Today’s top headline is one I would have missed, but for the keen ears of my father, who has taken over as Lead Kina Listener in our time together—as I spend my energy watching my parents enjoy her, instead. Kina has reflected on the separate nature of our brains before, but as she is currently passing some real quality time with a pair of people who do not share her context and inside jokes, there’s a fair amount of Kina needing to catch their brains up to match her own—and it obviously has her thinking. “Yeh-yeh, do you remember…” or “Gramma, do you know [McDonald’s]” is a frequent conversation starter. She obviously derives real joy from lecturing my parents on the nuances of her inner world, and it’s deeply comforting to watch as their picture of that world takes shape.

Child Once Again Requests, Then Refuses Chicken Fingers

That process of getting Kina’s brain inside our own clearly never ends, since we once again bought her chicken fingers yesterday, having asked her directly whether she’d prefer them to grilled cheese (which she always eats). If you should arrive at any conclusion from having read this paper over the last seven months, let it be the now-obvious fact that Kina will never eat a chicken finger, no matter how much she insists she wants one.

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Going to just leave this one here for all of you, as we spend some private time with family. The beige is my parents’ carpet, which is how I will remember this visit when I scroll back through my photos of these pages.

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We’re off to see my parents for a couple of days—the first time we’ve packed for an overnight trip in almost a year. In the intervening ten months, Kina has matured sufficiently to entertain herself in a car (and her parents have matured sufficiently to admit that iPads are useful), though she has also developed a monstrous travel appetite. The Mazda CX-5 is a fairly roomy vehicle, and Google tells me there are 30.9 cubic feet of cargo space in the rear. By my calculations, some 20.9 of our particular cubic feet were fully occupied by snacks, each requested personally by our child. In desperation, we stopped at a bakery on the way out of town, and I swear to god I bought two full paper bags of bread and pastries—an investment to hedge against snack refusal. As it turns out, stuffing your child full of bread is a reasonable way to keep them from wheedling for other sugary treats. The power of gluten!

My Little Pony Is Accidentally Watched

I do not, for the life of me, get this show.

Kid Indicted For Calling Daddy “Stupid”

We do not use that word in our house, and yet somehow she has picked it up. Some days, I think there is horrible knowledge deeply ensconced in the minds of newborns—the word “stupid”, wielded in moments of anger against one’s father, is one such nugget of knowledge. I won’t lay out how we got to the point where she insulted my intelligence, but I will say that she spent three minutes in time-out for it. After a long crying jag with Mommy, she did approach me to apologize. I fully expect to be stupid again in a week.

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Kina has developed a truly astonishing talent for glowering during this pandemic, and she wields it frequently. The problem with her master of that expression, though, is that she’s created a baseline of discontent that requires more forceful declarations of real protest. Ergo, the stomping. We don’t have a very large apartment, but Kina can stomp her way through it with the best of them, emitting sounds as she does that are less “sigh” and more “steam valve”. Slamming doors? She’s got it. Foam sword? You’ll get it. As I reflect on it now, I realize that she’s finally at the point of her falling tantrum curve in which stomping is more frequent than weeping (though we very much still have weeping on the dance card), and it makes me grateful that all I finally have a kid whose rage is best expressed through the rolling of her eyes at me and a vigorous stomp away as she yells, “Daddy! You’re! Not! Lissening! To ME!” She is literally the only person on earth who can scream at me and still seem so charming. I’m sure she finds that insufferable.

Kid Dips Strawberries In Old Olive Oil

I want to say, first, that the olive oil is old only by contemporary foodie standards, given that it was one of my last purchases pre-lockdown—a bottle of really nice Spanish oil that I bought in a binge trip to Despaña in Soho, along with some aspirational keep-this-for-quarantine ham that we nonetheless ate for dinner that same night. Second, I will note that strawberries and olive oil go very well together, and I admire Kina for her refined palate and culinary pluck. Finally, I take great pride in the sharpened point of Kina’s zinger here—that Daddy bought this oil so long ago that it predates his own child’s existence. She’s gonna be a real monster, and I love her dearly for it.

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According to Kina, as she ate oatmeal this morning, “everybody has a lane”, which both surprised her parents (where did this come from) and did not surprise them (because it’s true, if you think about it). Prompted to elaborate on lanes, she offered that “Mommy has an exercise lane, I have a She-Ra lane, and Daddy has a blanket lane.” In those three lane assignments, there lies some truth: Laurea does talk a lot about exercising, Kina does unquestionably love She-Ra, and I often lay curled under my comforter for as long as possible, so as to avoid the crushing weight of reality.

