Laurea and I have been reminiscing lately about past trips to other countries—at a time in which cramped transoceanic journeys feel like an absurd sensory luxury—and I think it’s rubbed off on Kina, who now wants to role-play international flights by riding on my shoulders through the house. The flying-through-the-house thing is nothing new—we “fly to California” multiple times a week—but today she wanted to fly to both Italy (for pasta) and the Philippines (for family), and it seemed only right to accept her business class ticket (our fantasy, not hers) for a long-haul intercontinental jaunt. Flight attendants asked her politely to buckle up tight and stow her bags under the seat in front of her, and after a short taxi, we were off. The flight, as it turns out, is not much longer than a flight to California! We made the journey to Italy in just under two minutes, after two gummy snacks and a hearty slug of apple juice; one episode of Daniel Tiger was watched. Upon landing in Italy, she demanded a plate of pasta and immediately fell asleep. Poor thing was just crushed by the jet lag.

“At Night We Do Hugga-Mugga From Close-Away and Far-Away”

Speaking of Daniel Tiger, Kina and I have purloined the young tiger’s classic expression of affection for our own use, adapted for bedtimes to allow for some loving closure and my own swift departure. Background: Kina’s very selective about hugs and kisses—which we fully respect—and deploys them at bedtime only when absolutely necessary. For a long time, we subbed in a nice hugga-mugga (nose-to-nose, wiggling faces), before she decided she wasn’t keen on that level of facial contact either. So we moved onto “hugga-mugga from faaaaaar awaaaaay”, which has me standing five feet away from her as we shake our heads slowly side-to-side—the hugga-mugga equivalent of an air kiss. Before long, though, she decided that some amount of closeness would help her sleep better, asking if we could add a “hugga-mugga from clooooooose awaaaaaay”, in which our faces are five inches from each other instead. So now, if you were to watch our bedtime ritual with the sound off, you’d see me slowly backing away from her bed, both of us tenderly saying “no” to each other until I vanish through the doorway. It is my favorite time of the day.

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As Laurea approaches the finish line of her month-long odyssey of long, exhausting days, Kina has just now begun to get a sense that there are coworkers involved—and we all know how much Kina loves coworkers. Of course, without direct access to Mommy’s colleagues, she’s had to lean on indirect interactions in order to charm them: a Lego “air thing” that her mother can use to breathe more easily in moments of stress, for example, or cute pictures and animated recordings of unicorns. The crowd of people on Laurea’s screen has included more than just coworkers, though; in the last month, she’s produced conversations with Hillary Clinton, Rachel Maddow, Willie Nelson, and Beto O’Rourke. These are important people! And yet Kina’s worldview (rightly) suggests that Laurea might interrupt HRC briefly in order to see a cute picture of Kina draping herself over a swing in the playground with her friend Nikola, and that Hillary herself might feel a sense of sweet relief if Laurea were to show that picture to her. I mean, just imagine. It’s a great picture.

Kina Enters Slide Tower Through “Elf Door”

Kina is at an interesting playground age, in which she is big enough to be adventurous but still eager enough for her parents’ company to want us to join her on large-ish playground equipment designed for small-ish butts. We’re often telling her that she’ll have to go on her own, that her parents aren’t allowed to enter into some twenty-foot-tall enclosed spiral stairwell with four-foot ceilings (true), and that the elves who live inside it might get squooshed (false). Accordingly, she must go through the little “elf door” at the base of the tower herself, navigating the rowdy big kids on her way up to the turret and whooshing down the slide into a fluffy sand pit on her own. It is something that I have no interest at all in doing myself (false), but I love to watch her sense of joy and accomplishment as she does it herself (true).

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A clothing-designer friend invited us to have pictures taken of Kina wearing various clothes that this friend had designed, for the purpose of selling more of those clothes—which makes a ton of sense, given that Kina is very fashionable and influential in certain newsletter circles. Kina has never been one of those photo shoot kids, unless you count the thousands of photos we have taken of her on our phones, and Laurea and I have never shown her what the absurd art of modeling entails, and yet.

And yet Kina has somehow osmotically absorbed the art of disdainful model faces and weird contorted poses that really show off cozy knitwear. The other kids on the shoot lolled about as kids do, looking pleasantly at the camera and playing with toy trains, but our esteemed publisher, a fashion icon to her core, glared witheringly at the creative staff and growled through the entire shoot. The only way you could infer that this was modeling and not misandric rage was that she stood patiently (albeit dismissively) on the seamless the entire time.

It is conceivable that she might actually have stormed off, actually, were it not for the bag of Trader Joe’s gummies that our friends brought for their kid. By the end of the shoot, all those kids were so wired on sugar that the whole thing turned vaguely manic. I imagine this is what real photo shoots are like. But what do I know? She didn’t inherit this from me.

I can’t wait for the pictures.

Today’s Parade is a collaboration between Laurea and Kina, and it commemorates the last weekend workday in a thirty-five-day stretch of extended production days for Mommy. We suspect that most readers can identify the parties involved, but for those who are new to this publication: Laurea is on the left, and the hairy melon with legs is Kina. This is an unusual self portrait for Kina, in that she typically draws all her giant-headed people with “buns” (two ovals underneath the head). It could be that the finish line is blocking them. This is what the art historians will say at the exhibition of these Parades, some forty years from now.

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I’m going to let Kina literally speak for herself here, in that these headlines—when read through—together compose an unprompted and thoroughly disarming soliloquy that she recited to me this morning. I hope it’s as comforting for you as it was for me.

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Today was “Fun Friday” at school, an official wacky-clothes day for which Kina immediately demanded her special tutu. Presented with the need to make it “wackier”, she then added a denim jacket, which Laurea and I immediately noted was less “wacky” than “oh my god extremely cool”. Kina took to the outfit quickly, locking me in my room like the inveterate nerd that I am and strutting around the apartment, a true ballet bully—Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club meets Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. Inspired by her rage tutu, she was extra-shouty all morning, at least until class, when she fell silent and obedient in the presence of actual educational authority. Other kids came dressed as astronauts and chefs, but only Kina was prepared for the activity of the day—dancing. When asked to pick her favorite dance moves and show the class, she walked away from the camera and twirled around slowly for three straight minutes, holding the edge of her tutu in one hand and her rainbow cup in the other. It was a touching performance, if slightly dizzying. Immediately after class, she stripped off the outfit and asked for a t-shirt. She truly is my child.

Kid Busts Out Where The Wild Things Are

Every night, when I ask Kina to pick out a book before bed, I pray that she will bring back Where The Wild Things Are, and every night she denies me. This is unequivocally my favorite children’s book, by my favorite children’s book author—a classic for rebellious kids who are doomed eventually to be responsible for other rebellious kids (in one form or another). I have a signed copy of this book on my shelf that I had for years expected to read to some kid of mine, and which I ultimately realized was too valuable to read even to myself, and so the copy of the book I have on Kina’s shelf is a burner copy that has gotten barely any reading time, because she refuses to bring it to me out of spite. So last night, she knew she was giving me a special treat, raising her eyebrows expectantly when she told me we’d be reading Wild Things. I really went to town on it, too—roaring the terrible roars, and gnashing the terrible teeth, and rolling the terrible eyes, and showing the terrible claws (all in concert with a very solemn Kina). By the end of the book, we were both very sleepy, and she drifted right off, but I wished—as I did when I was a kid—that there might be a little supper there in the room right next to her, still hot.

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Kina did not always like ants. In her young toddler years, she would screech to a halt on the playground at the very sight of an ant and demand that we lift her over it. In our edition from May 17th of this year, we covered her early efforts to categorize bugs, not realizing that she’d eventually rule in favor of some of them, let alone ants—clearly among her least favorite bugs of May 17th.

We have talked about the bees before. The other day, in fact, when the air was still chilly, she and I went to our local coffee shop for her regular “cheddar cheese and bacon” and sat by our favorite lavender plant. Kina asked about our bee friends Becky and Joe, who were nowhere to be seen. I told her that bees don’t like the cold, and she nodded knowingly, even as she scoured the skies for new apian companions.

I don’t know if she likes small bugs because they’re less threatening or more lovable, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that she hates a roach, like a proper New Yorker.

Kid Oblivious to Injustice

This is another one of those headlines that’s here to help me remember this day. It’s a hard truth to face—the idea that the justice system, sworn to protect our citizens, would deem it largely acceptable for three law enforcement officers to shoot into an innocent person’s home and let her die. I work in a news organization—no amount of personal privilege allows me to ignore this, and nothing should. But there are Black folks on my staff who had to come to work today and build the software that distributes this news. It’s traumatic for them, and for me by proxy, and I struggle to see any light at the other side of this at the moment. This world is not a particularly good one right now! So what is my obligation to Kina? I sweep my worries under the rug when I’m with her (and, frankly, being around her is comforting to me), in part to ensure she has the longest possible uninterrupted beautiful childhood that we can offer her. Am I sheltering her? Absolutely. At what point will she learn about this, and how am I supposed to teach her? What am I supposed to say?

I attended a presentation today by Britton Williams, a psychologist who specializes in trauma-informed care and came to talk to the team about secondary and vicarious traumas—the very real psychological harm that emerges from observing the trauma of others (a particularly relevant scenario at my work). In that presentation, she talked about an experiment with a group of young rats, who were allowed to play freely and curiously for three days. On the fourth day, they introduced a single cat hair into the play space, and the play came to an abrupt halt—even though these rats had never seen a cat. The worst part? Even after the hair was removed a day later, these baby rats never played together in the same way. “It makes me sad for the rats,” she said. How could it not? Innocence is so fragile, and rat or not, it’s terrifying to contemplate the idea that innocence can be so irreparably shattered.

I am fully aware that I cannot shelter Kina forever, and that despite all our collective traumas, we muddle through. I just don’t want her to feel the way I feel when I look out the window these days, and I intend to do everything I can to fix what’s outside the window, so she won’t have to.

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Flying through fast tonight with a brief newsletter, since Dad is late with some conference talk prep (one of Hello Kitty’s scintillating “office games”) and nearly forgot to send this. If I had started this note an hour earlier, I’d be talking about the weird ways that kids are obsessed with pretending to eat their own parents, and how they (or Kina, at least) enjoy making their parents pretend to eat their beloved stuffies. What? Is it just us?

Tomorrow, a more timely missive. Tonight, remember Valentine’s Day.

dad

What is there to say here? Kina looks snazzy in a coat. She’s been moaning for months that she wants to wear “down-sleeve” dresses and pajamas instead of the arm-baring “up-sleeve” tops we’ve been dressing her in all summer. We can’t tell if it’s because she is more comfortable in down-sleeve dresses or just prefers the look of them, but she’s quite happy these last few days of sixty-degree weather to have her arms and legs covered as she heads out the door. The problem here is that she appears to have grown significantly, and things that we called dresses last year are shirts for the tall girl with whom we now reside. I know I say this a lot, but how did she get to be this big? The shoes-too-small headline from the other day is just one of several examples in which Kina has become a giant. Fortunately, we bought her a coat last year that was comically too big, and which now fits her like a glove. Again, I’m not interested in her staying the same size, but I seem to keep forgetting—despite approaching our fifth winter with this kid—that she outgrows seasonal clothes every year, and I’m starting to understand why my parents always bought me shoes that were a size too big.

Unexpected People Mess Up Entire House

I just want you all to know that I have been asking our management company for five years to replace my 1980s-era windows—which never closed correctly, are not properly sealed, and leak both air and precipitation. Yesterday morning, seemingly out of nowhere, they arrived with eight brand new windows. I skedaddled Kina out of the house for the day, while they tore the windows out of my walls and methodically replaced them. When she came back, eight hours later, the installers were carrying bent and torn aluminum and bags of trash out of the house, and Kina’s toys and animals were shoved in a pile all on one side of her room. Her takeaway, predictably, was that these men had rearranged her room for her, and she was thrilled at the novelty. She didn’t even notice the windows. To each her own.

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As we have discussed before, Kina is growing up, and so I find myself frequently trying to identify ways in which she is not yet grown. When she and I were playing earlier, I took great comfort in the fact that she still can’t (or won’t) pronounce th sounds, and so I still get to hear my big kid say “tings” and “dat”, in a voice that is still so high that even helium doesn’t change its pitch. I know this will change, of course, and even today she uses that squeaky voice to rattle off much longer narratives than her 2019 counterpart (and dad) could possibly imagine. When she stumbled into the apartment earlier this evening after a full day outside, she regaled me with stories about how she went to the bathroom three whole times, and how she wanted to make sure that Hannah had a chance to go to the bathroom before she did (which, she noted, was the fair thing to do). Her notes on paneer—a cheese she met only yesterday—were conveyed with the kind of detail I expect from a restaurant critic (and a conversational devotion she appears, once again, to have picked up from She-Ra). On some days, I worry that it’s going by too fast, careening down a hill with no brake (which is true in some ways), but on others I remember that her voice is still tiny, and that we’re here together now. She is growing up, but she’s small enough.

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It’s not entirely true that our love for Kina is unrequited, but it is requited on her own terms and at a time of her choosing. The moments when she does declare her love for us are extra precious to us—a special treat—and usually fall either just before or just after she sleeps, when she is most unaware. The rest of the day, loving her is like living with a tiny Han Solo.

I don’t know that it matters if she loves me or not, actually. That’s the point of unconditional love, which is either comforting or terrifying as we contemplate the years ahead and simultaneously look back on how carelessly we navigated our own teenage years with our parents. A few hours ago, Kina tried to tell me how she felt about me by repeatedly and pointedly slamming my bedroom door. Once it became apparent that I wasn’t going to respond, she decided instead to hit me, and then to start inconsolably weeping, and so I found myself holding and comforting this small person who—by all outward appearances—was really angry at me, and who was definitely being a real dick about it, actually. I love her so much that the conflict didn’t even enter into my mind. I can’t know what it’s like to be in her head at this age; nature makes us all forget that (probably for good reasons), and so I can only assume that Kina’s love is complex, is messy, is big enough to include five minute periods where she is both slapping me in the face and laying her head on my shoulder. She’s brave to live in all of that, and all I really care about is that she knows that I love her—which, our readers will note, she does.

I have a confession to make: I almost forgot to draw The Sunday Kina today. Kina and I were half an hour away from a play date with Sloanie when I finally remembered. This is partly because Laurea left early this morning—without the prompt of watching her cut paper for the Parade cover, a Sunday morning just blends together into one long whining-for-special-treats noise. But draw it I did, and alongside me, our intrepid sticker collagist. She asked me politely to help her get the polar bear off the sticker backing, but the placement and selection here is all Kina. I take credit for the increasingly jaunty logo at the top. Sunday funday.

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Kina’s new teacher, Ms. Olenick, really loves plants and has a cute cat. These things are endearing to Kina, and she reacted accordingly in her first one-on-one meeting of the year, pulling out all her favorite items of the week to hold in front of her iPad camera: Sooty the plant, a children’s book about anarchy, her doctor set, and an enormous toy stroller. I don’t expect that every one-on-one meeting of the year will be about show and tell, but I think this set a good tone for the two of them—like a first date where you talk about your favorite bands and authors. They’re well-matched.

The whole idea of one-on-one meetings like this is sort of new to everyone in the context of school (though I, a classic business drone, am quite used to it). It occurred to me halfway through the meeting that teachers typically learn about individual children only in the context of a classroom, as they interact and cross paths, which—let me tell you—is not that easy in a video chat. I hope that having this time together once or twice a week leads to Kina feeling a deeper emotional connection to her teacher, which seems so important for kids in preschool. That these meetings happen at all—and that they take place on a screen—seems inconsequential, as long as they work.

We drove past her school on the way home from the playground today, and she pointed at the building as we passed, saying “That’s my new school!” How strange it is to live through this year, in which a massive brick building is just a totem for the social experiment that is happening on screen in our living room. I feel like we should stroll by to just lay our hands on it, for good luck.

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I told Kina a story tonight, late to bed after a birthday dinner with her Uncle Ken. Kina isn’t often outside after the sun goes down, and as she rode on my shoulders, she marveled at a single planet in the sky—a star, by her estimation. We don’t actually get real stars much in Brooklyn, and with the haze of distant wildfires in the atmosphere, a young New Yorker these days might look up at Venus and think the firmament held just one brilliant, lonely star. I didn’t want to keep her up much later than I already had, so I rushed her home, drew a bath, and swept her into her pajamas as my phone buzzed in my pocket.

A few minutes later, I laid her down and tucked her in, offering her one story (She’d never accept less.) I told her the story of Baby Rainbow Unicorn meeting Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court. It’s not much of a story, but it has our nation’s finest jurist in over a generation, the wisest and strongest judge in all the world—who held up the rights of not just Puppy and Panda, but even the smallest cat in the dollhouse—conveying to our friend the unicorn the unparalleled responsibility to defend those most in need of protection, and to see clearly where the world and its laws are broken, so that they can be mended. The story goes that Ruth Bader Ginsburg leans over Baby Rainbow Unicorn and says that she will need to be so strong, that the grownups around her have to be even stronger, that she should persevere and believe that she can do great things. She places that strength in Baby Rainbow Unicorn’s heart, and her wisdom in Baby Rainbow Unicorn’s young mind, and kisses her gently on the forehead as she says good night.

Baby Rainbow Unicorn, in all of this, is drowsy, and doesn’t understand how important this moment is. She asks for a cheek hug and for Panda to snuggle. I dim the lights in the kitchen and sit down to my laptop to write a story about stories. All the while, I think about Venus in the sky—so bright it outshines the stars on a smoky night. I have faith in its light to guide us, remembering always that it could never light the world on its own. That light we carry together.

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Kina loves it when I come out of the bedroom in the middle of the day; it is a Major Event. Lately, she’s taken more thorough stock of my travel patterns, remarking that she “just saw” me, and that I’m coming out of the room “so, so much”. It’s like she’s forgotten that I spent the last six months working in our bedroom—it seems so novel to her that I am around, for reasons I’m unclear about. Some days lately I barely see her during the day. If she’s here, I can hear her banging about in the living room; if not, I sometimes dip my head out just to get some air. On those days, I open the door after work and she squeals with glee. “Daddy! I haven’t seen you in a long, long time!” she’ll say. It makes me want to work at home forever.

Child Tends Tiny Plant

Last weekend, when we saw Andrew and Des, they helped Kina pot up a plant whose name I have forgotten, filling a tiny tomato paste can with soil and gently tucking a propagated shoot into the dirt. On the drive home, Kina asked if I would place the plant into the cup holder next to her car seat and looked lovingly at it as we drove. Once we got home, we stuck the can on a little plate and placed it on the windowsill in our living room. Every morning, Kina has asked to water it, despite knowing that we should only do so once a week. This morning she named it “Sooty”, which seems appropriate. I pray that I do not accidentally kill this plant.

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So, I wrote this edition thinking that today was the first day of school and immediately sat down with Kina to enjoy her first fifteen-minute class of the year, only to find that the first class of the year was just an opportunity to say hello to all the teachers. Next week is the first day of school. My bad. This is fine, of course—I’m pleased to have little orientation sessions for a school year that seems so strange. I was actually impressed with how much thought the teachers had put into the experience: sign language to help kids interact without talking over each other, moments that felt like group sharing (even if all the kids were muted), and as much of the gentle care that you could hope from from a preschool teacher forced to teach their class at a distance. It was bittersweet and absurd, but it was preschool (which is bittersweet and absurd even on a good day).

In fact, I’m glad today was just a meet-and-greet moment, because I was in such denial about this being the first day of school for her that I feel like we didn’t get the ceremony of a first day. I want to dress her up special for her first day. I need to take a picture! With her backpack! I want to tell her how proud I am of her, and how big she’s gotten. The thing about this remote school thing that is most disorienting is the absence (or unfamiliarity) of the ritual. When I used to drop Kina off in the Before Times, I’d put her backpack in the cubby, take her over to the board where she could move her name from Home to School, then kneel in front of her and ask for:

1. a high five

2. a fist bump

3. a big hug

I don’t think I was ever so happy in my life as when I’d walk out of that classroom after the big hug, and I’m trying to figure out how to build that goodbye moment into a school year where neither of us ever leaves the house.

The other thing that’s annoying me about all this relates to socialization, and incidentally to Happy Meals. I’ve been talking about preschool a lot lately in terms of Happy Meals, and what matters about them. When you go to McDonald’s to buy a Happy Meal for your kid, you’re not hung up on whether to get a cheeseburger or nuggets—whether it’s a juice or a milk day. The cheeseburger and the milk are incidental, a sideshow for the toy, which is the entire point of the thing. The Happy Meal is only about the box and the toy. The thing that feels so backwards about remote school is that it only solves for the cheeseburger (the education and structure) but not for the toy (socializing with other kids) or the box (the specialness of a preschool classroom). I don’t care about the cheeseburger here; I just want my kid to have a toy—to learn from other kids, to speak their language, and to figure out what it means to share space with other human beings. The thing that I have felt most crippled by in my work is the clumsiness of shared virtual space; it’s something you have to be good at, and we’re just… not. So when I sat this morning in front of the iPad with Kina, all I could think about were the kids whose faces weren’t flashing on screen while the teacher played the xylophone (as good and loving as she was). I just wish she could play.

