Purple is compassion, or calm. Red is mad. Green is happy.

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We never plan for spring break in this house, so it’s fake school all week here at the Daily Kina.

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Being six means being the kind of person who actually questions whether or not the sky is quite as empty as we believe it to be.

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We had expected more of a huntable egg hunt than what the Isle of Governors laid out for Kina and a few hundred of her closest five-to-eight-year-old friends yesterday. Instead, a field strewn with gaily-painted wooden eggs was penned in by yellow nylon twine, sheltered from the hungry pawing of the massed crowd. A lone person in a creepy easter bunny outfit roamed the edges of the field, like a monarch before their troops, urging them into greater frenzies.

As the hour of the battle neared, the children pressed in against the rope inch by inch, until a few pink eggs slid into arms’ reach; the marauders swept them up in silence while the referees were otherwise distracted. “Take three big steps backwards,” said one of the adults, and the children relented, even as their little hands clutched the rope.

And then, suddenly, the clock struck eleven, and the border was breached. The children on the southern front, with Kina, rushed in screaming, yanking the eggs from the grass and tossing them into the baskets at their hips. Kina fell to her knees in a cluster of pink eggs, sweeping great numbers of them into her pail as the thunder of footsteps echoed around her.

Today’s stop in the longest thing on earth: Governor’s Island (aka Staten Island, aka Long Island), our little pop-up newsroom.

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Start spreading the news etc etc

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Laurea and I are now well trained in recognizing the sound of Kina hitting the floor of her room at 6:30 AM. One can only imagine what it is like to live underneath her. Sorry, neighbor.

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I don’t know how it’s taken me three years to enter my cubist period.

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It’s not clear to this reporter who was really getting the most satisfaction from the nightly bath—the bather or the bathing assistant.

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Dear Kina,

The illustration at the top left of the page here is of the two of us, in 2020, drawing the first Daily Kina. You were three years old. If this newspaper were a person, it would be three now. That makes you six. You're good at math; you knew that.

The thing I've been thinking for the last few weeks is that I really don't know what three years feels like, and I don't think I'd ever fully considered it before—I've never stared squarely at that period of time. Until this very moment, three years didn't ever feel like a long time. It was shorter than most of the jobs I'd ever held, shorter than high school, shorter than a presidential administration.

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of this legacy media institution—don’t forget!—but this weekend was Top Spring, and we all know that Top Spring comes (like Daily Kina Day) but once a year. Kina made the most of it, as you can see. Boing crew and all.

Kina Oven Hands—for those who pay attention to the daily portrait—is the version of Kina I had to wrangle this morning as I finished the Sunday edition. She was a real charmer, and well-insulated from hot ovens.

A brief note before I begin: Monday is the third anniversary of the Daily Kina, and I’d like to invite you all to send over little mastheads, portraits, or headlines of your own in celebration of this auspicious occasion, which I will be pleased to share here. Thanks to all of you who find this newspaper a fulfilling daily ritual. We think of you often. Okay, let’s go:

There are seven and a half months every calendar year in which Kina and her oldest, dearest friend are the same age. That period has at last begun again, now that both of them are six.

You can help protect the Brooklyn Public Library from cuts by sending a note to your city council member and Mayor Adams, who—in addition to further reductions in education spending—has proposed vast cuts to services and hours in the public library systems of New York City in the upcoming budget, even as the NYPD blows through its half-billion dollar overtime allocation for fiscal year 2023. Libraries have consistently demonstrated their value to this city as safe and equitable spaces for New Yorkers of all ages. They support our citizens for a fraction of the cost of the carceral negligence our tax dollars otherwise fund. A library card is a powerful statement; bear it with pride.

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Just kidding—the grievances come more frequently than once a year.

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When she got home from the playground, she lifted them gently out of her pocket and lined them up perfectly on the coffee table, one by one, clearing everything else away, and then ran to get hair ties.

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It’s kind of just ingredients all the way down, isn’t it?

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Hat trick!

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It was too nice outside today, so I brought some construction paper to the playground and drew today’s edition as Kina bubbled around with her chums. This was a delightful distraction for her after a day of worrying about the random daddy longlegs she found in her toy bin whilst sorting yesterday. As I tried to gently nudge it out of her bedroom, Kina drew a little dance floor for it, which seemed to distract it for long enough to let Kina escape.

Life’s weird.

Says Kina after breakfast in response to an inquiry about the best way to spend this rainy day: “Let’s sort the toys.”

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Witches wear green.

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To be fair, it was nearly imperceptibly stinky yesterday. I would know, because she gets her sense of smell from me.

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2020 may as well have been the dawn of time, when I was once in first grade. Kina did all the illustrations today—first time in a while. I think they’re hilarious.

