Today Everett woke at 7am. This is great progress considering the last few days, and possibly reflects the work we have done at home as well. We recently put a digital clock in his room and taught him that he shouldn’t wake us until it reads 7:00. Somewhat surprisingly this worked after a brief training period, though he did attempt innovative solutions to this problem like changing the time until it read 7:00. Technically we can’t fault him for this because he was still doing what we asked. This is perhaps another example of how we, the parents, put a damper on the seemingly inexhaustible supply of innovative but not-so-good ideas that he comes up with.

After awakening we had a quick breakfast and then walked to the beach. FHL is in a biological preserve, so it’s not surprising that there is a lot of wildlife here. If you can look outside then you can find deer – they are more numerous and less fearful than squirrels at home. On our way to the beach we saw a few deer, followed by jellyfish

and our first seal sighting (or sea lion – we can never tell them apart).

Fantastic, and later we saw at least two of them several times during a post-school rowboat ride. We also saw our first snake today when Chris almost stepped on it. Chris recalls seeing many varieties of small snakes here before and the one today was about two feet long, which is actually large compared to the ones he recalls from a few years ago. The National Park Service reports that every snake on the island is probably some kind of garter snake. Lastly, today we saw our first Pycnopodia since arriving:

This picture is not ideal because of the lighting, but the water has been pretty turbid since we arrived so it has been difficult to see deeper than a few feet below the dock.

This evening the sky was quite clear and we were able to see two snow-capped peaks in the mainland. First was Mt. Baker which is directly east:

Second was possibly Mt. Rainier, though this seems unlikely. We will have to do some research to identify it: