“I Change Colors Every Year”

If you know us, you know that Laurea and I did not plan for Kina to become the Pink Girl. For over a year, we defended the borders of Kina’s wardrobe and consciousness from the color pink, favoring a wider variety of hues and on-trend earth tones. Occasionally, somebody would offer us a pink gift, and we’d accept it, but it would be relegated to the back of a drawer, in hopes that Kina would quickly outgrow it.

Eventually, though, like water, pink found a way. Sometime early in 2020, Kina found herself drawn to pink clothing, a pink tutu, her pink cape, pink shoes, pink television characters. Kina has rubbed through every pink crayon in her collection and consumed every sheet of pink construction paper in the house. When I settled on a color for the masthead of The Daily Kina, I asked her what color I should use, and she pointed to a red marker and said “pink”, which was when I first realized that Kina thinks of the color red as just a very dark pink.

Yesterday was a notable shift for her, though. We were talking about everybody’s favorite colors, and Kina volunteered that her new favorite color was light blue, and that, while she used to love pink, she “changes color every year”, which feels about right. She does actually favor blue now, in the characters she loves (Elsa) and her choice of t-shirts. The tutu is still a favored costume, and the cape gets a lot of play, but she adores them less for their rose color than for their general sparkliness—another signature Kina look. While I worry about having to stock up on blue outfits, I do look forward to learning more about Kina’s blue period, and her further explorations of the rainbow1. Starting to miss the pink, though. Didn’t see that coming.

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