I don’t think we’d ever noticed how Kina says “Sure!” when she means “yes”, or that she says “I’m good!” when she means “no”, but I can tell you for sure that people in California notice it, and so it must be a New York thing.

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This is a special time. No further comment.

Today’s Parade is a collaboration with Tita Cindy and Tito Giorgio, and just one of Kina’s many natural artworks from the last day.

Bonnie is really the only deer in Kina’s life, to be fair, but the two are fast friends and cautious neighbors here on the mountain. I do not think there is a human she was more excited to see this week. We woke up today to find Bonnie standing directly at our door, waiting for this girl who comes just once a year. Kina knew it would be like this, she reminded us—she had told us the night before.

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Off to the next stop. Farewell, hot tub.

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It is not that easy for me, but now she’s best friends with Jasper, a boy she met this morning, so I guess it’s Laurea’s side.

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She did ask the little girl her name, seeing as she had (according to Kina’s journal entry) “the igsact same birthday as me”, and yet she ultimately did not remember the little girl’s name, and so I cannot tell you more specifically about the child who was born at the same time (more or less) than Kina. I can tell you they got along well, and that her birthday twin did not at all want to go to day camp, having found one of the few people she will ever meet who shares her birthday. This is special stuff. Camp can wait.

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I don’t know that I know anybody who loves California as much as Kina does. It’s a fascination that seems to have cropped up in the past year, and it’s made up of equal parts novelty, Lala, ice cream, playgrounds, sunshine, princess dresses, and unimpeded time with her parents. The sense of discovery I see in her is dizzying—she really is just absorbing this place, and it’s pushed aside any other part of her life; friends are a distant memory, teachers living in wistful shadow, the subway a relic of another age. Instead: so many beautiful flowers, ripe avocados, hot tubs, and adoration. It’s a fair trade, I think. No space left in the brain. Just California.

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Honestly, I don’t even want to know.

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The first morning in California with Kina has traditionally been a real doozy, usually starting at 4 AM and requiring our full attention and commitment. It’s hard for us to stay asleep, too, of course, but we know better than to succumb to the instinct to get up and play with toys. This year is better than all previous years combined—not because she woke up any later today, which she did not, but because she didn’t come get us. We mainly laid here in the dark, listening to her sing Disney tunes and whack on a carpentry set, grateful that we didn’t have to entertain her for once. Things do get better, as it turns out.

So, this is the Parade. As you can see, it is Califo(r)nia themed. It was originally meant to read “CALIFORNIA HERE WE COME PARADE”

Was too jet-lagged to send this last night.

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I don’t invent the headlines, I just report them.

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The controversial First-Class Plane Dad in question. Charmingly, Kina declared that the whole family should sit in the big seat up front. Very fair.

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I spent an actual dollar on a breath-filled water balloon this morning, so Kina is definitely on track to be a billionaire.

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Kina has not been alive long enough to really contemplate what the ideal superpower would be, and so, with limited information, she has chosen a very specific power that maximizes the joy she hopes to feel in this exact moment. There is something to that initiative that I admire—that sense of focus. The right answer to the question of “which is the best superpower”, which she will discover at some point in her adulthood, is the manipulation of time. I have not yet developed that power, unfortunately, but I do have ready access to Fruit Roll-Ups, which is apparently a miracle in and of itself.

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When I was a little kid, younger than Kina, I would watch Spidey Super Stories, the first live-action Spider-Man show, which was basically an extended segment on The Electric Company—a show for kids that somehow had cast both Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman. It was the seventies.

Anyhow, Spider-Man could climb walls, which seemed like a huge win, and I was just old enough to recognize that this was an exclusive skill and just young enough not to know it was also an impossible skill. I would stand in the family room and grip the walls, hoping to figure out how it was done, to no avail.

Eventually, I found a bottle of Elmer’s glue and just slathered the whole thing on the palms of my hands and waited for it to soak into my skin, which I figured would make me permanently sticky. It made me sticky. It was not permanent.

If you are reading these daily newsletters and thinking “dang they are spending a lot of time at the beach this year,” you are not mistaken. Ever since Kina took to dunking in the ocean last year, we’ve realized that all her greatest strides in swimming and other forms of marine independence come in the waves—plus, it’s really nice when the air is thick and still and 88 degrees.

Yesterday, Kina swam between me and Laurea on our way out to the sandbar about 150 feet out from shore (It was low tide, so not actually that deep). We jumped around in the waves as they broke on the sandbar, then retreated to the deeper waters closer to the beach and swam in the swells. It was… it was swell.

