Our newest, sweetest, youngest team member!

Of course, we are talking about Shreya, the one and only twin sister of Aditya.

We had asked her about it before, but when I (Baba) asked her today if she wanted to take a game inside and play with Aditya for 30 minutes, she was very interested.

We speak to her once in a while about how if she really wanted  to be someone's friend, she could choose to spend some time talking about "their thing" and doing it with them, so that they feel like playing her game.

As we talked about it again today, she said she has tried this in school with a girl who likes Ballerinas and so they combined their interests and made up some game about dogs and ballerinas.

That's it!  We then brainstormed about a game where Shreya would have her motivation (dogs) and Aditya would have his (airplane, inventions, machines, super heroes) too.

She quickly put together an idea of the game, and on my suggestion she put in 3 challenges for Aditya.  She drew it all on an easel to make presenting easy.  She then quickly cut out 4 doggy ears from paper, and even created 2 paper loops and taped the dog ears on to the loops.  She then also quickly created a cape!  All done in less than 20 minutes!

The sweet and loving 7 year old brought in such a fresh surge of energy and a new perspective! I was totally impressed.

Aditya was playing with Arjun when I went in and gave him the news.  He was interested... in fact, excited... as that meant he did not have to leave the playroom (otherwise he would have).

I took her and the easel inside, and that's it.  Arjun and I left the room and did his feedback in the living room,  while the siblings played with each other for a whole 30 minutes.  No bickering, no control battles, just play and having fun!  (We did videotape this special play session.)

Later Shreya reported that it was lots of fun, and Aditya was extremely flexible and never "sat down and talked about his cars" (his major ism wherein he completely loses the other person and can talk for several minutes at a stretch).  He totally rose to the first challenge of becoming a dog-airplane combination machine and rescuing Silky the puppy (played by Shreya).  He also innovated a way to solve another challenge-- put out the fire on an island where the rescued dog's mom was trapped.  He would drink lots of water and then use a machine to push it out of his throat and throw it up over the fire!

There are several "firsts" we have seen in our program, but this is a special "first", for it belongs to Shreya as well as Aditya.  Both are our role models with their creativity, energy, excitement, enthusiasm, and their willingness to step out of their comfort zone to change themselves and create something wonderful!