Who got to see the Lunar Eclipse on Sunday night?!

Of course, I’m late to the game sharing my pictures…because, let’s be honest, of who I am a person. But really, we’ve just been so busy lately, our days have been packed full with gardening and outdoor work, taking care of our cat Dash, who just had major surgery, along with regular life with kids and pets- all of whom need to be fed several times a day- so by the end of the day, I’m just ready to drink my tea and go to bed. I finally took the time today to get them done!

We have our last two goals for Everett’s homeschool to master before fully transitioning to summer school, but this was the perfect opportunity to show Everett just what to expect his summer school to look like- staying up late, eating hot dogs and popcorn over fire, while we look at the moon and find constellations in the stars!

Everett was excited to see his first lunar eclipse. I showed him a video explaining how it happens and what to look for. In the video, they said lunar eclipses happen one to two times a year… and boy was that a melt down that he had never seen one before! I told him that he was too little to stay up late and see them until this year, but he was sure that last year, when he was still five, that he was not too little. So I had to explain that between cloud cover, which always seems to happen whenever there are neat celestial events happening, super late eclipses that don’t happen until one or two in the morning, and the freezing cold over the winters, that he just couldn’t see them before now. I think the last lunar eclipse I was able to see, it was so cold I snapped my tripod and could only stay outside a few minutes at a time! He finally decided that it was okay that he hasn’t seen one before, because he gets to start now.

Allen brought out the telescope and we got to see glimpses of the eclipse close-up. It was difficult to track the moon with the telescope, and it bugged out my eyes, but it was definitely cool to use and show Everett how a telescope works.

The sky was mostly clear on Sunday night here in Wausau, but there was a large patch of clouds covering the moon just before ten o’clock. Luckily, those clouds moved pretty fast, and we were able to catch the start of the eclipse just in time. The first picture actually shows the last of the clouds before they cleared away. As the moon was covered in shadow, we saw how much darker the sky got, and how we could see more stars when it was dark! Everett has been searching for the Big Dipper and trying to find shapes in the stars, so he it kept him interested in watching the moon and stars as the eclipse progressed.

Then, when the moon was in the full shadow of the Earth, we called in a night and headed into the tent for Everett’s first front-yard camping experience! He loved sleeping in the tent with his sleeping bag and had a good night’s sleep. Mom and Dad, on the other hand, woke up tired and sore. This may have played a big part in my late-ness of this post as I attempted to recover from my lack of sleep! Everett’s excited to do more camping, so it might be something that we’ll have to get used to doing. I thought my tent-days were over when I left the Army, but I guess here we go again!

This lunar event was the perfect way to get Everett excited for summer school. When I told him that we were almost done with homeschool for the summer, he said he didn’t want to stop learning- and what an excellent way to show him that learning doesn’t just happen at the kitchen table, but all around us as we experience the Earth and build a life we can be excited about.

Check out a few of the pictures as the moon moved into our shadow and turned that epic red color of the Blood Moon!

Thanks for reading!

~Carissa