The reluctant puker has returned to form, having navigated a wiggly final night and one last low-grade fever. With the morning came our standard 6:24 green-light wake up call and a chipper young girl with stories to tell, of Des and Andrew playing banana basketball and Daddy going to space. She’s picked up some of the rhetorical quirks of good gossip, like saying “and here’s the funniest part” and putting her hand on your arm as she really drives it home. Would a four-year-old in actual school with actual kids be telling stories like a local neighborhood matron, leaning out of her first-floor window and smoking a Virginia Slims? I only have one four-year-old, so we’ll just have to see if kindergarten is full of neurotic little adults next year. I’m just glad she’s keeping her food down.

Child Eats Bland Foods

Speaking of which: After a day of eating plain rice, Carr’s crackers, and porridge, Kina’s just about fed up. This morning, she insisted on some frozen mango just to stir things up. We acceded to her request, bracing ourselves over the next hour for a spray of fruit. The gods smiled on us, and she’s spent the rest of the day cautiously testing the waters while sipping Pedialyte. We appear to have weathered the storm, which means that Laurea and I will also eat food with color for the first time in 48 hours tomorrow. A BRAT diet, they call it. No comment.

Hated Doorbell Rings Once Again

For years, the buzzer in my apartment did not work. I’d wait out in front of my building for deliveries, or ask friends to yell upstairs for me from the stoop. The situation was inconvenient, but it also meant that random passers-by wouldn’t ring my doorbell just to get into the building, and I lived a quiet life. About five years ago, though, they replaced the buzzer panel at the front door of our building, and the 80’s-era squawk box next to my front door was suddenly useful. This was good for deliveries and friends, but bad for peace and quiet, because the buzzer is Very Loud and Extremely Shrill and Non-Negotiable. When Kina was born, I tried to research replacements for my buzzer box (which is called an “intercom station”, suggesting that one might actually attempt to have a conversation over it—a ludicrous notion for any New Yorker who has one of these boxes), but none of the available options had a volume knob or advertised a “pleasant chime”, and so I gave up and accepted that Kina—and the rest of our family—would simply learn to fear the buzzer appropriately and develop any commensurate neurosis. I keep trying to just play it off like oh hey Kina it’s the delivery guy look let me buzz him in, but she really really doesn’t like the buzzer and will run from the room covering her ears or just glare at the doorbell as if it’s insulted her. She and I are similar in that regard, and part of both of us wishes the buzzer was just gone and we could have the mailman yell upstairs for us to drop a key out the window, wrapped in a sock. Someday she and I will learn more about soldering and work on a school science project together to install a volume knob on our vintage Graystone intercom station. We can do this! I have a Dremel!

dad