Sometimes it takes a rare celestial event – like the alignment of the sun and the moon – to make you drop every thing and alter your crazy busy schedule to witness a breathtaking event.

Initially, I planned to just keep my oldest kid home from daycare and just go get some solar eclipse glasses from 7-11 and go out in the backyard and look up in the sky and hope we see something without going blind. That was my plan. Then come back inside and try to get them to take a nap after 3 pm. Good luck with that.

But my hubby was working from home. And we kept hearing about the best places in the city to watch the eclipse. 

And then I read this article about how the eclipse is best witnessed in a crowd of people. My brother in the Midwest called me and said he was witnessing the eclipse while we were on the phone and it was “pretty awesome.”

Peer pressure (and the Internets) prevailed. We packed the kids up and headed to the nearest public library, where they were holding an eclipse party and handing out free glasses for kids.

And I’m glad we did.

My family loved it. It’s funny how something so constant– I mean, the sun and the moon are always out there and they aren’t leaving anytime soon– could stop us in our tracks and make us take note of its beauty.

And not just its beauty but each other’s too. We were outside the library with tons of other kids and families, office workers, commuters, passersby.  College students spilled out of a nearby dorm to watch it with us. And we all chose to be together instead of watching it on TV or the Internet or in our backyards. Kids colored their depictions of the eclipse on a group coloring page. Another group of preteens threw a football.

We were all just spending time together really, watching the sun pass by the moon.

It wasn’t quite a once in a lifetime event– this is supposed to occur again in 2024. My kids will nearly be preteens so they won’t remember this one. But we have the pictures to prove it.

More importantly, I have the memories. Because we were all there, together.