Intrigued, Laurea and I asked about other people’s lanes, uncovering the following:

• Ms Ines (former teacher): Book lane!

• Ms Jamika (former teacher): Teacher lane!

• Ms Olenick (current teacher): Supplies lane!

• Tito Giorgio (family friend): Lasagna lane!

• Panda (panda): Small blanket lane!

• Sloanie (friend): Teacup lane!

• Futura (friend): Purse lane!

That is all that I remembered to write down, but I’m pretty sure we covered an additional twenty lanes—all of which were pretty accurate, by my estimation. The best and maybe most sinister part of all this is that, whenever you meet Kina, she is secretly filing you away in a lane. Stay in it!

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IN THE BEFORE TIMES, we had Kina enrolled in a sort of daredevil gymnastics class called Streb PopAction—a sort of juvenile demolition derby hosted by a fascinating dance company known for its acrobatic dancers’ propensity for courting injury at the hands of large moving objects. Kina had not always been daring as a toddler, but a few semesters of Streb had her very calmly jumping from platforms taller than her, sliding down platforms, and swinging from suspended trusses. And then, just as she was really getting into it, they locked the school down.

Our house is not a gymnasium. Nonetheless, she makes her own danger. Just this evening, I caught her jumping from the coffee table into a pile of throw pillows, inches from our bookcase. Today’s top headline is about a routine stunt she pulls, leaping roughly 2.5 feet from the dresser by our window (where she meets regularly with her pigeon friend) and onto our bed. This is as exciting as it gets in our non-gymnasium house, and until such time as we purchase three-inch-thick gym mats for our living room, also the safest form of daredevilry that I can countenance. I look forward to the re-opening of Streb, if only to see just how daring our daughter is, and to build in her the confidence to reason with and confront scary situations. You can only be a particular kind of toddler stuntperson for a few years in your life, and I want her to enjoy that—just not from our coffee table.

Last thing: I want you all to know that I did try to make an Evel Kinaevel joke in the headline, but it just didn’t land.

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Things Kina finds exciting these days: tents, sleep, and flashlights. Thing she asks us to do on a regular basis: pretend to sleep in a tent with a flashlight, which she turns off so that the space under the comforter is pitch black. I cannot emphasize enough how comforting it is to have your three-year-old child reassure you that, though it is dark right now, everything will be okay because she is there next to you. It is equally hard to overstate how painfully blinding a flashlight is when turned on directly in front of your fully-dilated pupils.

“I See Things In My Head When I’m Sleeping”

I cannot remember what it was like when I first realized I could dream, but it is a classic gift of parenthood to watch your child go through it. Kina has been trying to explain the experience of dreaming to us for a few weeks now, always as some variation on the idea of things in her head when she is sleeping. It’s always something from the day or two before the dream, and often some novel experience she’s had, played out in a slightly different way. We met her friend Futura and her family at Governor’s Island on Saturday, and we all piled onto bikes with the kids on the back. As we rode, they made faces at each other, joking as we sped past each other on long looping circuits of the island. In her dream, they’re on the island together, riding bikes all day. Are we even there? When adults dream they can fly, it’s our moment to be unbounded and still in control. For little kids, that sense of control and liberty can be as simple as dreaming of a day with your friend, riding a bike wherever you want to. I miss dreams like that.

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The first thing you notice is that the ketchup isn’t real. The server, with a solemnity bordering on the absurd, places upon the table in front of you a bottle of Heinz ketchup. “It’s pretend,” she intones, before shuffling quietly back to the kitchen. It’s not immediately clear in what capacity the ketchup is meant to serve as a condiment, but after a few awkward minutes, it becomes apparent that this is the first course, a simulacrum of an amuse-bouche. At any other restaurant, this would be merely a farce, but I would strenuously urge you here to try the pretend ketchup, because it is ridiculously good—perfectly balanced, just slightly tarter than it is sweet, a tomato in suspended animation. The thing, it turns out, that you get when the ketchup is pretend is the platonic ideal of ketchup. It seems in hindsight totally obvious, the card nobody has yet thought to play. If the emperor has no clothes, you are left to dress him as you wish. Here, he is dressed in ketchup.

