Celebrating Life

Today our beautiful N turns ONE!

We sang Happy Birthday then Tia Maria, our resident pastor, prayed over N's life. I marveled over the turn of events since N's mom was nearly forced to abort her. (Read about how she came to us last year here.)

Happy Birthday, baby!

There are LOTS of cute pictures of her smiling and clapping and the other babies, but all reveal the name on her pretty cake, so I can't show them here.

Practicing walking. She can almost do it!!

Little Kitchen Helper

Our dear F (just turned 2 years old) helping Tia Silvia this morning in the kitchen...

TOO cute!!

Visiting SPAI, an Adoption Agency in Italy

My husband and I spent almost two weeks in Italy in June. Our main purpose was to visit some of the twelve Casa de Amor children now living in Italy with their adoptive parents. It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip!

(To read more and see pictures of the children, go to my personal blog, here!)

Found it! Looking for SPAI's office right after arriving to Ancona by train.

While there, we planned a quick side trip to Ancona to visit SPAI, "Servizio Polifunzionale per L'Adozione Internazionale". SPAI is the adoption agency that has placed several of our children into Italian families, the most recent being Juan Gabriel in January 2012. (This year we have had zero international adoptions as Bolivia's government remains unwilling to even consider renewing international adoption agreements.)

Ancona is a nice little port town

Casa de Amor is also very grateful to SPAI for the past several years of financial support. We thought it would be nice to go thank them personally!

Meeting Doctora Clementina Merlan in her office. She would love to visit Bolivia again, but with adoptions currently closed between our countries, we are not sure when that visit would take place - or when we will have grants from SPAI again.

Touring SPAI's office, full of momentos from the countries they work with

I loved SPAI's street, pedestrian traffic only