Birthday Celebration

We celebrated three birthdays this week: Luana turned 7, Willian is now 12, and Lucilene started her teenage years. This was Luana's first birthday at CLM and she was overwhelmed with the attention and gifts. Her mother was only 11 years old when she had her and being a little girl herself, wasn't able to give her the attention she needed. While our other first graders are sounding out words and adding numbers, she has difficulty identifying her letters and numbers and often confuses the two. Willian is a bright boy and does well in school. Unlike our other children, he has visits with both his mom and dad, who are both interested in assuming guardianship of him. Lucilene also struggles with her schoolwork and has been working to master her multiplication facts. She and her younger sister and brother, Janete and Elielton have recently become available for adoption. Thank you for praying for the needs of each of these special children.

Dia dos Pais

Last week, we celebrated Father's Day here in Brazil and honored Lobinho and Mike, as well as our future dads. The kids made cards and gave each dad a special mug...Mike's had a picture of a black lab in honor of Maggie! We were blessed to have Bob, our director's brother-in-law here with us to celebrate. He and his family have been intricately involved with CLM for the last 28 years, visiting 14 times. This was Bob's first visit without Kathy, which has made it bittersweet. Please continue to pray for him as he grieves and for Lobinho and Mike as they model a father's love to our 36 children.

Destaque da Semana!

Since January, we have been choosing one child as our Star of the Week based on good behavior or improved behavior. The kids have really enjoyed the suspense each week waiting for the announcement of the next Star...but we have realized that some of our kids will never be chosen based on their behavior! In an effort to spotlight each child as a unique gift from God, we began today randomly selecting one child as our "destaque." The word is often used for employees here and means distinguished or outstanding. Valdicleia was chosen today and is holding the bulletin board I made to highlight her favorite things. We hope this will be another way to reinforce how special each one is to us and to God. Please pray for Valdicleia this week!