Across from you, your dinner partner may be enjoying “a stinky fart” or four nearly-identical courses of “Let It Go” (a song from the children’s animated movie Frozen, though the dish itself is room temperature—a rare misstep for a restaurant that doesn’t actually prepare any food). By the end of the meal, you’ve eaten countless exquisite ideas, a parade of perfect nonsense, but not a crumb of food has passed your lips (though your server will present a Hi-Chew with your check as a treat to take home). You’ll leave in a daze, but fundamentally unsatisfied, and this feels entirely the point of the exercise. You could have been eating oatmeal, cheesy popcorn, or fruit snacks—all of which might fill you up but leave you flat—but I guarantee you that nothing of substance is quite as nourishing as a meal with Kina.

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I have just gotten back from an actual anniversary night out with Laurea, which was among the most illicit-feeling and nourishing things I’ve done in seven months, and so I’ll keep this brief. When Kina says, in today’s top headline, “Remember before when we had rules?” what she is really saying is not, “Remember before, when we had rules?” but actually, “Remember before we had rules?”

Reader, we do. It was a time of multiple nightly wakings, of pumpkin-lantern fears, of scritchety-scratching at doors, of plaintive wailing. We have twice set rules to reduce undue parental awakenings: first, in February (right on time!) after we suffered by far the worst three-month-long sleep regression in the history of mankind; second, in July, when we created the Three Great Rules for Letting Mommy Sleep. Since at least mid-August, she has observed these rules with some consistency, and I would like to take this moment to publicly thank our daughter for respecting the rule of law. We are only as good as our promises, Kina.

Today’s Parade is a dedication to ourselves as a family. Two of us have been married for twelve years now (a full lunar zodiac cycle!) and the third of us drew this in celebration. Almost all of these letters were produced by Kina herself (though we did recite them carefully).

It’s hard for me to remember the specifics of the day we got married; bits and pieces leap out. Laurea ensconced in the changing room with every female member of her extended family. The extremely good hors d’oeuvres. The sense of being so visible at the altar. Whispering my vows to myself behind the offices of the Marin Art and Garden Center while watching multiple guests at our wedding escape to the woods to smoke weed. The two newborn babies in the audience—who are, of course, now twelve. Laurea’s face, behind the veil. We probably did not think about our becoming parents that day—and we specifically didn’t offer that in our vows, being still so unsure about what it would mean to make that kind of a promise. That we now are parents, then, feels like such a good choice to have made together, and our renewed commitment each year to being a family together is one of my favorite celebrations.

Obama was not yet president on October 11, 2008. The economy had only begun to visibly collapse. We had two tickets to Indonesia. My hair wasn’t gray. It was just the two of us, and all of the two of us. We were very happy.

We still are.

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The self-portrait that I have reproduced here in extremely high fidelity was one of Kina’s assignments for her second week of school, and I think it’s fair to say that the result is pret-ty stunning for this devoted abstractionist. At this time last year, our little Picasso was giving us rough lines, solid fields of primary colors, and paper-ripping ballpoint squiggles. Her recent foray into faces (as noted in the commentary on a recent Parade) has been fascinating, but limited—coyly primitive, even. And yet, today’s portrait, which demonstrates the artist’s new and rudimentary command of hair, also features two of her signature purple “buns” and what appears to be a blue face snake. The original, a masterpiece in pastels, can be seen by appointment on our fridge.

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It must be wild to be three years old, as you just begin to realize that there are different kinds of “the past”. Kina’s relationship to things-that-once-happened has evolved dramatically as she’s grown, but her journey actually started with “in a long long time”—a period that referred, in its infancy, even to things that had happened earlier that day (but was most often used to refer to books she had forgotten existed). “When I was a baby” then entered the scene as an epoch that predated “long long time”, once she began to fully absorb that the Baby Kina we’d watch in videos was in fact her, as a baby. Kina then learned to distinguish between the recent past (“long long time”) and the distant past (“when I was a baby”), which was at some times confusing, until the dawn of “yesterday”—a term whose precision has improved dramatically in recent weeks, but for a long time meant “not an actual long time ago, but possibly up to a week ago”. More recently, we saw the emergence of “one month ago”, which adds precision to the gap between “yesterday” and “long long time”‚ but which still often means two weeks ago.

