The best day of your entire life is when you learn to jump over waves on your very own, and your own daddy is very impressed and excited for you, and you go with your little butt to buy a tiny gift at the toy store, and then you get pasta.

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The other day, as I was sitting on the clay sand beach by our vacation rental, I saw two kids making drip castles from the silt at the bottom of a hole in the sand. Despite having grown up on this beach, I had never seen nor contemplated this style of sand castle. The next day, as Kina frolicked in the waves, I spent an hour slowly drizzling a stream of wet sand over the foundations of a drippy little cathedral. It was so meditative! I felt restored! Laurea made several jokes about Gaudí and we took loads of pictures to commemorate this ephemeral tide sculpture.

Then Kina stomped the everliving shit out of it. The root of suffering is attachment, etc etc.

Also, Kina jumped over the waves on her very own today! Ocean parent!

The Goldenrod has been in business since 1896, longer than anybody I have ever known has been in business, or alive, or making saltwater taffy. When I was a kid, I would stand outside the windows and watch the taffy being made—guessing the flavors, examining the machines, counting the wrapped kisses. Some four decades later, here I am again, watching my kid watch the machines and pick her own pound of taffy.

It’s all very romantic, except it turns out Kina doesn’t like taffy. “Taste-tes weird,” she says.

They’ve made it 120 years without her liking taffy; I’m sure they’ll be okay.

We picked six quarts. She picked one cup.

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Day 3: Jealousy sets in. The brother’s cuteness becomes a problem.

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After playing with her little cousin Otis for about twenty minutes this morning, Kina declared that he was actually her brother, which is convenient, since we don’t actually have to feed or raise him—a win-win situation.

Today’s Parade was dashed off in haste as Kina scurried to the beach. She left a little secret on the back for you.1 DON’T TELL ANYONE.

I’m very proud of my map.

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Kina has been watching her step at camp for the last two weeks, with the understanding that only star students are eligible for The Surprise, which turned out to be a donut. I didn’t even think she liked donuts, but she loves recognition nonetheless.

She told us we needed to be Star Parents the other night. Maybe she’s buying the donuts. I think we at least deserve a bubble party.

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So many poo jokes. Also, the standards department has decided that Nicky is spelled “Nicky” now.

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I have been putting off my first colonoscopy for something like three and a half years now—ever since my friend Jason died of colon cancer, just before the lockdowns. I am prone to health anxiety, and the fear of a scary outcome somehow outweighed the constant sense of dread I lived with during that delay. I’ve had a colonoscopy prep kit stuffed in my sock drawer for over a year, left unopened and unexamined, taunting me every morning as I got dressed.

Colon cancer, the doctor told me this morning, grows slowly, and when caught early is usually treatable. This was news to me; nobody had ever talked to me about what colon cancer is or how it works. Probably just as well, because it would have likely led me to delay my procedure even longer than I already had.

Kina busted out her tough-monster voice, which sounds a little like Gwar meets Oscar the Grouch, for this rendition of an otherwise inoffensive song from Gabby’s Dollhouse. I don’t think Kina’s aiming precisely for death metal or Oscar in this particular growl (which she also uses when she sneaks up on us and barks, “Baby Lucy!”, for no discernible reason), but it ticks the slightly-angry, slightly-silly box pretty well.

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It’s like, you know, when you’re playing in the sprinklers with your friend, and you get all wet, and the wooden platform at the top of the stairs is super warm, and you decide to make funny little wet trails on the planks with your butt, except they haven’t sanded the platform in several years, and Mommy picks like two giant splinters out with her fingers and spends the rest of the afternoon removing all the little slivers from your swimsuit.

That is a feeling you never forget.

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We here at the Daily Kina welcome the one-day break in this epic heat wave, which gave us the freedom to bike all over Manhattan yesterday, buying light-up shoes and stamps1 and getting our hair cut and eating some bangin’ fish ball soup and just generally toodling around. Laurea was lucky enough to score three consecutive fancy electric Citibikes, so we all got to feel the wind in our hair as we cruised around the tip of Manhattan, with Kina wearing my sunglasses and fish balls in our tummies. Not pictured: our final stop at Little Owl, where Kina complained that our table smelled like eggs.

After shopping for stamps (as noted in today’s edition), Kina and I agreed that the week’s Parade simply had to be made of rubber stamps and watercolors. And so it was.

Nothing like watching your child enjoy a little nitrous and chatter incessantly to the dentist before zoning out hard on some Gabby’s Dollhouse as they drilled out a cavity on her lower left molar. Makes me want to switch dentists.

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A true epicure knows that the best bite on a plate of food is the entire plate of food.

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Like father, like daughter.

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If you, a newer reader of this publication do not know about Chuckie Avocado, you need to know three things:

1. He is a stuffed avocado

2. He is named Chuckie because she got it as a gift from Laurea’s friend Chuckie

3. He decides how far open the bedroom door will be every night, and he guards it zealously. That is now his only job. At all times of day, he can invariably be found by Kina’s door, smiling and green.

Now you know Chuckie Avocado.

When we arrived at the beach at Jacob Riis yesterday at 10 AM, Kina was steadfastly opposed to putting her face even close to the water. This is no different from prior visits to the beach in the last few seasons—our notoriously beach-loving publisher will spend hours being battered by the most frigid of waves but draws the line at wet faces.

Coming off an adventurous day at McCarren Pool (see “Child Takes Leap of Faith” in yesterday’s edition), though, I was able to show her how Burlingame—my anthropomorphic talking fist—could take a quick breath and close his mouth before dipping under the water with a little splash. As she watched my fist jump and frolic in the Atlantic Ocean, Kina was ultimately sold; when the tide came in and the surf grew more adventurous, she took a deep gulp of air and dipped under a crashing wave with me. She emerged gleeful, reborn.

Two hours later, she was still begging me to go back in the water with her for “one more dunkie”, hooked on the adrenaline rush of subaquatic life for the first time. Laurea and I are now fully convinced that this child loves the beach more than both of us combined; we were at the beach for six hours, and Kina spent at least four of them in the water with one of us—and frequently fully-submerged with me. The Sea Parent strikes again, and he has the waterlogged ears to prove it.

HIPAA prevents me from writing about her royal highness’ oral hygiene, but not bad for three years since her last visit, says a highly-placed source.

As she was drawing this, I didn’t think much of it—a sun and a rainbow? But stepping back and looking at it now, this piece is ready for the modern galleries at the Met. A proud father’s ambitions for his child’s creative work knows no bounds.

I cannot walk in this heat, no matter how skimpy or flowy my clothing. Kina can run for hours in the direct sun while wearing a dress made of literal plastic thread. This is childhood.

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