It is surprising how little I know about this topic—why we grow and then stop growing, what it feels like, how it all works. Even Ted Ed doesn’t have a five minute explainer on this.

I should have paid better attention in biology.

dad

The little disgusting mysteries continue in the dark corners of Kina’s little schoolyard.

dad

The thing is, you know exactly what she means.

dad

Our publisher sends her best wishes to Matt and Dominique, who got married yesterday as she looked on blissfully. She regrets that they did not twirl each other, but admits there are many years yet for them to twirl.

dad

When Kina was still barely a year old, she developed a passionate interest in birds and would chase them unsteadily around the playground shouting “BOOD!!! BOOOOOOOO-UUUUURDS!!!”

Years later, in the middle of the pandemic, she built a cordial relationship with a particular pigeon, whom we named Pigeon Friend:

Speaking of birds, we have befriended a shabby-looking pigeon who comes to roost on our fire escape. We recognize him because of his rakish little white underwings, and because he’s utterly imperturbable. Kina talks to him while sitting on our dresser, asking him how he’s doing, and telling him that he can be my (Dad’s) little brother. In return, he stares at her with his beady little orange eyes. They are the best of friends.

Kina has collected many plastic gemstones and random pieces of Laurea’s jewelry collection over the years for the sole purpose of becoming a crystal healer, apparently. She is now in full possession of my life’s savings.

dad

I don’t know what happened between when I was a kid and today, but in those intervening four decades, we turned leprechauns into the Easter Bunny of St. Patrick’s Day, and I just wasn’t prepared for a generous new character on the holiday calendar. The leprechaun did not bring Kina any money this year, for what it’s worth, nor did we capture any (or even attempt it).

dad

Our esteemed publisher would like you all to know that she was among the listening angels, unjustly punished for the actions of the rowdy boys. Dismantle the patriarchy.

dad

Kina got a tummyache at lunch yesterday, and maybe it was because of sesame oil? Hard to say, because I am not a doctor and the nurse is also not a doctor and also it’s hard to say what it feels like to have a tummyache when you are five. Fortunately, I work exclusively at home because of an ongoing pandemic and can walk to her school in under five minutes. While I’m not sure that being there was any more instructive than talking to her on the phone, I was at least able to talk face-to-face with Kina and feel reasonably assured that she wasn’t in anaphylactic shock or anything that was headed in that general direction; I gave her a hug and a kiss and watched her walk back to class with an administrator before heading home uneasily and… hosting a three-hour long online conference session. This is how the universe sets things up for me; I don’t make the rules.

So I basically sat in my bedroom and gesticulated thoughtfully on Zoom for a few hours and panicked privately until Kina returned home and frolicked around as if nothing had ever happened. Apparently her tummyache went away just as soon as she walked into her classroom. Huzzah! I have no idea how much of her little bout of heartburn was directly related to something she ate and how much could be attributed to the stress of talking to grownups about what the tummyache could signify, but the brain-gut feedback loop is strong in me, and I imagine it played at least a small part in her experience yesterday as well.

I was a little bit worried that Kina would develop an aversion to lunch or nurses from the whole experience, so I tried to get ahead of that at dinner last night, but when I asked her what she remembered most about her visit to the school nurse, all she said was, “I thought I saw my friend Andrew’s sister there, and when I asked her if she was Andrew’s sister, she said no.” If that’s all she remembers, it’s a good enough sign, I guess. Sorry, Andrew’s sister. Better luck next time.

I really just asked her to put on her jacket before going downstairs, but now I’m questioning more or less everything about my own judgement.

dad

Laurea flew off this morning to her first actual in-person event in over two years, and Kina was ambivalent. She’s come to expect us here, most of the time, ever since she was three years old, and since her brain has skipped ahead faster than our work travel has, she’s just now coming to a much sharper understanding of what it means to be away from us. She can feel the difference between a night out (as I had with Futura’s dad recently) and a week away, and she’s keen to know which she’s signed up for when one of us steps out of the door.

Something about this phase of cognitive development seems to have triggered in Kina some fear of uncertainty—in our absence, and in the timing of our return. Today’s second headline is actually a good illustration of this. We told her this morning that her friends are going to start having birthday parties that she can attend without us, and while she seemed copacetic with the broader notion, the whole framing of these parties as “drop-off parties” and not “drop-off-and-pick-up later parties” made her wonder why we’d leave our most precious daughter at some godforsaken trampoline emporium for an indeterminate period of time.

We promised her that we’d come back, when the party was over.

No, Kina, you may not “go down and get a box when you guys are asleep”. You are effectively still a baby and the world is full of vultures. Maybe when you’re in second grade. Maybe.

dad

I have been doing lots of thinking about best friends lately, because Kina has been talking about best friends, and I’ve been thinking about what best friends cost us. One of the things I don’t think I noticed about growing older was when I stopped mentally ranking my friends—a behavior thrust upon us in childhood and reinforced (for those of us born after 1985) by MySpace. Instead, I find I think about friends for different frames of mind. The justice friend. The jazz friend. The electric bike friend. The friend who understands that part of me that got stoned and listened extensively to Aphex Twin in college. The dad friend. The nihilist friend. All of them meet different parts of me, and I’m grateful for each of them (and the other twenty to fifty of them who have carved out little homes in my mind).

Every day, when I drop Kina off at school, I see the little kids outside their classroom, shuffling around to make time with the person they want most to be associated with. Even at five years old, I see these little girls boxing each other out to preserve their statuses with each other. They are all trying to figure out their best friendships. Kina wants a best friend. And her other friends want best friends. And those relationships aren’t necessarily all symmetrical—though maybe one of the best friends also wants to be Kina’s best friend, for now. I don’t know what it all means, but all the little kids are willing to slag off every other little kid in the universe in favor of their respective best friends.

This feels risky, right?

I wish I could tell you that I was making all these secret clubs up.

dad

“We found a secret corner of the playground and we took down our masks and Georgia put candy inside because we are not supposed to eat candy but that way Ms. Chelsea wouldn’t see us.”

A continuing series on the evident extreme sneakiness of kindergartners.

dad

We are a shoes-off household, but the exception proves the rule.

dad

The worst possible thing is to be told to do exactly the thing you most intend to do, as if it wasn’t already the best idea that you already came up with totally on your own. On this, Kina and I are in complete agreement.

Also, as a reminder: Tree juice is apple juice.

dad

I somehow forgot to include that Kina and Laurea also stumbled across a parade of astronauts (or was it astronauts in a non-astronaut parade?) in McCarren Park and were given a gift of moon rocks. It was, by all accounts, a bountiful Mommy-Daughter time.

The Cheese Rock is fine.

Kina got a little mad at me today and then did a not-nice thing that led to my putting her in time out, where she stewed silently for five minutes as she awaited her release. The fact that she didn’t scream and weep as I carried her to the room felt novel somehow, as did her seething discontent upon my return.

She kicked around the living room for a few moments, agreeing that she probably should not have spit in my face but not really promising never to spit in my face in the future. She gave me the cold shoulder and then marched to my room, where she buried herself under a blanket (pictured above).

Kina does not like to say that she is sorry. She will do nearly anything to avoid saying the words out loud, which is super irritating to me—the person to whom she most often owes an apology—and I often just push and push for her verbal acknowledgment of having wronged me. I have seen her go as far as mouthing the words while holding her breath, as if to form a regret-shaped die through which sorrow would otherwise be extruded, if only the material were there.

Publisher wanted to take the reins today.

dad