But today’s headline is the headline because of her statement at breakfast this morning that her stick was a thousand years old, which led her to a series of pronouncements that many things were a thousand years old. She has, of course, no concept of what happens in a thousand years, but it seems to be a placeholder for the totality of the period before “when I was a baby” (with the exception of one additional period called “when I was in Mommy’s tummy” that she understands immediately predates “when I was a baby”). I’m pretty sure she learned about “a thousand years” from—and this is not in any way surprising to long-time readers—She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, whose two eponymous mortal incarnations, Mara and Adora, were separated by a millennium. Madame Razz, She-Ra’s immortal garden witch (and one of Kina’s favorite characters) knew them both, and often mistakes them for each other as she floats clairvoyantly through her own memories. Like Kina, Madame Razz plays fast and loose with time, compressing a thousand years into a day. Maybe we’re all doing that these days; is March a long long time ago or one month ago? It’s not an exaggeration to say yesterday and when she was a baby feel like near neighbors.

In any case, she got this stick on the playground. It might be from when she was a baby, but Kina says it’s a thousand years old. Same diff.

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People often say that the tantrums of a three-year-old seem like they will never end, and then they turn four and are suddenly fine. Kina is now two months shy of her fourth birthday, and I can assure you that the first part of that well-trod assertion remains true—let’s hope things look abruptly different in December.

Last night, Laurea made pasta (which, as you know, is our publisher’s favorite food), grating some primo Parmigiano-Reggiano on top as a finishing touch. As we sat down to eat, Kina was so excited, bouncing up and down in her seat, ready for a big chunk of noodles—until five seconds after we mixed the cheese into the pasta. I think she barely got one sentence out (“Where’s the cheese?!”) before collapsing in tears. Fifteen minutes of gasping, snot-soaked weeping ensued as Kina grasped at her mother’s shirt, burying her head into her shoulder. We walked her around, picked her up, put her down, asked her what she needed, got her stuffies to talk to her, sat as she lay on the floor and screamed, watched as she turned beet-red. I finally asked her if she wanted more cheese, and she nodded her head violently up and down. Within seconds of my picking up the grater, she calmed down.

Why did I not do it sooner? Because these are not the rules of the house. After she apologized (which is new), we explained to her that when Mommy wants me to take out the trash, she asks me to. When I want Mommy to get some water, I ask her to. In this house, we do not weep for cheese, child.

Insufficient cheese is a problem that can be solved. There are many things to cry about, and I need her to save her tears for moments that will put to better use every milligram of adrenaline my body can produce in response to those tears. For less tragic situations (like scary cantaloupe crusts), we can talk about it. I am liberal with cheese! I can bring parmesan to bear! Just ask me! Maybe I need to accept that we live in an age where bawling over pasta is a luxury, and I’m certainly discounting the need for an average 3.8333 year old to cry—because crying is a craft that requires practice. I just feel like I don’t ever get to cry these days, and I suppose that the point is that I am jealous of this person who gets to cry whenever she wants.

Maybe when she’s four, I’ll take my turn.

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Kina makes for an exasperated nanny, running around as she does with three demanding stuffies. How can she be expected to maintain with all their various needs and complaints? It’s worth noting that Kina never takes all of them outside—she takes them to “pretend outside”, which is usually somewhere in her bedroom (and never on her bed). I think she’s somehow internalized this idea of cabin fever in the age of COVID and knows instinctively that you can’t just spend all day locked in an apartment with three loud babies. Get out while the numbers are good, I say! Enjoy that pretend sunshine!

“Can You Water the Plant Mommy Bcuz My Hands Are Too Cheezy”

Two things I want to say here: First, I really fretted over the word “Bcuz”, mostly for reasons of Kina-nunciation accuracy—she would actually write it “P-cuz”, which is hilarious when you hear it in person. Second, I am extremely proud of my cheeto-finger drawing. The plant, by the way, is fine.

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We have spent a lot of bedtimes lately exploring the concept of opposites. Today’s headlines are a representative selection, reflecting the spectrum of vibes in which Kina dwells on a daily basis. While she has achieved a certain mastery of most familiar adjectives, she stumbles a lot on nouns, which don’t really have opposites but are fun to explore.