After all these days in the ocean, some two years or so into wearing basically the same swimsuit every trip, her rash guard basically gave out, so Laurea tossed it in the trash can. Farewell, sweet rash guard.

May the gods preserve the MTA and its direct overland route to the best water feature in Brooklyn.

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The newsroom remains tense after yesterday’s unprecedented interference by our publisher, but she looked real cute on the teacup ride.

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The newsroom is livid.

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The thing about this family: We are weather nerds. I don’t leave the house without a thorough analysis of precipitation, temperature, and air quality for the day, and I take my probabilities seriously. We are also beach nerds, which means that we have a high hit rate for great, sunny beach days. Tuesday was meant to be that kind of beach day.

Yesterday, though, as we confronted a hot July 4th with a (broad, useless, emergent, nonspecific) “50% chance of rain”, we began to question our plan to spend the day at the beach, for fear of… getting wet? Rain and beach, no good—and if we flip a coin and it comes up rain half the time, those aren’t the kinds of odds we like.

However, faced with the alternatives—stay home, drive to New Jersey, watch three movies—we threw caution to the wind and rolled out to the beach. What if life isn’t black and white? What if you can spend two hours at the beach in the blazing sun before it starts sprinkling? That’s two hours of beach time I get to snatch from fate.

I really thought I knew the Rapunzel story, but Kina clearly has a deeper sense of the narrative. Can’t say I’ve ever thought to trap people in a dungeon so that they can get to know each other better through a fun little game of escaping-the-dungeon, but it seems worth trying, if you have access to a dungeon.

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Easily my favorite implication of today’s top headline is that Kina thinks substitute teachers exist so that her usual teachers can go to the beach from time to time, which is an amazing reason for substitute teachers to exist, but also an accurate reflection of my low-key constant wish that I could clone myself.

I promise all the clones would get a day in the pool.

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An impromptu decision to pursue indoor activities yesterday (in light of the continuing climate-change inferno in our neighboring Northern province) took us to the American Museum of Natural History—whose newest wing, the Gilder Science Center, has been on our short list since it opened. We met up with Kina’s friend Runa in the hall of gems and stared at crystals for twenty minutes or so (more on that in today’s Parade), then scrambled upstairs through the cement honeycombs of the new wing to the relocated Butterfly Vivarium. The kids ran ahead with three tickets between them, sufficiently alarming the security guard that she gave me license to follow them in without a pass (sweet!) to keep an eye on the children (bittersweet!) among the butterflies (ultra sweet!)

For the next long while, Kina, Runa, and her sister Bea walked slowly through the humid vivarium with their fingers outstretched, attempting to cajole insects to perch upon them. They’d grow perilously close to one of the butterflies—just close enough to raise the attention of a nearby docent—and then wait as the butterfly studiously ignored them, each party presumably growing further annoyed with the other.

Eventually, after having given up on the hope of ever reaching the heights of butterfly princessdom, the girls withdrew from both the exhibit and the museum, retreating to Central Park, where they could touch anything they wanted to, climb big rocks, and maybe throw small rocks. It’s hard to say, since the adults were all exhausted from the museum and possibly taking naps on a nearby boulder. Some of them, probably. One or two.

She’s gonna write a letter to her favorite chocolate maker from Youtube to get his secret recipe.

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Aaaaaand we are back.

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It has begun. Sorry about the hair, dad.

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I cannot believe it has come to this, again. Thank you to Team Yeah-Yeah and Grandma for being there with Kina today as she grows up.

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p.s. Here’s all the prior last days of school

Looks like Ken got the full Kina Sunday treatment. Bravo!

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Nobody likes mustard, everybody likes aquariums. A full day on the town for our publisher and her interim editors.

I don’t think I can do this Parade justice, so I’ll let my dad speak for himself. It’s clear he got scammed into doing this one on his own, but he did well for it. Thanks, dad.

Day 2: the child makes creative demands.

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Hello from London, where I am doing conference things with Laurea. Today’s edition—and the subsequent five or so—comes from “Ya-Ya”, whom I have been calling “Yeh-Yeh” here for the last three years. Whatever—it’s his name, not mine. Today’s (yesterday’s?) top headline dives into Kina’s habit of tossing a handful of Cheerios into any smoothie she finds, which is in fact for textural contrast—a gourmet like her parents. You should try it sometime.

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Hello from the plane! Our publisher will be presiding over the Agreeing Courtroom with my folks during the next week. Expect my father’s handwriting.

