We are starting to get into a routine. Everett awakens around 7, followed by breakfast, some kind of mini adventure and then off to preschool. Today he wanted to combine the latter two, so after breakfast we went to the dock and rowed to school (stopping at the rope swing on the way):

One interesting thing about becoming a parent is the sense of mortality that comes with it. This is partly in the sense that the universe has entrusted us to bring a new life into the world, and those are pretty big shoes to fill. Parents seem to have an endless supply of potential worries and are forced to take calculated risks in order to encourage exploration while keeping everyone safe. The most concise explanation we have ever heard for this was from one of the Tosa Spokesmen that Chris rides with who is a father of four: Mom’s think about possibilities, Dad’s think about probabilities. This accounts for why Everett is in the rowboat with Dad instead of Mom.

Today at lunch was pretty sunny and Melissa wasn’t feeling well, so Chris went to the dock to look for creatures and practice underwater photography, which is more difficult than it appears. The primary challenge in this case is filming from the dock and figuring out from above water which creatures are within range of the camera lens below water. We now have several pieces of footage showing dock pilings with the extremities of some very interesting animals just peeking into the edge of the picture. Fortunately Chris was able to get some decent shots today in the bright sunlight, including the first nudibranch sighting of the trip! We think this is some variety of Dendronotus. But in the mayhem and exhaustion of the days leading up to this trip Chris forgot to pack his copy of Pacific Coast Nudibranchs. Fortunately we are at a marine biology laboratory, and if memory serves correctly the library is open 24 hours a day, so a midnight trip to sort this out might be necessary. In any case, this is what we captured today on video:

One final note: a few nights ago we mentioned a flashlight that was our first equipment loss to the sea. At the time I didn’t mention who lost the flashlight because it didn’t seem important, and because the person who lost it probably feels badly enough anyway, but apparently the word is out in town. When we picked Everett up from school today a girl his age walked up to Melissa and asked “Did you, um, did you drop the flashlight?”

Curiously, we noted its exact location and Chris returned to the dock at low tide (around midnight) to retrieve it but it was gone. Leading theories about where it went: someone else found it first; it rolled away in the current; a crab or some other animal took it. All of these seem unlikely for different reasons.