“What’s the opposite of Puppy?” (Panda)

“What’s the opposite of truck?” (bike)

“What’s the opposite of nose?” (butt)

She’s accused me of being stinky a lot lately, which is probably fair, since I’ve spent the last four years calling her stinky. It stings a bit, though, when she walks into a room, sniffs a bit, and declares that the room “has a Daddy smell”. I would like to think that I am on the “good” side of the good/smell dichotomy. You’d have to ask her.

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We went to the beach yesterday to do a little grilling with Andrew and Des, and to celebrate Laurea’s recent liberation. The events I have not written about here (for lack of space to explain them) are the countless chasing games and role-playing of late-night Amazon deliveries that Kina engaged in with everybody; while exhausting, those were easily as nourishing as the food. The kid was having so much fun, in fact, that the offering of her very first s’more felt almost like an afterthought. I took great care to produce the ideal marshmallow—golden brown, jiggly, almost light enough to float off the stick—and squished it just so between the graham cracker and the chocolate. She took one bite, thought about it, and then raced off to play “mustard” with Des (a game that involves shouting “mustard” and chasing Kina). Despite my recent efforts to “eat healthier”, I ate two s’mores myself; you cannot light a fire and not make s’mores. Kina will learn that—eventually.

Pops Purloins Pasta

The rare alliterative headline, this story is about how I secretly did want a meatball, but (again) am not allowed to eat them at the moment, and so was forced to stealthily pick off her rigatoni while she didn’t notice, until she did. God, I love meatballs.

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Our friend Amanda invited us to join her and her two kids at the Bronx Zoo yesterday—another escape we have somehow never made, due to the fact that getting to and from the Bronx by subway is unreasonably difficult for a kid who naps. Now, of course, that Kina barely naps and we own a car, the time was ripe for us to make our first visit to New York’s premier zoo experience. Lions! Giraffes! American Bison! All the finest of Earth’s creatures, laying out languorously on reconstructed veldts. Kina has long been a fan of zoos—or “zoo”, singular, since the only zoo she’s ever seen is the Oakland Zoo, with her Lala. On her two visits to that zoo, she was a huge fan of tigers, giraffes, and baboons (whose red buns were a source of tremendous fascination). We expected similar responses this time.

And yet, as we really ought to have expected, her response was dissimilar, a mishmash of demands for treats and apathetic responses to small mammals. We made an early raid on the Children’s Zoo—which was probably our best move, even though it’s laid out like an Ikea; you’re there for the alpacas, but you have to walk through catfish, prairie dogs, otters, and flamingos first. In any other situation in which alpacas were not involved, each of those animals would inspire prolonged adoration, but Kina was impatient and had no interest in tarantulas. So, upon reaching the besieged pellet vending machines (“Sir, please keep moving. There are more stations farther along. We are trying to social distance. Ma’am, please keep moving. There are more stations…”) we purchased a handful of mealy pellets and sent Kina down a gauntlet of goats, sheep, and alpacas to feed them all. Kina, ever the paragon of fairness, tried to identify those animals most ignored by the other kids (even when they—the alpacas, not the kids—chomped her fingers), coming to me frequently to purchase more and more fifty-cent handfuls of kibble. I think I spent at least six bucks on pellets before we literally washed our hands of it and made our way out.

Reader, that was the highlight of the visit.

Other medium lights: the shuttle to Wild Asia (a part of the park that, once you reach it by shuttle, you cannot see except by monorail), two curious peacocks, the three-dollar grapes, the “candy trail” (don’t ask), and numerous outcroppings of Manhattan schist—over which Kina patiently led her young friend Simone the Person whenever we encountered it.

Things that did not register: lions, giraffes, the tiger mask we asked her to wear, kudu, antelopes.

Things she asked to do, and which we could not do because she was too small or it was not permitted: crawl through the log, walk up the stairs, sit in the turtle shell, climb on the rope course.

On the whole, I suspect the Bronx Zoo is a very fine zoo. If there had not been a 45-minute wait for the Wild Asia monorail, Kina might have enjoyed seeing a tiger. It did not cross my mind to find the baboons—with their red buns—but I fully intend to go back and try again. Next time, I’ll walk her straight through to the alpacas.

