"What?" he asked. He looked alarmed, actually. We typically don't swap gifts on Valentine's Day, preferring instead to celebrate when the crowds aren't at their peak. Fondly, we call V-Day and New Year's Eve "Amateur Night." Yet here I was announcing, the night before, that I wanted something.

And I was serious.

"I want you to find me the moon," I said.

My 8-year-old son, Tyler, and I had been charting the moon for his science project and now, suddenly, it was gone. It had been a full moon for many nights and now, nothing. "Maybe it's a New Moon," Tyler offered. "What is that?" I asked. In addition to not being good at math, I'm not much of a science girl either.

But that night was the third night we'd looked for the moon and couldn't find it. Did a New Moon last that long? Tyler wasn't especially concerned. He shrugged his shoulders and wrote "no moon" on his science sheet.

But it bothered me. I could see the stars, so where in tarnation was the moon? My loving hubby looked it up on his tablet. "Here it is," he said. "It's at 53 percent." Hmm. So it should be about a half moon.

"Okay," I nodded. "Let's go find it."

So we walked outside, our old dog in tow. "It should be right there," said my husband, pointing at a cloudless, starry sky.

"But it's not! Where is it?"

"It's there. You just can't see it."

"That is ridiculous!" I fumed. But by this time, the hubby began to lose interest, figuring, I guess, that he'd done his part. He'd found the moon; it wasn't his fault I couldn't see it.

So then I did what any normal person would do: I asked my Facebook friends. "Where is the moon?" I posted. I started hearing from other moms; they couldn't find the moon either. Aha! I wasn't going crazy - or blind.

Finally, one kind and intelligent soul informed me the moon wasn't rising until about 1 a.m., so I would have to either stay up late or get up early to see it.

Homework is bad enough; I can't even get through the math anymore. And now I'm supposed to get up in the middle of the night to check on the moon, my newborn homework assignment?

And then I discovered something terrific.

There's an app for that.