Argonne picnic

Finally Peter is acting good enough and we decided to take the kids to the annual picnic of the whole laboratory. It was said to have a lot of fun games for young kids, but both I and another friend just naturally presume that there would be free food too--that is normally what a picnic means, right? When we got there and met our friends' family, the first thing being informed was that food is not free. The odd thing was that neither friend's family nor us brought any money. Isn't that funny? Four adults and three kids, with no cash in pockets, staying at a place around noon? Of course it was not possible to drive the kids home again, since there were a lot going on, the inflatable slids, beds, tunnels, and some other games. So, we ended up letting Lei(poor guy, he is always the hard-working one) drive back for money while me and friend's husband taking care of the three little ones(my friend was volunteering in organizing one game at noon). We took the kids onto a tractor (real one)for a ride and happened to find out that on the other side of field, there were pony rides. After lunch, we went right ahead, even Peter wanted to sit on a pony's back. Next thing surprised me was that someone brought in so many snakes and turtles. Yes, besides a full time job at Argonne, that guy and his wife raise a lot of big snakes and turtles. They were very nice and Let Yaya and Peter get in and pat the snake(by the way, it made me nauseous, i am not a person into animals at all). Peter was very excited about the turtles too, and kept bending down to touch. Friend's son, also was very fasinated by these, even put the snake around his small body, i guess after his dad's strong encouragement. On another side note, I begin to realize recently that our knowledge about animals obviously is too limited for our kids who live in America. For example, I know they are snakes, but what is the subsets, or exact species it belongs to, i have no idea. But the kids are learning so much at school about animals, like different bugs, dianosaurs etc, i found it hard to keep up with every word Yaya's saying about bugs sometimes. Ugh, not good, if i had time, i should learn. I hope i will. Anyway, watching those animals was an unexpected fun part for the kids during the picnic. Afterwards, we went to get some cotton floss and snow cones, it was good not only because they were free, but also it was the first time experience for Yaya (and Lei, he was so curious about what a cotton floss tastes like and ate like a little boy, hahaha..)After spending over 4 hours under sun, everyone was pretty wiped out by the time the picnic was almost over and we began to get ready to take off. But Yaya was yaya, she wanted to do everything one last time before we left. She ran over to those inflatable stuff and one by one did her last round. Finally she was satisfied. It was a good thing in a way to get so tired, because the whole family took a nap after getting home up until 6pm.