Hannah Stays For Dinner

Last night, we lit some candles, set the table, dimmed the lights, and shared dinner together as a family with Hannah—Kina’s best friend and long-time nanny. Laurea made moqueca, a Brazilian seafood stew, which we chased with cupcakes and approximately nine thousand live performances of “Let It Go”. And we talked—a lot. Hannah, Laurea, and I don’t often have a chance to sit and chat about things unrelated to the tactical ins and outs of Kina’s day; we look forward to these meals together to joke with each other and pretend things are normal for a night—dinner, cake, music—because raising Kina as a shared endeavor in 2020 feels like flying through a storm. And so, aside from the jokes, we try also to use these moments to re-establish what the three of us are collectively comfortable with, how the parks and playgrounds are feeling, what to plan for in the months ahead, what’s showing up in the research. It’s a wildly different kind of relationship than we all had before this year set in, but it’s working—us against the pandemic, our squad of protection for Kina, a family. Laurea and I are not religious, but Kina’s learned from Hannah how to pray, and when Kina whispered blessings over us at the table before we ate last night, it felt right for us—to have her call, by candlelight, on a higher power to protect her protectors.

The other day, when I said I do this for Kina, for us, and for you? Today’s paper is really just for us. But I wanted you to know that Hannah stayed for dinner last night, and that we had a good time.

Kid Reminisces About “Pumpkin Lanterns”

We first saw the pumpkin lanterns in these pages back in April (pictured below), when Kina called, frightened, from her room late at night to ask, “Are the pumpkin lanterns in the sky?” Turns out we’d stumbled on her first nightmare. Back in October, five million years ago, Kina and I would try to spot Jack-o-lanterns on all the stoops between our house and the school; she loved that game, and so I was surprised that her mind had chosen that item to haunt her (though I suppose the point of Jack-o-lanterns is to be at least mildly scary). For weeks afterwards, when I put her to bed, I’d open the curtain so that she could peer outside and check for pumpkin lanterns. Her more recent dreams and nightmares have featured marine life; at breakfast today, she told us she’d dreamt of sharks chasing her at the beach and mused wistfully about those carefree nights when her only worries were of pumpkins. I wish it was just the pumpkins for me, too, kid.

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