PARTY TIME!

It was Son Rise senior teacher William who, during his outreach 3 weeks ago, suggested we take some time off, get together as a team, and celebrate what we have accomplished in our program in the last 2 years or so.

We did just that on Friday.  We had... you guessed it... a PARTY! 

Food, drink, music, and games!  Our Son Rise program had never looked like this!  It was thoroughly refreshing.  Aai, Baba, Aditya's sister, and his volunteer friends had pizza and ice cream, while Aditya had his special "almond meal pizza".

Aditya spent the first 20 minutes sitting close to the laptop that was playing his favorite music.  Flexible to allow sister to forward to her favorite track.  Then we asked him if we could... after the next song... stop the music and move on to play some games with the people at the party... and he said he wanted to!

One of the games we played was "Two truths and a lie" and Aditya detected the lie almost right away when Aai and Baba were talking.  With other friends,  he paid attention to them talking, took a guess, and was okay to get it wrong, and in the process learn something new about that person!  (Although we were not even working on that goal... we were at a party.  How cool!)   But the best part was when he made up a lie! I immediately realized this is not something he does or could do, and I congratulated him for it:-)

The most beautiful moment of the party for me, was when we took turns talking about:
 1.  a thing we were not doing with Aditya 2 years ago but now do
 2.  a thing we would love to do with him a year from now

Speaking on the first topic, Aditya said he used to build with blocks 2 years ago, then blushed, then went on to say he now plays soccer, pretend play games, ungame with his friends!  He also said this journey is beautiful, and then he asked if the journey will continue.  We said we think each of us will be part of the journey that is unique to our own lives... forever... but we will share our journeys with each other too!  How beautiful that we were having this lovely conversation with a boy who once would not engage in any meaningful conversation!

Way to go, Aditya, and his fantastic Son Rise friends!