I stepped in a pothole but I’m okay, because I have these three butts and know how to cry.

dad

Kina has lately become obsessed with a Ted Ed video about the Salem witch trials, insisting on watching it every day. If you, either as a sympathetic watcher of Ted Ed videos or as a loyal reader of this newsletter, have watched said video, you will know that it is Very Creepy1 (and one of the better animated Ted Ed videos, I would offer).

As we were getting ready this morning, she was role-playing an ergot-addled Betty Parris in my bedroom and waddling towards me like a zombie, until she suddenly jumped in shock and ran into my arms, having finally scared herself after several days of ghost-embellished animated hallucinations. So I wrote about it, but now that I am writing this, Kina is calling out from her bedroom to ask about today’s edition and if the spooky eyes were real. I yelled back to tell her they were a joke and that we wouldn’t watch that video anymore.

Imagine having to try to make your brain scary—youth is wasted on the young.

Detective Kina on the case, trying to figure out when, in fact, Daddy will return from his rooftop work ever and if, in fact, he would have preferred the ravioli for dinner.

dad

Unfazed, ready for action, festooned with a bow.

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Good news: She didn’t wake us up. Bad news: It was the equivalent of four in the morning when we woke her up.

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We are back. We visited. We did not move. We slept. It is over, but it was glorious.

Another landscape! I am proud of two things here: first, that she completed a Parade that she had originally abandoned as “ruined” in JFK two weeks ago; and second, that she respected the sanctity of the P in the masthead when she painted a tree behind it this morning. It’s the details that count.

Define “today”, I suppose, the editor said after placing his child in her bed in Brooklyn at 12:40 AM the next day.

dad

Last time we took Kina to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, she was not yet quite three and seemed generally uninterested in the miracles of science demonstrated there. She rambled around aimlessly, oblivious to the wonder around her. It was fun enough, but I did a lot more exploring than Kina.

Yesterday’s visit was much more of a Kina jam, and while her interests leaned towards exhibits that were artsy and dancey (see the main illustration of the trippy color room), she got her fill of fluid dynamics and surface tension and electricity in ways that two-year-old Kina never did.

At the end of the day, we were more worn out than she was, and we sat on the pier of the Embarcadero, watching her frolic in the rain simulator and shout into the echo tunnel—a happy five-year-old scientist from New York wearing a little princess gown and showing the locals how to spin around.

Bali, the daughter of Laurea’s ex-stepdad, is a living reminder of how long Laurea and I have been married, having been born just a couple months before the grand event. In photographs of that day, infant Bali is largely memorialized as a stroller, but she’s grown into a fantastic young person who is somehow like a foot taller than when we last saw her. Before yesterday, Kina had met Bali on all of four occasions, but she only remembers her from the last of those visits, when the two of them danced together to Christmas tunes played by a reggae band at a shopping center in Marin.

This time, Kina was prepared and excited, asking us repeatedly in the idyllic days leading up to our lunch with Bali about when, exactly, our lunch with Bali would occur. It occurred yesterday.

She is down from the mountain for the first time that she can remember, with a stuffed deer and a little morning dew on her finger. What glory.

dad

Did I mention we were spending a little time this week living on a mountain? Have we talked about Kina’s love of climbing and jumping? I am exhausted.

dad

It’s big out here in the mountains. Kina can barely make sense of it.

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Just a small revelation here that speaking like an attendant at Buckingham Palace can get Kina to agree to anything—which, I imagine, could be the desired effect with the Queen herself.

Also, heads up: tooth fairy’s real.

This edition is a reminder to future Laurea and future me that a little time away from Kina is good for the brain (and your relationship), and the bonus is that Lala will draw all the Daily Kinas.

dad

Our guest editor really buried the lede here by putting Kina’s second lost tooth below the fold, but you should rest assured that the tooth fairy read all the news and took care of business. Thanks to Lala for running the newsroom for a second day, as the masthead took a little vacation to Half Moon Bay. We are revived.

dad

It’s Lala edition time, as Mommy and Daddy decamp to the beach for their twentieth anniversary as a couple. Enjoy the bathroom lock drama and pelican observations!

dad

Every once in a while, as a parent, you do get that stereotypical sense of overwhelming pride in your child. Such was that sense, for me, as I watched Kina make up a special and reasonably scientifically accurate butterfly metamorphosis dance (with at least four distinct steps) on a trampoline in California yesterday. Just, like, welling up with pride in my lepidopterist child choreographer.

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p.s. Tune in tomorrow for the first of two consecutive Lala editions! What hijinks will ensue?!

It’s been a long time since I went to any Fourth of July parade anywhere at all, and never with a five-year-old kid, and so I think I had forgotten what they really are: a celebration of obscure civic positions, vintage cars, and chambers of commerce. Highlights: the local dentist gave Kina a toothbrush, and a cute smiling BART train tootled past. Lowlights: the county assessor, whose luxury convertible sedan says a lot about assessment. Kina was not thrilled, but she’s up one toothbrush.

dad

Jet lag and trampolines were just made for each other.

dad

We made this edition at the gate for our early flight to San Francisco, penned in by bags and under a tight deadline. We are now in California, so the presses obviously ran as expected, though we are all a bit more tired than usual here at newsletter time and are deciding just now, late in a drawn-out second sentence, to hit the sack.

When you’re drawing the Parade on a narrow little counter in the boarding area, you produce what is strangely the first landscape edition of Parade in history.