Company Picnic

Insitu holds several company-wide social events each year, and this summer's picnic was held in the community park in Bingen. The event is catered by a local restaurant, and there is an entire section of the park filled with activities for kids: a baby-sitting area (complete with staff), several inflatable bounce-houses, and a face painting station. We opted to keep Anders with us during the party; he was perfectly happy just wandering around the park.

Once he saw the bounce-house, though, it was a different story. Anders had been in one of these just a few weeks earlier at the Trout Lake Fair, so he knew what it was. But this time the house was bigger; it included stairs and a slide inside. And there was a larger flow of older kids cycling through the house. Apparently neither of those were enough of a deterrent, so Anders got in line and made his way into the house. Since he has a generally cautious approach to new experiences, he didn't move very quickly through the house. He was moving, but it was an order of magnitude slower than most of the other kids around him. We were a little concerned that someone might just run over him (not intentionally, of course) when an older boy who was in the house came up to him and started helping him along the path. He held his hand, guided him around turns, and even helped him all the way up the stairs that led to the slide in the middle. It was at this point that Anders decided that he didn't want to go down that slide and began to scream. Corinne stuck her head in and pulled Anders out, and he calmed down when he saw us. We thanked the boy who had helped him along. We got his first name - Nathan - but neglected to find out his last name so that we could relay thanks and appreciation to his parents.

Anders didn't get his face painted, but another member of our party did.

"Cow jumping over the moon."

- Mike, Corinne, Donna Mae, and Anders Rocket

Date: August 18, 2010