This Week at the Fords: Hope your Thanksgiving was as peaceful as ours. Erika enjoyed three days off school with alot of lounging around and playing with her dad and sisters. On Thanksgiving Day, we spent an enjoyable afternoon at Billie Huddleston's home with several single people, including some international students. The girls really enjoyed exploring Billie's home and entertaining us with play. This holiday was a wonderful time for us as a family to reflect on how God has blessed us. God's goodness truly overwhelms us at times!!
Illness of the week: Jessika had a Doctor's appointment. Although she is quite healthy, her doctor referred her to a speech therapist. We suspect this problem stems from her first year of life in Germany, where she was exposed to only a little English. But who knows? This actually surprises me because she has begun to talk a lot more. Jessi has had to work for every word she knows. Most of the words she learns are from the same few books Jim reads to her over and over and of course, there are the same videos she watches again and again. Her assessment begins this Wednesday. I will keep you posted.
Word of the Week: "Taco! Every time we pass a Taco Bell, Jessi yells with delight! She also yells "Taco" at anytime she feels like going to Taco Bell. I take it as an indication of hunger and offer her some other snack. So far she has been pretty good at taking whatever food she can get. Beggars are never choosers at our home.
JIM'S CORNER: " Protestant Dogs "
I am currently planning to write a book entitled, Dogs and the Reformation: A Study of Catholic and Calvinist Canines in Christological Controversies. No one to my knowledge has examined the plight of the canine in the sixteenth century, when religious upheavals supposedly altered everyone's daily existence. For example, the Dominican friars, according to a few unbiased Protestant pamphleteers, were, as the Latin indicates, not humans but actually dogs or "hounds of the Lord" (Dominicanes). The concept for this book came when I read that, as a result of Protestant pressure, priests in the diocese of Speyer (1524) were forbidden to bring their dogs along to the Mass (true). While this incident wonderfully reveals how the Reformation changed the status of ex - Roman Catholic dogs, it is the only such story I have found to date. I suppose I can pad the rest of the book discussions on gender, identity and "creation of the self."
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