The math works out, actually, and we are all glad she’s home.

dad

Are we not all quietly screaming these days?

dad

I mean, there wasn't exactly a lot of snow to begin with, and she seemed happy enough to sleep. Ten hour fever and we were out of the woods. Happy (retroactive) Valentine's Day!

dad

It snowed, finally, and then it didn't, and there was still school, but not at school.

dad

I told her twenty custom messages would be a lot, but I am also the guy who busted out the hot glue gun and metallic ink for the stamped letters, so I’m not quite sure who’s walking the walk here.

dad

It is bowl time. Get the foam fingers and bowl-ball bats out of the closet.

dad

Good news: It is Saturday. Bad news: It is 6:23.

dad

I don’t know why I was so surprised that letting Kina put her own to-do list together every night would make chores work. It’s just foreign to me. Glad she’s figuring this out now.

dad

Great news from the tip of Kina’s finger, if you needed any of it. Great news, that is.

dad

Reader, she is growing up so fast.

dad

I think it is a little ironic that Kina’s internal arithmetic model for third grade just yields a slightly-diluted second grade. What she would like you to take away, though, is that she is very advanced in many ways. And she is.

dad

I guess it was a long week, no? Kina had a lot of strife and turmoil to deal with, and I think we all deserved a good Sunday together. I took her to her original baby swings at Rodney Playground, we all had a fancy lunch and washed it down with cupcakes, watched a movie at home (well, Kina did while we slept), and we ate picadillo and had some fun conversations. All told, it was sort of our gift to Kina after a short series of moments that were not, strictly speaking, fun for her.

In exchange, later in the evening, she vanished into her bedroom and produced two ornamental shells. On mine, she wrote “I love you, Daddy” and painted hearts in every heart-shaped divot. On Laurea’s, she wrote “LISTEN TO CHILL OUT”. Both were perfectly crafted to remind us how wonderfully special this kid is.

It’s an honor to have her as a boss, a roommate, and a kid. Unlike pasta, she is absolutely perfect.

One of Laurea’s most endearing qualities is her certainty that, someday, she will go to space. I have had many years to become accustomed to this plan, but Kina only learned about it yesterday, and let me tell you, she does not find this endearing.

Space is a very large destination, full of nothingness and devoid of cell-phone towers, so it’s a little tricky to pin down where basically anything up there is at any given time, if you are seven.

This difficulty in geolocation (when one has basically left the geo), coupled with a slight resurgence in separation anxiety, has led Kina to her recent ruling that no mommies shall go to space, no how. It’s just too hard to find your way home, and home is the most important thing to Kina right now.

Not a stellar day yesterday, but we are all okay. Kina was being helpful and holding the door open for some classmates, and then the door was closing and then it was closed, and a parent was running over to her.

Laurea texted me at work in the middle of a meeting to say she was taking Kina to the urgent care, which all went well for them but not as well for the daddy stuck at work and wondering how the kid’s finger was. But the finger is fundamentally fine, if a bit purple, and it is splinted and Kina is comfortable enough to have since attended a birthday party, a tasty brunch, and three hours at the New York Hall of Science. All good.

dad

Rousing the rabble over “redo”: the Kina Tyche de Ocampo-Yee story.

dad

A slightly lighter topic today, though no less fraught for our publisher, who knows full well the importance of a school photo and the power of a well-selected outfit—a selection she was denied in the face of green/beige homogeneity. We must all suffer indignities from time to time.

dad

It’s surprising how little I’ve heard from other parents about whether or not they fight in front of their kids. I suppose it is the sort of topic that we’re afraid might invite judgement (a fear I shared even as I wrote the headline on today’s paper), but conflict is such a significant part of sharing a life together that I’m curious why the topic doesn’t come up more often.

Laurea and I had an argument yesterday in Kina’s presence—something we prefer to avoid—and it ended with me shouting as we walked out the front door of our building, which I am not proud of. Kina, judging by her demeanor and plugged-up ears, wasn’t proud either. Recognizing that things had gotten too noisy, we cut our losses, and I took Kina to school in silence as Laurea made her way back upstairs.

Kina didn’t know this at the time, but I ran home right after dropping her off so that I could catch Laurea before she went to work. We had a calm and clear conversation about what we wished had gone differently, apologized for our parts in the argument, and pivoted to talking about how we would address this with Kina.