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Almost exactly three years ago (before I started writing the newsletter version of this paper), I produced an edition made up entirely of the word “Meow”. This edition is an homage to that one, which I will add here for posterity, in honor of Kina’s unwavering love of cats. Loyal readers will recognize in this historic artifact a few historic nuggets—a long-abandoned price, Kina’s original portrait, a four-headline weekday edition, and our friend Oakwul.

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She really did just sort of… start swimming? It was wild.

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I get nervous when I have to draw a portrait of somebody who is not Kina, but I do feel that I’ve captured Eka’s essential vibe and her inexplicably deep love of Kina.

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Tea parties are infrequent affairs in our home, and I was honored to be invited in the first place, but I meddled a little too much and ended up banished for ten minutes, before being allowed to return on the condition that I sit quietly and not mess with the cakes. I did okay, but I had to eat off the smallest plate.

ALSO: Kina can flip herself upside-down on the rings! Who knew? How many shows can this child plausibly perform in the span of a single month? Let’s find out!

ALSO: I really did debate for a long time whether to make the top headline about Kina’s wondrous, mid-sidewalk, leotard-clad fascination with slime, but it felt too intensely personal to put that high up. Still—it was hilarious.

I do not feel totally at ease with the concept of infinity—it’s too uncomfortable, for a lover of numbers, to conceive of a number that is beyond counting. I like to be able to catch up with my numbers, but Kina has addressed this by abandoning any notion of mathematics and just imagining a never-ending rainbow slide, which—once you commit to it—you ride on forever and ever. It is because of this that one cannot have two or three times infinity; you never have the opportunity to get on the second slide. I find this unassailable, and it will help me sleep at night.

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p.s. For more history on Pigeon Friend, please consult:

Among the very best, technically—just twenty or so out of 75,000 teachers, by my count—but Kina knows Ms Hart’s the actual very best. And now so do you.

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The pratfall really got a laugh. Comedy genius.

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Oh, thank god.

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She really packs a lot of subjects into a short lesson with her little “teacher stick” and her taped-on gems.

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It was a big day for these two kids who have known each other since they knew anybody at all.

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What can I say? She’s a force of nature. Look at that form! I swoon.

No problemo.

Careful readers will note that no sleep occurs at this proposed sleepover, and there is a “secret part”; I suspect there will be a sleepover edition sometime this year. We’re ready for it (the edition, not the sleepover). Also, this is my fourth consecutive birthday writing this paper (my first birthday edition, from 2020, led with “Mystery at Chef Panda’s New Bakery; Chocolate Croissants Lack Chocolate”).

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Have you tried it? She’s not wrong.

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Our selfless publisher, en route to school in a smoky haze, turns her attention to the little furry folks.

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In a “normal world”, an elementary school administrator planning for a celebratory Field Day for the end of school would have backup plans for rain (let’s say), or an outbreak of COVID, or continued systemic budget cuts that impact the number of available kickballs. But the bar for normal has once again fallen, and our proverbial administrator is left wondering why she didn’t take into consideration that Canada might be on fire.

But the email came in this morning that Canada was on fire after all, and that it was so on fire that New York itself seemed like it was actually on fire, and so there would be no field day—no takeover of the local park, no dirty shoes, no kickballs (budget shortfalls or not). The kids would still dress in their class colors (blue for first grade!) and maybe watch a movie, but they would stay indoors with the windows firmly shut, because this was the kind of smoke that was deeply unhealthy for everybody—but especially for kids with respiratory disorders, which are disproportionately present in communities under the poverty line, which—in turn—represents half the population of this hypothetical administrator’s school.

And so the kids would spend the day indoors, watching a movie and coming up with games to play. The parents would show up at 2:40 under a burnt orange sky to scoop their masked children up and ferry them home and into their sealed-up living rooms and ask them how their day was, knowing full well that it was not as good a day as their kids had hoped for.

There’s a good way and a bad way. It tends to hinge on a sigh and the hint of a smile. Now you know.

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Just your average day on the bike with America’s messiest child and her love of ice cream, stickers, and ring pops. By far the cleanest bit was when she swam unassisted, which is somehow not today’s top headline, but the quote was too funny not to lead with. This is journalism.

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Kina has considered the matter deeply and has decided that I will be Mister Bossiness for the rest of the year, alongside Momminsons and the Princess Snugglemachine herself. That’s news enough for a lazy weekend, I think. Playground’s open, go have fun, Sugarprince.

Holy wow do I love today’s Parade. As usual, it took a few hours to get Kina’s creative juices going, but the abstract results are hard to argue with. I love how she used all the materials today, and I was proud to help here and there—but this is her masterpiece, if you ask me.