Meteor Shower

The other day I posted about a misconception/hoax about his past weekend's meteor shower.  As mentioned in that post, the Orionids are a result of Earth passing through the tail of Halley's comet.  Depending on the sky conditions and amount of tail debris that enters our atmosphere, the Orionids can be impressive.  Earlier in the day I thought briefly about waking my 5 year old and taking her outside to see the shower.  Estimates ranged from 30 - 60 meteors per hour which isn't too bad.

The best time to observe the Orionids this year was around 1 AM on the morning of October 21.  Since my daughter is in kindergarten, waking her up at 1 AM on a school night is not an option.  Not to mention, waking ME up at 1 AM on a work night is not an option either! :-)  This year the time of the shower was fortunate in that the 21st was a Saturday night/Sunday morning.  So I thought that maybe if the skies were clear, that I'd wake her up and have a father/daughter science bonding experience.

Unfortunately things did not work out and we didn't make it outside at 1 AM.  I have no clue if it was even cloudy or not.  Throughout the day my 2 year old was cranky and in one of her moods.  At 11 PM after she'd been asleep for 3 hours, she turned over and vomited out her dinner into her bed.  Lovely.  One of the joys of being a parent.  I had to turn on the bedroom light, which woke up my 5 year old.  It took 10 minutes to get everything cleaned up and both girls back to bed.  30 minutes later at 11:30, the 2 year old vomited again.  My 5 year old woke up again and it took another 10 minutes with the light on to get everything cleaned up.

By that point, I basically said, screw it.  My daughters have both been up twice already, no one is having any fun, and even though my 5 year old was fine, waking her up at 1 AM again was going to make for one rough Sunday.  So things didn't work out this time, but I'll continue to be on the lookout for a good meteor shower to share with my daughters.  

If you have the chance as a parent, and your kids aren't barfing all over the place, I encourage you to enjoy a meteor shower with them.  It may suck to wake them up in the wee hours of the morning, but they'll always have this moment that will stick with them for the rest of their lives.