I don’t know which bit I resent more—the mockery or its accuracy.

dad

If you have pooped your pants at least once in your life, you are in good company.

dad

I would not have started writing this newspaper if I didn't care about remembering the various little things that happen to Kina every day. Despite that effort, Kina has started to be able to recall more minor dramas from her youth than we find ourselves able to remember. Whether, as in the case of the fallen fish-shaped ice cream cone, these are events that actually happened or are mere constructions of her mind, it feels at times as though things are slipping away from us—not least of those things being Kina’s childhood. I think this process of writing and drawing gives me some sense of control over that distance of memory, but it’s insufficient. I never thought, in 2020, that the real repository of stories from Kina’s childhood would be Kina herself, but as her brain develops and the stories add up, I’m surprised (though I should not be) that she has her own take on her life: which moments startled her, which of them dug deep, which felt pivotal or silly or sad.

The stories I remember from Kina’s day now include her own, sometimes from years ago, and I feel lucky to be able to write down the moments that I truly did once forget, having been reintroduced to them by the person who was there in the first place.

As the inspection report shows, the only thing keeping this swing from collapsing is two small, tight knots wedged between the bedframe and the shelf hanging from its side. Any reasonable assessor would smack a stop-work order all over this.

dad

First, you have to find the sort of bee that is willing to push the envelope. Then it’s all about the world’s smallest cannon.

dad

Why even chug water out of these gigantic Stanley cups like we’re water billionaires when the winter air is just gonna suck it all out of us and leave us as wrinkly dusty hunks of skin after ten minutes? The ruse is exhausting.

dad

Our little etymologist is fascinated by the origins of words—both the where and why of them. Who called it a dog? Why? Why do we still call them dogs? Why do we not call them “cats”? What other random syllables might we assemble to name the thing currently named “dog”? Language is an agreement, Laurea tells her in the bath one night, that things should be called things and not something(s) else. Kina’s own language is an agreement that she formed with us in the first few years of her life (and, notably, in one extremely solitary and formative year of her life in 2020—we see that take shape in the absurdist headlines of this newspaper.) It feels strange at times to watch as her language evolves as an agreement with others, too—as she becomes a New Yorker in her choice of words and accents. She’s part of the big agreement now, as are her parents and their parents and her friends and their parents.

It’s just easier to call them dogs. Saves time.

dad

This kid has had some tough run-ins with the pavement in the past, but also, yesterday, with a little kid in her class who just wouldn’t stop yelling at her, which made her cry, which made Mr. Ortiz call Laurea, which made both of us really mad until we remembered that these people are literally seven years old and living complicated lives with very little impulse control, and when Kina came home, it was like nothing at all had happened that day—a total walk in the park. Laurea and I had agreed not to make a big deal about anything Kina wasn’t prepared to make a big deal about, and the worst that came of last evening was that I bit the living daylights out of my cheek, and Kina found herself comforting me on a day that I thought would have been really hard for her. Think of that next time you get a pretty bad cut.

dad

p.s. Thanks to EV, JSM, MB, and C+GF for upgrading your subscriptions. Every bit of support is welcome. The newsroom appreciates your ongoing readership.

I don’t know why she felt the need to reinforce her preexisting status as boss of this household by holding two balloons onto her upper lip. Everybody likes balloons, I suppose.

dad

I can remember with great clarity the smell of my grandmother’s house when I was Kina’s age. There is a specific sort of dustiness in the walls that underlies something green and cool. And there is the smell of sugar and milk from the kitchen, where the water had a specific flavor, sort of floral, rocky, with just a little aldehyde. The cement floor of the breezeway smelled as cement does, and the drywall boards after years of damp did, too. I smell the dirt and the roots of the trees from the basement even through the wall, and the sweeter ground of that basement giving way to the smell of old carpet and French toast as I walked upstairs for breakfast. I smell my grandmother’s cigarettes for a while at bedtime, and then I don’t after a few more years. I recall the smell of those cigarettes and the French toast at five in the morning, when she’d arrive at the house, and her smell lingering there over breakfast and in the car. I can smell the flowers she grew in the breezeway—with the cement and the wallboard—with real subtlety. In the afternoon, with the sliding door open to the deck out back, you could just take in a bit of the river from the cove beyond the tracks. The lazy, fernlike aroma of the grass, damp at the bottom of the hill, where the air was gravelly and green.

Kina built this Parade off of a sticker, fulfilling the long-held promise of a tree.