The Daily Kina in Print for 6 Months and 1 Day

Today’s Parade is a nameless abstraction, painted suddenly by Kina in the minutes before we had to leave the house today; the paint you see captured in the photograph above is still wet. I have decided that this is a cover commemorating the six-month anniversary of our esteemed daily publication. Though much has happened in the few months since our One Hundredth Day edition, there’s a lot still the same. We’ve built a rhythm here—not just in writing these front pages, but in living through a pandemic. I said early on that I figured I had about a hundred of these drawings in me, and now I have nearly twice that. As of yesterday, I’ve written these little newsletter essays for a hundred days straight—and I wasn’t betting I’d make it more than a week. The sheer volume of doofy dad jokes I see when I scroll through the history of this publication is mind-boggling. We have definitely reached the phase of this hobby when I’m actually really impressed with my own effort, and I can only hope that Kina someday appreciates that it wasn’t just so she could watch She-Ra every morning. I don’t want to bet I’ll make a year, but I hope I make it to the end of 2020. I hope we all do.

After yesterday’s tale of seeing flowers in Kina’s brain, a few of you asked to see our flower-nose portraits. Herewith, the flowers threading up into our own newly-wed brains. In each of these, we are mere milliseconds from sneezing.

Have a good week, everybody, and remember that if you own any CDs, you are a dinosaur.

dad

Two related vignettes—

First: Periodically, when Kina is tormented by injustice or her father or the injustice of fathers, I will ask to see if there is something in her brain that might be annoyed. If that request calms her down, I then conduct a thorough examination to confirm the presence of annoyance. First, I look into her eyeballs to see if I can identify anything annoying inside her head. Then, I try to see the sides of her brain through her ears. Finally, I have her open her mouth so I can get underneath the brain. If I find something—which I often do—then I’ll whisper into Kina’s ear so that the annoyed thing can hear me clearly, asking what it might accept to make its way out of Kina’s brain. Often, the answer is “a special treat”, but occasionally I can convince it to leave by doing a silly dance.

Second: On our living room wall hang two portraits, of Laurea and me, taken on our honeymoon. In them, we are each sitting in front of a gauzy red background, dressed in comfortable clothes, with jasmine flowers stuck up our noses. Kina is fascinated by these pictures, and often points out to us that we had just gotten married (true) and that the flowers were probably itchy itchy (true). Sometimes, she talks about putting flowers up her nose, but seldom proposes we actually follow through. This is the only art in our entire house that she ever comments on.

So, this morning, after regaling me with stories about these portraits once again, Kina asked me calmly to look into her brain and see if I saw flowers in there. It took a bit longer than usual to notice anything in her brain, since the flowers were quite small and unassuming—but there they were. I asked them to come out, since flowers are often so itchy itchy, and they replied that they might, in exchange for some eggs. This came as a surprise to me, since Kina has not liked eggs for many months, but on further reflection, I understood that these were new flowers with their own tastes, and that we couldn’t let our past perceptions of Kina’s brain hold us back from new (or renewed) cravings. Goodness, no! We gave her a big bite of eggs, which Kina savored as the flowers invisibly emerged from her ears. I will look for them again tomorrow.

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Kina has been asking all week about her flu shot. “When is my flu shot?” she will ask. “Are we going to pediatrics?” “Is it tomorrow will I get a flu shot?” Well, reader, our esteemed publisher has finally awakened to Christmas in October—the day of her scheduled vaccination against seasonal influenza, a fantastic day on which she will receive a lollipop. As we were eating breakfast this morning, she asked which pediatric office we’d be visiting, and we told her she’d be seeing her regular doctor a couple blocks up Grand Street; she was fine with this, if mildly disappointed, because her very favorite place to be stuck with needles is the extremely-sterile LabCorp facility on 14th Street in Manhattan, where she has twice had blood taken.

The first time we took Kina there, Laurea and I had prepared ourselves for the worst. The only other time she’d had blood drawn before that, Laurea and two nurses had to restrain her, and I nearly ended up curled up into a ball myself. We would not be caught off guard again. The phlebotomist walked us to the back of the storefront lab into a fluorescent-lit, minty blue room festooned with decals of Minnie Mouse. She calmly asked Kina to sit in her mother’s lap and put her arm in Mommy’s hand. I braced as she swabbed the inside of Kina’s elbow and placed the needle against it. And then: silence. Two vials of blood were drawn in complete, tranquil silence—as Kina looked on directly. The needle was withdrawn. A band-aid proffered. Lollipop granted. Stickers stuck. We walked to a nearby playground as Laurea and I basked in the miracle of a perfectly-content and recently-poked lollipop fiend.

