She really must insist.

dad

Kina tells me that this elaborate spying ritual is all in service of preparing for a huge prank to be pulled on the boys crew sometime in the near future. When I ask her what the prank will look like, she describes the same roles: Distracter, Spy, Lookout. I explain to her that she’s missing the actual Pranker, but she seems unperturbed. The prank is just that the boys exist, and the prank is that the girls are spying on them, and the prank is forever.

dad

Honestly, ensuring that everybody gets valentines is the right move from a sociological perspective. What feels like chaotic neutral behavior is being maybe the one kid in class who receives all the valentines and hands none out because she does not have the patience to write twenty-three names out by hand, even as she writes me detailed notes about how I have failed her as a father by pooping for too long? Let’s see how this plays out.

dad

Another clutch parenting tip down the drain as Kina grooms her stuffies until well past 8 in the morning.

dad

Andrew won a Grammy®1 last night—her second, astonishingly—as the cellist of the Attacca Quartet, playing the music of Caroline Shaw. The newsroom here is very proud of her, having known her since before she was a Grammy®-award-winning artist, even before the publisher of this newspaper was born, even (if we may) when Andrew was Kina’s age and did not yet know how to play the cello.

That it is possible to grow from being a person I did not know to play the cello to being a person who now wins Grammys® for it seems like a minor miracle, but I can assure you it is the combination of a tremendous gift and many years of hard work that, frankly, I cannot imagine having put in the way Andrew has.

The last time Andrew won a Grammy® (words that I never imagined I’d say about a child whose musical gifts were once limited to playing the Jaws theme over and over), it was February of 2020, just a few weeks before the lockdown. To win an award like this comes with real privileges, and the Attacca Quartet got very few of them that year—a massive victory, but a real letdown of a parade. 2020 was a bad year for musicians, and I watched Andrew adapt and the quartet grow (sprouting not just a new second violinist, but also two additional children). It occurred to me that most musicians do not see an award like this even once in a lifetime, and it was good for Andrew to make the most of the one they got, even though times were tough.

The last time I wrote in this paper about the American Museum of Natural History was back in 2021, when we patted ourselves on the back about how wonderful it was to walk through the best museum in the entire world with a curious four-year-old. I still stand by that, but I can straight up tell you right now that it is even better with a six-year-old. Kina can read now, which means she can figure out what all the animals are, express her formidable opinions about gems (including the almost-certainly purloined Star of India, with its glittering star and complete absence of the color pink). She liked the dinosaurs enough, and she spent a very significant little moment under the belly of our friend the whale. All in all, an outstanding way to spend the coldest day of the year—and we didn’t even succumb to the call of the gift shop!

Kookoo bananas, for sure.

I’m not sure exactly what it feels like to be six and wake up feeling as though you’re not actually in your own body, but there is something about waking up from a dream and feeling in-between bodies, clawing for the edges of the dream while still making sense of your own eyeballs that does resonate with me. Bodies are strange things, and souls even stranger—nobody should have to reckon with them at 6:30 AM, in my opinion, but Kina seems to enjoy it enough, so I’ll leave the casual morning dissociation to her.

dad

Getting real “bingo” vibes off this drawing of Kina doing her finger guns thing—a development that has been extra amusing for her lucky parents.

I contemplated making “I’m Going Freestyle” the top headline today, but I was afraid I would not be able to do the shredded burrito justice in the big illustration.

So it goes.

When she wasn’t threatening to pluck out my chest hairs or watching videos about deadly slow lorises, Kina spent all morning defending her mother from my suggestions and mansplanations. Parry as I might with my own assertiob that I was being unfairly maligned, Kina came at me again and again, sticking her head out from her bedroom or yelling from the bathroom that “mommy was right”.

I seldom get the benefit of the doubt from my esteemed roommates here, but it is amusing at least to see somebody so small defend my wife’s honor in the matter of whether or not to parboil pierogies.

dad

Welcome, new subscribers, and thanks to those who have pledged their support of this august institution. I am clearly off to the races with an evening edition that arrives twelve hours late, but this is what the funding is for! Just kidding, I forgot and then I was asleep.

In any case, here we have Kina delaying her bedtime by insisting on what appeared at first to be three revolutionary products (à la Steve Jobs) but turned out to just be cutting out hearts together. It was lovable, fun, and crafty all at once.

I recognize, in the moment, that what Kina is doing here is complex; she does not want to go to sleep, she loves spending time with her parent friends, and she is a big fan of hearts. My first reaction to the “fun crafty loving” project—much of the time—is mostly to suggest that it might actually be time for bed, but I’m learning to relish the moment differently. I do enjoy spending time with my child friend, of course, and I’m getting used to the hearts.

Okay, setting aside Kina’s unwillingness to commit to a long-term relationship with the PBS gross nature videos channel, I think we are all a little reasonably skeptical of liking and subscribing to things. I do not like being pandered to, and I like pandering even less.

And yet, here we go.

I’ve been drawing this paper every day now for almost three years. I’ve got it down, nestled tightly in the space between Kina brushing her teeth and Kina being rushed out the door (much to her dismay) to school. I have worked through at least fifteen Canson mixed-media pads, three stacks of the best white construction paper in the entire world, and an irresponsible number of Crayola washable markers. I do this, as I have said, for my own mental well-being, for some future Kina who wants to know what this time was like, and for you, the person who is reading this.

Sometimes I scream while closing my mouth, too, but it doesn’t sound like whistling.

dad

Sorry to deliver this Sunday paper so late; Kina pranked away my energy to write newsletters yesterday. It is presumably to be found wherever she put Laurea’s purse.

“Don’t make this into a Parade!”

As of 6:30 PM, she liked the babysitter well enough, but the jury’s out.

dad

Kina gets her collector’s habit, I think, from me. Lately, as you can see, the collection is stones.

Also: I am proud of my zebra, and somewhat shocked that Kina knows what the African savannah is?

dad

It’s okay, folks, we figured it out.

dad

The school gates close at 8:30. She got dressed at 8:15 today. I will accept any and all strategies for solving this.

dad

She later admitted that the wound matched the shape of her thumbnail.

dad

Kina’s friend invited us out to a famous ice-dancing extravaganza that is actually much better than I thought it would be, but mostly because I got to watch Kina stare with astonishment at a bunch of skating princesses for two hours. There was snow, though, and a giant crab. And fire. They set fire to the skating rink. You had to be there.

dad

Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate. Kina would like you to know that there are no rabbits in our family.

It might be difficult to discern, but I made this Parade myself at a Riso workshop run by Futura’s dad (which is why the girls were having a play date). It looks like a mess, but it is a slightly art-y mess, and it makes this whole project like 1% more zine-y.