It has been a crazy long weekend, and yesterday was a particularly long day of assembly and adventures for Kina and her family. As I write this, Kina is (probably) asleep in her new loft bed, having aged today (by her measure) half a year in a single moment—from “five and a half” to “six” at the stroke of midnight.

I don’t have much to say about six that I didn’t say about five, or four. Kina is a miracle, and she’s kept us alive and kicking through the last six years (and the last three of those in particular). Today, as she chanted the traditional “Are you one! Are you two! Are you three!” she just kept going past six to ten and then eighteen and thirty-one, and it made me remember all those birthdays of my own, and how long it’s taken me to become who I am.

Who was I at six? A little boy spreading Elmer’s glue on his hands and hoping to become Spider-Man, who would run into the snow drifts to hide outside his house when he felt slighted, who loved his first grade teacher because she knew he loved to read and gave him the space to do more of it, who would soon move to another town in another state, and another, and another.

We are still just approaching Kina’s birthday, but the official party was last night, at a furiously whimsical play space about ten minutes from our house. Kina and her friends took the spot over and tan themselves ragged for an hour and a half, then screamed as the back wall disappeared, revealing a glowing room full of unicorns and pizza.

It was mind-boggling. The kids lost it. Best birthday ever, and a noted departure from her fourth birthday, in 2020, which you get to read about every year—as a reminder of why this newspaper exists.

dad

I dunno. Sometimes you just feel a little stinky.

dad

In reality, she was calling out all these activities herself and shooting them all down instantly. It was impressive.

dad

Let me first say: If you ever hoped to be inspired by the majesty of newspapers, you could not do better than to visit the New York Times printing plant in Flushing at 8:30 in the evening. It reminds you of everything we are holding onto in journalism, and everything that we have lost. It is also a very cool place full of very cool people who have been working on something very impossible every single day for as long as anybody can remember.

It is also full of robots and things that spin at some ungodly speed in the service of printed news. Kina would absolutely love it.

dad

Certainly we can agree that robots are trustworthy and not at all ominous. Also, why didn’t anybody point out that I have been stamping these as 2023?

dad

Listen: I’m just saying, when you have a mix of vegetarian and meat chilis at the cook-off, and a significant portion of your Brooklyn elementary school parent audience is vegetarian, you’re not going to get a clean view of the field.

I mean, just speaking statistically.

dad

Gonna close off this chili storyline tomorrow, once all the cumin and meat smells are fully exorcised from the apartment for the night. We have lit candles, y’all.

Real Warhol vibes today, as Kina goes multimedia on the rainbows for the first time. She had originally intended for the rainbows to emerge from a giant pot of chili, but the integrity of her vision is obviously more flexible than my own.

I feel both honored and personally attacked here.

dad

How many ways can she possibly shut me down?

dad

“Do you want to touch it?”

“No.”

dad

I feel like we need to recondition Kina‘a expectations about business trips.

dad

I think she’s just telling me that while she’s capable of not eating candy, she’s unwilling to not eat candy. And we all have our boundaries.

dad

Wherever you filed the edition on empathy, you can probably file this, too. It’s important to remember that everybody is different, and that not everybody likes the same things you do, in quite the same way—whether flavors of ice cream, colors of nail polish, or whether or not they like chocolate.

Also, the story on the last headline today is that I was cleaning up in the kitchen while Kina was going to the bathroom last night, and after a few minutes of silence, she called out through the door, “You know, Daddy, someday you’ll be famous,” which was very nice of her to say but also strangely premonitory in tone. At least it’ll be for this, according to the kiddo. Monkey’s paw, and all that.

dad

I’m still exhausted from all the driving (and thank you, Ken, for sharing the load), but let me tell you—it is a wildly different thing to drive around with another adult in the passenger seat, instead of having them posted up behind you on Kina snack duty. As somebody who literally bought a car with the idea that his partner would be spending most of her time in the back seat with Kina, this is a novel and exciting development. Did it cost us two Kinder Eggs and seven hours of iPad time? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes.

I know I keep saying such and such this week’s Parade is my favorite yet, but this week’s parade is my favorite yet. Kina asked me to sketch a gem, and the rest was all her art direction: “only makeup colors, and mostly pink”. I think it turned out beautifully. It glitters.

I am the smooth dad.

dad

I was flat on my back after dinner, but this kid was running around like a maniac, lost between lunch and dinner.

dad

Staying in other houses is always tricky at bedtime, and there are some trips when I will wake up in the middle of the night and find myself alone in bed, with Laurea fast asleep in Kina’s borrowed bedroom. This is the only way either of us has any insight into Kina’s waking dynamic, which is aggressively forward-looking, as it turns out.

dad

Our apologies regarding the oxygen. We hope the non-stop iPad time helped with your suffering as we navigated bumper to bumper traffic through four states.

dad

I can’t believe she published before I did.

dad