Archivist Locates Missing Shard of First Edition

I found it, hidden behind a bunch of other papers on the fridge. I intend to leave it pasted there, as Kina clearly intended.

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One of Kina’s most beloved categories of plaything is Pretend Ice Cream. She has ice cream sticker books and cardboard ice cream puzzles, but her most prized possession is a little ice cream counter she got from her Lala last Christmas, which sits beside her bed on our most uncomfortable chair, manned twenty-four hours a day by Chuckie Avocado (a stuffed avocado who wears a paper hat from our local soda fountain). The ice cream counter has eight flavors of ice cream, two cones, a cup, and six different toppings. The toppings are my favorite part, because they’re made of a satisfyingly chewy kind of rubber—which I say because I like to chew it, and that drives Kina bonkers.

On most mornings, she will ask what flavor ice cream we’d all like (hers is always strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla), whether we’d like it on a cup or a cone (she always wants a “cup and spoon”), and if we’d like to spring for toppings (for her, “chocolate drip-drops”, which I think we can all agree is a much better term than “hot fudge”). Once served, I sometimes just swoop in and take a big chew out of my sprinkles or whatever she’s allowed me to order that day, which elicits a proper scolding that “this is pretend ice cream, not for real ice cream.” Chastened, I proceed to pretend-eat the pretend ice cream, but very quickly. This really sends her over the edge, because she wants everybody to savor their pretend ice cream, whereas it’s my position basically that it doesn’t matter how fast you pretend-eat the ice cream, because you can never actually finish it. Impervious to my reasoning, she then exhales deeply and takes my ice cream away. That is how the pretend ice cream game works.

She does, of course, like real ice cream, which I also eat very quickly—but she’s usually too distracted to notice.

Kid Refuses to Match Socks With Dad

I don’t remember how long ago this was, but we once discovered that somebody made The Very Hungry Caterpillar socks for toddlers—which was too cute a discovery on its own, until we discovered that they also made them for adults. As is likely true for most toddlers, The Very Hungry Caterpillar was one of Kina’s favorite books, and in her very early toddling days, she would blow through those socks straightaway whenever we did laundry. And so—in the interest of being the cutest dad to the cutest toddler—would I. This family doesn’t go in much for matching (Laurea will often change her clothes if she’s discovered that we are wearing similar colors), but I took such great pleasure in wearing the caterpillar socks together that I recently bought new pairs for Kina and myself to replace the originals, which had grown threadbare. But today, when I saw that she’d put on her caterpillar socks and went to pull on my own pair, she went out of the room to change her socks. When she came back wearing her rainbow socks, she put her hand on my leg and told me, “It’s okay to be the same and different, Daddy. People need to do their thing.” I was simultaneously charmed, heartbroken, and awestruck by this. How could I resist such a well-stated truth? My child is growing up, and as she has clearly inherited the anti-matching gene from Laurea, I will have to learn to wear my caterpillar socks on random days. Such is life.

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This is the year Kina really discovered acorns. She’s been walking around plucking them from the sidewalk (as I explained in an earlier newsletter) and giving them out as gifts to friends, family, and guys who work at the parking garage. She is careful to select only the finest and most robust specimens—she found a particularly chunky boi in Kensington yesterday on our way to see Andrew and Des, an acorn whose nutty bit (or pericarp) was larger than its hatty bit (or cupule). I was proud that she found this acorn before some enterprising squirrel did, though I venture she’ll need it less in winter than they might.

I’ve explained to Kina that acorns come from oak trees and can only be found near them, which led in turn to a conversation about how there are in fact other kinds of trees (which seemed of little interest of her, given that other kinds of trees do not produce acorns). Now that I have an acorn aficionado living in my house, I feel that I am developing an ambient awareness of oak trees that I did not have before—a sixth sense for where they might be found (parks, older residential blocks) or lacking (condos, commercial corridors). Were there more oak trees before? Why do we not plant them anymore? Who would willingly choose a linden tree over an oak?

