Saturday Argonne Open House

Yaya has been asking about my work a lot ever since we moved. She used to go to my lab in NU with me on weekends occasionally when I needed to do some simple stuff. I allowed her to stand by since all i had dealt with was synthetic DNA in water. Then when I began to work here, I seldom came to the lab at off-work hour, even if I had to, I chose to come when the kids are asleep. Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity for her to come for the open house.

What I did not expect was that there were so many people coming that it took us quite some time to find a parking space in the huge parking lot. Yaya even met one of her classmates before we got into Chemistry building. Then once I got to my lab's hallway, where I was supposed to work, I realized that it would be hard work for me. People were just coming and going non-stop, and they all seemed to be so interested and expected us to explain something to them. I ended up talking continously about we are doing and what I have on my exhibition table all afternoon.

We made one solution of a fluorescence dye, the point was to show the kids that it was pink in air, but once put it in light, the color changes into green. It turned out to be a big hit. Almost all the kids were facinated by the "magic" color change. What impressed me most that these kids seemed to be so active and brave in trying to explain the phenomenon. The youngest kid I asked why, i guess, was only 5 yr-old, and even he, putting his finger on his lips, said to me right away"I think it is the light.."Well, who know? Maybe they will really remember this and learn it when they are in the right class. Yaya, too, was very interested and insisted on doing the physical part---showing the color change while I demonstrated it.

At the same time, Yaya went up and down the hall way to look at some other stuff from our group. She loved to play with the magnets Oleg had prepared and ran back to tell me"mommy, look, at that table, they got something really magic, those thing became sticky when you put them close enough.."Funny, huh? Then, she overheard Arlene explaining to people about how they can see her crystals under the microscope. She asked me "what is a crystal?", which, believe it or not, I had a hard time explaining to her. When Peter finally showed up with Lei after his nap, Yaya got to go see some other departments' exhibition. She later told me she liked the one experiment she did where she saw pink and blue colors by dripping solutions on to a piece of paper(pH test paper). Lei confirmed that she waited a long time in line to do the hand-on experiment. In the meantime, kids got some fun stuff, like tatoo, sticker, 3-D glasses etc to play with.

There's one story about this little boy who is only 6 yr-old. He showed great interest in the lab and insisted going in to take a look. Some collegues were moved by his enthusiasm and even gave him a lab coat. But in the end, the department did not allow him to go in the lab because of safty reasons, well, you can imagine how upset he was. In order to encourge him, the department secretary finally worked out something with his mom---they would email each other to set up another date for this little boy to come back and have a lab tour. Isn't this cute? One other thing amazed me was that there were over 18,000 people on site that day. Wow!

I was so glad that it was over by 4:30pm because I was so, so exhausted. On the way home, Yaya told me in the car "mommy, now I know what your work is like, you talk to so many people everyday at work..." What? Well, it seemed to me that I need to arrange another trip for Yaya herself as well...