I took my five-year-old to see the Perseid meteor shower (have I mentioned she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up?) I put her to bed at the normal time, then got her up around 11pm to get ready to go. I'd planned to get her up at 11:30, but was glad I did it early because she cried for half an hour straight. She wanted to stop, but she couldn't, poor kid. She kept taking deep breaths, but she was so tired that she couldn't help it. I offered to let her go back to bed, but she refused -- she really, really wanted to go see the meteors. I managed to talk her down enough to get her out the door and buckled into her car seat, where she fell asleep as soon as we were a few minutes down the road. I drove about 45 minutes outside town and took a couple back roads until I found a good spot in between a cornfield and a soybean field. I pulled up in the tractor entrance. With no houses for at least a mile in all directions, the view into space was awe-inspiring.

The stars were amazing. Having grown up in the city, I'm always blown away by the night sky in the country. I only saw four meteors, and Evelyn might have seen one or two. Even though I'd checked the radar earlier that evening and it was supposed to be clear, the sky to the southeast was covered in clouds, and that's where most of the meteor action was supposed to be. Oh well.

We stayed for about five minutes, after which the munchkin said she wanted to go home; she was fighting so hard to stay awake. We got back in the car, and I'm pretty sure she passed out as I backed onto the road and started to head back toward the highway.