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Six years old, a teenager: a case study. (Not pictured here is Laurea, who is allowed to at least cross the street.)

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Here, Kina has drawn her own “Fudashins Bord”, which help her students to write their letters properly.

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Kina was, when she was younger, eerily at ease with having her blood drawn. This is convenient, as her allergies require an annual visit to the phlebotomist for tests, which was our morning occupation again yesterday.

The first time she had her blood drawn, it was in her doctor’s office, and we approached the process with the anticipation of certain doom, restraining her with all our might as she struggled and screamed, surrounded by three scowling nurses. It took hours for the adrenaline to wear off.

A year later, with a visit booked to a nondescript clinic on 14th Street, Laurea and I agreed to assume and expect nothing at all, and escorted our two-year-old child (whose long-term memory was still flimsy) through the door and into a fluorescent-lit back room festooned with Disney decals.

I love that Kina showed me her shady face and then was super shady to me in the same breath.

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School’s haunted.

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You know you’re six when the bus ride to midtown is as exciting as the musical you took the bus to see.

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I leave the house for one day and suddenly she can do a flip.

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Kina doesn’t like it when you clap before the show is over.

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Kina’s favorite food is pasta, and among her favorite places to go to eat it is a Roman restaurant down the street from us. She reliably orders either the rigatoni in tomato sauce or the carbonara, relishing every starchy bite. Reliably, I suppose, until last night, when she instead chose a mixed-greens salad.

This felt significant to me in a way that I hadn’t considered might be inspired by a bowl of lettuce. Kina has eaten pasta since she started eating food, really, and Laurea and I take great joy in serving it to her and building our restaurant visits around access to various pastas (when we aren’t completely burned out on pasta, which happens with increasing regularity). To hear her order salad instead was a shot across the bow of the S.S. Someday She’ll Be An Adult and All You Can Do Is Sit By and Watch.

Periodically, I stop to wonder when Kina will stop wearing princess dresses. The conventional wisdom, as I understand it, is “usually sometime between six and seven years old”. It felt charming, two years ago, to be perplexed and overwhelmed by Kina’s forest of taffeta—to muse out loud about how we hadn’t expected or facilitated this, or to roll our eyes in dramatic exasperation. We had, what, three years of this? Princess dresses, every single day.

I didn’t want to put her pukey day on blast in our last issue, but it felt notable that Kina had more or less no conscious interaction with the world—with the exception of a bite of breakfast and a spoon of soup at lunch—at all yesterday. This is classic Sick Kina, I should say; she stays almost entirely still for 24 hours, runs a steady fever, and then pops up suddenly like a marionette and asks for popsicles. It’s very worrisome, until it’s not.

Today she’s fine. Who knows.

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I wish we were available to go to a musical in the middle of the day with my kid and her entire first grade class. I mean, really, I really do. The outcome would either be devastatingly charming or pure chaos. It would be lovely, indeed.

A lot more lovely than what we endured last night. But that’s for tomorrow.

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I love the games that kids invent on playgrounds.

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According to this Paper of Record, Kina’s lower left incisor started wiggling on January 22, over a month ago. We would periodically forget that it was wiggly, then be reminded suddenly as Kina’s mouth squirmed on the couch while she fussed at the tooth with the tip of her tongue. Just over a week ago, we reported on the “good news” of Kina’s still-wiggly tooth (and the solemn end of carnival).

Yesterday, “just after pack-up”, Kina’s tooth finally fell out, as her jubilant classmates cheered her great accomplishment. The tooth came home in an envelope. The envelope came home in a backpack. The backpack came home on the back of a newly-untoothed child whose first question was where she would have to put the envelope in order to be found by the Tooth Fairy.

The Tooth Fairy is the one myth we have not shattered. I’m not sure why. It’s probably because the Tooth Fairy is the only imaginary creature whose sole interest is Kina—and Kina’s teeth, specifically.1 There’s something transactional about the Fairy that is fascinating, and I should by all accounts dislike the idea of the Fairy, but the Fairy delivered as expected. Having once delivered a million-dollar bill, she dropped her rate to a mere ten dollars (nine dollars more than I typically received from the same fairy, though that was over 40 years ago).

Playing Marco Polo inside the relatively confining passages of a New York City apartment is murder on the toes and not nearly as refreshing as when you play it in a cold swimming pool in the middle of a summer scorcher. I was heretofore unfamiliar with the whole pregame involving Eenie Meenie Miney Moe and all the players switching around like a game of human three-card Monte, but we take our joys where we can get them.

I will also note that Kina’s approach to Marco Polo is basically “Marco”, because she believes you shouldn’t have to yell “Polo”, and that the Marco just needs to use their superhuman sense of hearing to detect subtle movements from several feet away. Great idea for those whose ears have not been battered for years by city noise and poor choices regarding loud music.