One year later, same story: Minnie Mouse, Mommy’s lap, needle in, Kina watching, blood drawn, needle out, band-aid, lolly, stickers, playground. Blood draws are Kina’s happy place. You can see why she was mildly disappointed.

A couple months back, you will recall, we got Kina a new doctor’s set, and one of her very favorite things to do is to give and receive vaccinations. She applies “lotion” to my arm, raises the syringe, and tells me to look at Mommy, that “there will be a little chimp”. A brief sense of pressure. “Not so bad, right!?” I am very, very healthy now.

Today’s shot—at her regular (and extremely comfy) doctor’s office—was apparently a great hit. The very famous (in our household) Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes showed up wearing a very chic black skirt and matching black sweatshirt, addressed her adoring fan, asked about her companion Simone the owl, administered the injection swiftly, and applied a neon-orange band-aid. Girls, she assured Kina, never cried when they got shots; boys, invariably.

A lollipop was offered. Strawberry. The patient had a fantastic day.

dad

I have alluded a few times in the last thirty-five days to a giant virtual event that Laurea has been working on, which is now—officially—done. We are, of course, grateful to be working at all in this house, but hooboy has it been a haul. I was just looking back at the last month and change of TDK issues, and it’s pretty astonishing how much happens in five weeks (considering, especially, how quickly the last six months have gone). Mostly what has happened has involved my spending a bit more solo time with Kina than usual—mornings, evenings, and usually one of the two weekend days—and relishing a moment in which my daughter does not treat me like chopped liver. Laurea is a tough act to compete with here, dear readers, and while she’s been distracted by [checks notes]:

1. senators

2. former Secretaries of State

3. Gloria Steinem

4. epidemiologists

5. filmmakers

6. famous journalists, and

7. a number of surly old white men,

I have in the meantime been able to lean on my:

1. natural charm

2. capacity to invent stories

3. love of fart jokes

4. familiarity with She-Ra, and

5. shared love of cheese and bacon

in order to win the heart of America’s most famous preschooler. A few weeks ago, we took Kina to the temporary office that Laurea is working from—a little glass-doored monk’s cell on a massive floor of an industrial building. Kina has since been obsessed with the idea that Laurea must somehow “escape” from work, and with the injustice of her being trapped in that room at night (when she should obviously be putting Kina to bed, by her estimation). So, now that she has escaped, we have to rebuild all our equitable Kina rituals again, all while trying to make the readjustment as easy for her as possible. She is dealing with this mostly by calling out to Laurea from distant rooms at all times of the day and evening, listening for her own echo. Last night required a lot of hugs and returns to Kina’s bedroom after we put her to bed, but she seems more confident today that Mommy has truly escaped.

I’m proud of what Laurea accomplished this September; it’s certainly one of the hardest things I’ve ever watched somebody pull together, and it was a huge success. It’s important to both of us that Kina knew she was doing it, and that seeing a bit less of her carried with it the message that Kina will herself someday boss surly old white men around, too. Gloria Steinem would approve, I think.

It’s ever too late!

dad

I woke up this morning and saw an article about “The Best Outdoor Space Heaters”, which of course led directly to my badgering Laurea about whether or not we should buy a little heater so that we could spend the winter outside—fully be-parka-ed, sledding, drinking hot cider, warming our hands by our hundred-dollar propane torch. Laurea shot it down (though she was strongly in favor of parkas), but Kina picked up the slack. At breakfast, she started running through all the things we could do in winter, but as if in a fever dream—a version of winter told by somebody who had only read about winter from half-burned scores of Christmas carols, like Narnia on acid. Who among us has given any thought to a sleigh drawn by sparrows? Sign me up.

Truly, I want to feel okay about the upcoming winter, though it’s hard to feel okay about much of anything these days. The city and its collective sense of safety today, when compared to what it felt like in April, bodes ill for us. We should not all be mushed together as we have been lately—even as I don’t relish the thought of being trapped in our homes again, though that may be exactly what we need. To be able, occasionally, to toss the parkas and a space heater in the trunk of the car this January and drive way out to quiet-ass nowhere (cider, sledding, and all the rest), is a comforting thought. I just want to be alone with our bird sleigh and the snow mooses, set apart from the things that got us here, with hands all nice and toasty.

Did You Know: Apple Juice is Called “Tree Juice”

I have been meaning to tell you this for months. It belongs in the historical record.

dad