Stargazing

We let Friday be lazy.  I met our next door neighbor, an ancient woman who is drying a whole lot of tomatoes out on her roof.  She doesn’t speak any English, but we smile at each other a lot, and she likes to tousle the kids’ hair as they walk by.  Speaking of hair, Milo’s Dubrovnik haircut is growing in kind of crazy.  It was cut so short that it lay flat when he first got it, but now it looks like there are two horns growing out of the top of his head.  Meanwhile, it’s been months since C.C. had a haircut, and her bangs are now long enough to obscure her eyes.  We’ve starting clipping them aside so that she doesn’t bump into things.

We have been trying to do our part as parents to prevent the “summer slide”—the educational regression that happens when kids don’t spend any time in the summer reading and reviewing what they learned during the school year.  Milo’s teacher sent home a packet of worksheets and activities with him, along with a stack of books at his level on the last day of school, and we’ve been picking through them as we travel from place to place.  C.C. reads and writes a ton, so we subscribed to a math website so that she could keep up her math.  The problem is, she hates it.  It’s a worse struggle than homework, and she cannot believe the injustice that is forcing her to do “homework” on summer vacation!  Despite our attempts to incentivize her participation, we might be on a sinking ship.

So we went through that fiasco on Friday, connecting to the internet in the town square.  It’s a lively place with a few coffee shops and restaurants, and seems to be a good mix of tourists and locals—not the kind of place that has been completely overtaken.   Most of the villagers here work the land, whereas many villages of this type that we’ve visited shifted from an agricultural based economy to a tourism-based economy long ago.

We spent the middle chunk of Saturday at a secluded beach, and snorkeled around a small offshore island with the kids.  I am hugely impressed by what good snorkelers they have become.  We paired off, and I was Milo’s snorkel buddy—he was terrific.  There isn’t a whole lot to see here—a few fish here and there—but they are in good shape for an open water snorkel now.

Vasilio had arranged a nighttime stargazing activity, and we all wanted to go, so we imposed a mandatory rest time when we got back from the beach.  All of us slept except for Alec.  Milo had a tough time settling down.  He flipped and flopped despite all attempts to rub his back and settle him down.  “I’m just too hyper-accurate!” he shouted.  I put on the Winnie-the-Pooh audiobook to calm him down.  That, and lying on Alec’s chest, did the trick.

The stargazing started at 10 pm.  Vasilio led several cars up, up, up a windy road to the top of a dark hill, where we met three astronomers from the island of Lesbos who had already set up their two enormous telescopes.  It was beautiful.  We saw Saturn, some other galaxies and—a personal favorite of the kids—the eagle nebula.  They had seen it on the Star Walk app on my iPad and were so excited to see the real thing?  For me, Saturn was the highlight.  It was cool enough for me to go back to the car and get a fleece blanket to wrap up in.  I lay down on a bench and just watched the meteor shower playing out overhead—much better than any telescope.