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Kina has made a habit for weeks now of drawing elaborate pictures of rainbows and cats and pizza for any restaurant she visits. Invariably, whoever takes the picture from her puts it up on the pass in the kitchen or at the host’s stand at the entrance or next to the Heimlich instructions. It happens with such frequency now that I fully expect her drawings to become a topic of conversation among cooks and servers at the places that cooks and servers go after work—which, presumably, would be a restaurant with a Kina picture behind the bar.

Every card that Kina makes for her friends the servers is signed “FOR YOU FROM KINA”, which I like because it is not nearly as self-centered as an autograph, but rather conveys a sense of personal gratitude—which is the intended effect. It makes me want to eat out more often, and I hope it makes you want to draw little pictures for your servers at restaurants, too.

Tip well!

Spent the day with Kina yesterday, as Laurea spent a little time at the spa. This gave me the chance to watch her destroy a beef patty in order “to find the pudding”, to help her buy two completely non-princess dresses, and to convince her to let us converse in operatic recitative for over half an hour—probably the greatest triumph of them all.

Amidst all of this, I was clearly gazing at her lovingly, which she interpreted as having something to do with employment. It’s an oddball headline, but it’s Sunday and we’ll take it.

For a later Daily Kina, I’ll come back to this question of the fading interest in princess dresses. The feeling is subtle but present, and Kina’s dress purchase yesterday signified something to me that I’ll have to confirm in a few months. The end of an era, maybe.

Sound of one hand clapping.

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The NYC public school system has over one million students, all of whom are eligible for free lunch and breakfast. Kina avails herself of both, in addition to the breakfast she eats at home. She shares her table with kids from families all over the neighborhood—some well-off, some below the poverty line. The fact that they all eat breakfast, for free, without question or distinction, means that nobody has to be singled out, pitied, or shamed. This is one of the greatest and most important social programs in the city. Kina loves the yogurt.

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It is funny to be a kid and believe that you need to have a favorite planet, and then deliberate on the matter and make a choice that involves your parents. That is not how cosmology works, kid!

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I really do try not to annoy Kina, but she desperately hates it when I sing, and I went to college for a degree in music performance, so we are at loggerheads here. Still, as annoying as I can be, I am equally lovable in ways that cannot be ignored. This is how family works.

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That damn tooth has been wiggly for literal months. I have no idea what it has to do with carnival, but I’m quite proud of her imagined costume and felt it merited top coverage.

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It was nice having Lala in town for a few days this week, even if her granddaughter pressed her continually for frilly dresses. That is just their love language. That, and truth.

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Thank you to Kina’s darling Lala, here for the weekend, who watched Kina overnight as her parents overate and stayed in a fancy hotel and read the printed Sunday paper like old fashioned humans.

Thank you also to Kina for this chaotic Parade. I helped out with the little Kinas hanging everywhere. If you read this as “for people who goth,” know that I did, too. It actually says “for people who join,” which is apparently her sales pitch for becoming a pledged subscriber. Unique value!

Look. At. Me.

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Kina’s Lala is here. Her Mommy’s Mommy, coincidentally, is also here—and it’s been a long time. So in the area grandparental affection, there’s an issue of scarcity and mutual exclusivity that Kina has been wrestling with all day.

There are moments, even without my mother-in-law around, in which Kina doesn’t like us talking to each other. Sometimes she says it’s because it’s distracting. Sometimes she frets that it’s boring. I suspect much of it is about her not being part of the story.

I think readers of this paper can appreciate that Kina is the center of the universe, no? Imagine what it must be like to be the sun—or daughter—when the satellites that orbit you had once themselves been the center of their own respective solar systems, and what it might feel like when two of your satellites begin to orbit each other instead.

The Lala has landed. Let the games begin.

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The kid knows a lot about skin and the sea of germs through which our guts meander, separated by mere millimeters from a thorough blobbing-out and horrible sickness that could require the emergency application of a band aid or medicine.

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It must be a strange thing to come to that moment in your childhood when you realize that your life is actually, technically, your own. It’s certainly not the case that your parents feel that way, having spent the prior half decade ensuring you do not fall into holes or starve to death; your life is their problem, as far as they are concerned. It’s not even the case that you know what agency in your life truly means—and it is probably a good thing that you don’t.

It’s just that you really wanted a third consecutive pasta meal, and you have come to understand that it is reasonably arbitrary that another human being gets to choose otherwise on your behalf.

I get it. It sucks. They also write newspapers about you every day, which I imagine will also someday be an issue. Until then, it is your life; we just cannot eat another bowl of pasta.