For all of our mutual fascination with acorns, Kina and I have not discussed what they are for and who benefits from their existence. Respectively, the making of new trees and the sustenance of squirrels seems tangential to her interests in acorns qua acorns. I’m in no rush to get to the existential qualities of acorns, because it’s such a joy to hear her compare each acorn on its aesthetic merits, and to reflect on the very best acorns of the day with her as she drifts off to sleep.

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On a normal day, I’d want to talk about the nap that Kina took between frolicking at two playgrounds today—Brooklyn Bridge Park’s amazing-but-nearly-inaccessible-by-anything-other-than-a-thirty-year-mortgage-on-a-townhouse-on-Joralemon-Street Pier 6 complex (Slide Mountain! Sandbox Village! Water Lab!) and Greenpoint’s McGolrick Park (Slides! Sandbox! Water!)—but really I am here to tell you that I have finally, after months of looking, found the first edition of The Daily Kina. Drawn in crayon on a folded-over sheet of what I now know was pink construction paper, the original has eluded me since I started compiling these things into piles on shelves. Its absence was bothering me, because I’ve always intended to have the editions properly photographed when things cool down a bit—I didn’t want the inaugural April 3rd issue to be just a snap from my phone. So, I found it; that’s the good news. The bad news: somebody who clearly did not recognize the historical significance of this construction paper cut a half-moon out of its folded edge, excising the headline “Daniel Tiger: A Grreat Show”. Surprisingly, I was less angry to see this than not to have it the original at all, recognizing that a giant hole is just one of the many natural flaws in the production of this daily paper.

Crumple marks from angry publishers, bleeding ink from where the paper was laid atop a wet spot on the coffee table, egregious misspellings, crossed-out letters—all of these are threads of the fabric of this newsroom. I told myself from the outset that I would never prevent Kina from messing with the paper, in a very literal sense. If she wants to draw a line across the edition, that’s her call. If she’s angry at me, she’ll steal the paper. I presume that if she someday rips it in two, I will have to tape it back together. This is her sheet of paper. And so it seems appropriate that, at some point in the last five and a half months, she cut a circle out of the mint condition first printing and used it for some other art project. I am trying to hunt that art project down so that I can have it photographed, too—the remix laid out next to the project it drew from.

But I am also keeping these originals on a higher shelf.

Tiny Invisible Skeleton In Her Brain Eats Pizza and Rectangles

Lately, I have been giving shape to the strong emotions that Kina feels from time to time. I ask her to draw close so that I can look into her eyes, listen to her ears, and smell her nose, concluding after some time that there is a monkey in her brain. We concoct an elaborate ritual together that will convince the monkey to emerge from her left ear into the palm of my hand, squeeze the monkey until it’s smaller than a mote of dust, and blow it into the wind—after which, for now, Kina calms down. In the last twenty-four hours, we have found the following mischievous animals in her brain: a monkey, a chicken, an octopus, a giraffe, a pigeon, and a tiny invisible skeleton. The last of these we coaxed out this morning by producing a fake slice of pizza out of yellow construction paper, alongside a sticky green rectangle—both of which are potent well-known lures for invisible skeletons. I don’t know if it’s the placebo effect or what (and I don’t want to jinx it) but Kina’s been a real charm all day; these animals are making our lives harder than they need to be! Ask yourself: What animal lives in my brain today? Once you know it, hold your palm up to your left ear and say out loud, “One, two, three, [animal name] go free!” to liberate it. Hold it tightly in your fist until you feel it nearly vanish, then open your hand and blow your tiny monster into the sky. Don’t you feel better now?

Today’s Parade is a Laurea-only number, featuring three flowers—one of which, a ring-shaped beauty, was invented exclusively for today’s edition. Another note: On looking back through all the Parades for the cut-out pink paper circle, I discovered that I’ve been emphasizing the wrong sides of the letters A for months, so I’ve corrected that going forward; my apologies.

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I am, if anything, glad that the part of the original that survives includes a fantastic crayon drawing of Moosie and the legendary “Poo on the Floor” headline—the first story in a long narrative that I am grateful to have otherwise forgotten.

I can’t even recall the context of the quote in today’s top headline, but it seems like an apt reflection on the zeitgeist, does it not? As we were driving around earlier, it occurred to me that all these new things she says that I find so funny are things that either we have said or that she heard on She-Ra. Is our own frustration with the state of things leaking into her bemused worldview? Are we that resigned? (Yes. Sometimes.)