Kina has not done a lot of research on transportation machines, but her devotion to her mother is substantial, which bodes well for the whole enterprise.

I would buy the bed car, though, for real.

dad

The nook is a criminally underrated structure, in my opinion, and Kina’s nook is one of the finest there is. It is also why we got her a loft bed. To not build a nook under one’s bed feels like a dereliction of duty to coziness.

dad

Wikipedia’s entry for “hug” is suspiciously mum on the inventor of the hug and their rationale for why some arms are on top and others below, which leaves our newsroom wondering what exactly they are trying to hide.

Thanks to those of you who have chipped a buck or two in so far. It all makes the next several years of writing these a bit less expensive. Let’s hope Kina’s snuggles last as long as I do.

dad

We do not have a very large home, and so the prospect of not talking in it—and being banned from its largest room—is pretty unpleasant. But this is the price I pay for having a seven-year-old, clearly.

The upside here is that I get to hear scary stories about the bathroom and occasionally get dressed up in blankets.

dad

It has been 701 days since our last meaningful snow on February 13, 2022, when Kina visited the Museum of Mathematics and chucked a snowball at my head (as memorialized—at least the museum bit—in the February 14th edition of this publication).

There is no record of the snow on February 13th, 2022, because we assumed there would be some snow in the subsequent year. We regret the error and will henceforth note that it has snowed, just in case it never snows again.

NEW SUBSCRIPTION POSTSCRIPT: If you have been waiting for me to figure my stuff out regarding ways to support this newsletter now that David has to pay $29/mo for it, you have come to the right part of this newsletter. If you want to chip on in, click on “Sign up for a premium subscription” down there in the footer or go to the Subscription page and upgrade ye olde subscription. Pay what you wish, starting at a buck a month. The benefits for any and all subscriptions include our deepest gratitude and possibly a greater variety of colors in the paper.

Kina did not know how to ice skate yesterday at 3:00 PM, but after several falls, one maligned plastic skate-assisting bear, and a burst of dedication to the cause, she was tootling along with confidence (if not any particular elegance) by 4. So smitten was she by her newfound mastery that she spent the remainder of the day swaying back and forth as she walked, as if she were gliding along on freshly Zamboni’d ice. Will she make the 2036 U.S. Olympic figure skating team? Talk to me after two more visits to the rink.

dad

A sudden windstorm sweeps through Williamsburg, and our correspondent is there to tell the tale. At eleven: Another shocking downpour; Kina demands cake.

Parade is back again, with a cavalcade of media and textures to capture this little bundle of balloons. I asked why she didn’t fill in all the letters of “Parade”, and she answered “contrast”. Okay, Picasso.

Sometimes it’s nice to do the wonderful things in your dreams that would, in real life, get you beaten up by a marine biologist.

dad

p.s. Working on the subscription payment things, if that’s something you want to participate in. If you pledged when I was on Substack, you should know that I never charged those or brought them over, so you will have the same sense of excitement again, soon.

I think I really did a good job of capturing the miracle of Kina’s independence and the nonchalance of my dismissal here.

dad

p.s. The return to these pages of Roberto the Soup obliges me to direct you to Helen Rosner’s inspiring New Yorker essay about simple soups.

Hi! You may notice that this newsletter looks slightly different from the thousand or so that preceded it, because I am using a different publisher to send it. I’ll probably end up tweaking the look of the newsletter a little bit in the days to come, but I’m glad to be off of my last email platform.

One thing that is different about this platform (besides the fact that it does not actively support publishing nazi and nazi-adjacent content) is that it actually costs me money, so if you find me asking here for a small (quite small) voluntary donation soon, that’s why. anything in excess of the 29 bucks a month that funds the project will go directly to Kina’s education fund or fancy dresses.

Thank you for your continued subscription to this daily newspaper. I would say I don’t know why you’re all so loyal, except I do. Kina’s great. I’m annoying. All is well.

If you haven’t ever played Exquisite Corpse, in which a drawing unfolds (literally) between players over several rounds, let me recommend it highly for those moments in which your seven-year old child is jet lagged beyond belief, and it is three in the morning, and all you want to do is just go to sleep, but the kid is wide awake. It will not help with any of that, but it’s at least slightly funny.

This is Kina’s first Parade in a bit. Good thing about having several conscious hours before anything in New York is open, I suppose. Silver linings.

