away. A boy I knew in middle school killed himself. A close friend in the 7th and 8th grade attempted suicide, and my mom took me to visit him at the hospital a few hours from our h…
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2013 - Year of the Mouse!

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As Chinese New Year approaches (February 10th this year), we bid a fond farewell to the Year of the Dragon. My oldest son was born in the Year of the Dragon, so all year long when we saw anything with a dragon on it, we'd point it out to him. And now as the Year of the Dragon roars out, we make way for the new year... the Year of the Mouse!

Okay, not really. It's actually the Year of the Snake. But for us Chases, there is a spectacularly magical Mouse-related year about to commence!

For Christmas this year, we gave the boys these photos:

And then we told them we'll be going to all of the Disney Theme Parks worldwide in 2013! I'm not sure who was more excited, the boys or their Mama! Truth be told, Michael, Nathan, and I have already been to all the Disney Parks except for the two in Paris. But Benjamin wasn't yet born when we lived in Japan. For that matter, Nathan was just a 13 week old baby when we went to Tokyo Disneyland and a ten month old when Tokyo DisneySea …
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Things I could feel bad about. But won't.

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Michael and I got to jump on a plane from Shanghai to Los Angeles to attend a four day conference on leadership, creativity, and humanity two weeks ago. It was something we really wanted to do, but the limitations to our finances living here in Shanghai mean that we can budget a trip to America only every other year, and this was not our year. But in the beautiful way that things sometimes have a way of working out when you are absolutely meant to be somewhere, someone else totally unrelated to the conference provided the funds via an envelope filled with cash to cover the cost of round trip airfare and the conference admission. The conference was amazing. So much good stuff that I'm still mulling it over and trying to find ways to adjust my life to fit all the new information we were flooded with. But this isn't a post about the conference. I don't even know how to write about it just yet. In addition to the four conference days, we decided to stay an extra three days in …
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