It is worth noting that I, a depressed optimist, believe that not everything will be utterly without use for literally everybody for all eternity—though all those things do feel universally aligned lately. My complaints are real and (sometimes) constructive, but they mostly serve to mark the passage of time, and if (or when) I say things like “Wow, everything is useless!” it is a way of keeping the mood from cratering as I dig in for the hard work of making things useful. My friend Jess and I frequently toss this GIF back and forth in a running text thread:

When I see it, it tells me both to let it go and suck it up. Do we want to raise a child who will spend her life crippled with rage, or one who will confront the absurd unfairness of the world with feigned nihilism, bitter resolve, and excellent taste in GIFs? This is not a hard question to answer!

In the meantime, I believe that Kina had no idea what she was saying, and that her utterance was a message from the collective unconscious. I love her, and I am resolved.

Chef Announces Apathetic Prix-Fixe

I have read the quote “There’s coconut and water you already drank” several times today, and it makes me laugh out loud every time.

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I have been fortunate, in the midst of this universal maelstrom of viruses and social collapse, to sleep relatively well. Much of this is because I am so tired all the time—either because I am tending to a small person who is constantly running or because of, you know, all of this. Last night, though, I found myself for some reason tossing and turning all night, and by the time Kina burst into our room for the 6:24 wake-up call, I was a mess. Our occasionally-sympathetic child, with the best of intentions, leapt to my side on the bed and repeatedly patted my shoulder, muttering “It’s just not meant to be, Daddy,” which isn’t really that comforting, but is at least slightly hilarious. As I dragged my way through work today, I tried to remind myself that the things that kept me up all night had nothing to do with her, and that I loved my awkward semi-comforting offspring.

Kid Tells Hilarious Joke Over and Over

For the last few nights, Kina’s insisted on repeatedly telling me her best joke, which consists only of the punchline “My name is Laurea by the Laurea-vantage!” and like forty-five seconds of outright cackling. She insists, after each telling, that I also laugh, and I do—mostly because her belly laugh is so funny. If, for some reason, I try to change the topic, she grabs my face and looks me straight in the eye as she cocks her head to deliver another hilarious zinger. This often goes on for at least half an hour. Tonight, her “joke” was to hop all over the house screaming “best of butter!!!!” It was, at least, a reprieve.

I’m exhausted. Hope you’re not. See you tomorrow!

dad

We are a no-shoes household, and it’s summer, so we’re a bare-feet household at the moment—unless you are our daughter, in which case it’s a rainbow-sock moment. Kina decided last week that she wanted to wear socks in the house “because they make me comfy”. That’s fine, of course, as long as her feet don’t get all sweaty—far be it from me to tell her what is and isn’t comfy, within the bounds of proper foot hygiene. This morning she upped the ante on us suddenly, declaring that she wanted both socks and slippers. This requires a bit more thought. We have never been a slipper household, and I’m honestly not sure how Kina even knows that slippers exist. How would we identify a proper slipper for her? What does it signify that our daughter is a slipper person? Are bathrobes next? Is this a sly commentary on our floors? I keep having this vision of Kina emerging from her bedroom, yawning over a cup of coffee, wearing raggedy slippers. I’m probably making too much of this. I hate slippers.

“The Noodle Factory Is Not Ever Closed!”

Remember that week that Kina woke up every day at 5 AM and made piles of Play-Doh noodles? Today I learned how much work that actually required, as she forced me to extrude a series of Doh noodles from what appeared to be a syringe. Some readers will recall from their 70s and 80s childhoods a series of ads for the Play-Doh Fun Factory or, worse, the horrifying Play-Doh Drill and Fill. I would watch those ads and wish that my parents would buy them for me. I could extrude huge ropes of Play-Doh! Create ersatz Play-Doh fillings! It all looked so fun and easy, with the dough just squooshing out of the extruder like pastry cream. If you, like me, were never the proud owner of a Play-Doh Fun Factory as a kid, let me tell you what I have since learned: Squeezing Play-Doh through the centimeter-wide hole at the tip of a plastic syringe is like pushing a loaf of bread through a colander. It is hard work with almost no payoff. The only person happy with the final product is the three-year-old who is using the noodles to make a bracelet—the same three-year-old who somehow did this herself several times a morning, and who will never know a childhood without a set of plastic extruder attachments. Kina forced me to do this all morning. Privilege makes for horrible bosses.

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