We are pretty sleepy around here, except when it’s useful to be sleepy.

dad

Yesterday was thirty-seven hours long, by my count, but I’m awfully jet-lagged and probably shouldn’t trust my own math. All I know is that it was Thursday forever, and forever included a fourteen-hour flight around the world, a full day in the pool at our hotel in the Philippines, a robust breakfast with coconuts, and a long wait for our bags in JFK. When we got off the plane, I panicked about not having written a Daily Kina, but then realized it was still Thursday and that I had managed to elude my morning obligation by chasing night in an airplane. If you want a taste of that missing day, you can always go back to the edition I wrote for the day at the beginning of our trip that technically never existed.

Glad I’m writing this now, because I can literally feel my brain shutting down.

dad

Lots of family stuff in these last two newsletters of the trip. In the first of them, from our penultimate day in the Philippines, Kina’s Tita Connie (who is technically Laurea’s Tita Connie, but the property is transitive) takes our publisher on a journey through the Landmark department store and buys her a sparkly dress. Then, she spends a little time at dinner braiding Aleli’s hair—a little gift for her favorite near-relative of the trip. Through it all, Kina slowly becomes a resident of the Manila Peninsula Hotel—an Eloise of the Philippine Archipelago.

And then there’s this—our last edition of the trip, marked by a visit from her Tita Maica (who is actually Laurea’s cousin Maica, this time) that ends with a heartbreakingly long embrace—it means a lot for Kina to be able to hug Maica, for many reasons. This moment felt a bit like the entire trip for me, a gift for Kina and for her family. That gift played out over four phases: the forest in Batangas, an initial visit to Manila, a journey to the island of Siquijor, and a return to Makati (again, in Manila). We saw relatives from both sides of Laurea’s family, ate a tremendous amount of food, were inspired by the transformation of the Philippines in the thirteen years since I last visited, and watched as Kina learned about her roots and learned some rudimentary Tagalog. This morning, as I headed out of the house to work for the first day in three weeks, I told Laurea that it felt like the culmination of a dream; we’ve been talking about this visit for seven years now, and part of me was worried it would never happen, but now it has happened—and it’s strange to find that it has already and completely happened, an event that took so long to arrive is now behind us. We are all pretty severely jetlagged (which I’ll talk about in the evening edition) and reflecting on the trip in ways that I never expected to.

When you spend your entire life waking up before 7 AM, sleeping in late can be deeply disorienting.

dad

The new year has arrived and the child is well pleased, well dressed, pooled out, and concealed in a credenza. By now, it is 2024 where you are, too. A very hapi nyu yir to all of our readers.

dad

I mean, yes, if I could just swim all day, eat amazing halo-halo, hang out with Kina and fly around a bunch of amazing tropical islands, it would be a nice change.

dad

We are staying in a very ritzy hotel this week, which means that our little publisher—a fan of fancy dresses—has a direct line of sight into all the wedding receptions and New Year galas. It is blowing her mind.

dad

“Thank you to the child who has returned”.

dad

I have never in my life met another human being who likes pools as much as Kina, and this week really cements it.

dad

Snorkeling, for the uninitiated, can be an incredibly overwhelming experience. Setting aside the obvious and terrifying novelty of undersea creatures and the elaborate living structures in which they reside, the sense of floating aimlessly over an uncaring universe, breathing through your mouth while underwater, and the ever-present possibility of meeting sharks, there is also the eternal strangeness of moving in the vertical plane, like a picture of oneself projected on a screen. When I first did it, I nearly puked.

Nonetheless, here in what is arguably the best place in the world to snorkel, in the “triangle of corals”, it seemed like a risk worth taking to drag Kina along for the ride—literally, in this case, as our guide had procured a life ring to supplement her life vest and three attentive life humans, into which we plopped Kina for the journey of a lifetime.

Within four minutes, she was over it. For a while, I tried to calm her down, as we passed, weeping, over countless sea turtles and brilliant blue starfish. I perched her on top of the ring on her stomach—not good. I removed her mask—not enough. I held her hand—insufficient. Our guides propelled themselves dutifully through the reef, as Laurea and I took turns appreciating an absurdly vast forest of corals and comforting our daughter.

Another normal Christmas day spotting geckos and playing in the outdoor pool.

dad

At the beginning of the game, which is basically pool tag, you bow to each other and intone, “the potato is… unaligned.”

dad