Ever since we set up the Morning Rules, Kina has taken to pretty elaborate pre-dawn creative exercise. We have, of course, discussed the Play-Doh noodles, but she’s better known lately for her avid work as a Lego magnate. Though she’s adhered to our agreement not to open the door or skritchety-scratch at it, the living room is directly outside our bedroom, and so Laurea and I often have to pile pillows on our heads to block out the sound of intense Lego construction (the pouring out of blocks on the floor, the sifting through those blocks to find the one pink block, the placement of the block, and so forth). Once she’s legally permitted to wake us, we often emerge to a multicolor urban superblock—an airy tower sitting atop a massive, windowless plinth. The young architect presents her commission to us, uncompromising in its disdain for the surrounding figurines. We blink in amazement. She asks to watch She-Ra.

“What Can We Use For This Big Giant Serious Booboo?”

It really was a big one! A minor contusion with various little scrapes, it didn’t appear to bother Kina, except that she really didn’t want me to wash it in the bathtub. To keep her occupied while I washed the rest of her body, we discussed the most effective method of bandaging a booboo of epic proportions. We figured, together, that four Hello Kitty Band-Aids would do the trick, so long as we were careful to put them all side by side—and to not use lotion. After she was all dried off, and we took a closer look at the damage, we agreed that three (lotion-free) Hello Kitty Band-Aids would be sufficient. All of which is to say, if you have a Big Giant Serious Booboo, you will need three Hello Kitty Band-Aids and absolutely no lotion. That should do.

“I’m She-Ra! I Fight For All People!!”

The real She-Ra does not make such broad claims, focusing instead on protecting Etherea, the generally helpless, and her closest friends. Kina’s willingness to extend She-Ra’s mandate in this way seems to have come from nowhere; no other hero or parent in this household routinely yells “I fight for all people!!” We are proud of her, and eagerly await her cabinet nomination.

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Kina is obsessed with how things smell these days, both for legitimately curious reasons (what frying onions smell like, or rain on pavement) and for absurd disgusting reasons (“What does my foot smell like, Captain Barnacles?!”) The idea that a thing’s smell carries with it either icky or noble connotations is something she’s trying on for size—studying me as I decide whether or not something’s aroma is good or bad. In many ways, she’s literally learning how to smell; she still hasn’t mastered the mechanics of sniffing, for example. (She blows out of her nose like she’s trying to clear her sinuses, looking to me for approval every time.) I don’t want to brag, but I used to have an amazing sense of smell, before I sacrificed it to the gods of SARS-CoV-2. It was like a superpower; I could smell a storm half an hour before it arrived, a leaking gas main in the street on a windy day, the particular kind of stew the woman two floors up was cooking on a Sunday. So when I see Kina’s eyebrows perk up suddenly, I feel like she’s smelling something that is rightly mine to smell. I’m jealous. I do enjoy making her laugh when I pretend to smell her feet and pass out, though—some consolation.

The “Aah, Yes, Yes” above Kina’s portrait is from breakfast, when she asked what Laurea and I were talking about (something about work, who knows). We explained it her, and midway, she vigorously and knowingly nodded her head—“Aaaaah, yeah, yeah. Yesss.” The kind of thing you do at a party when somebody is telling you something you realize you wish you’d never asked about. Our children, ourselves.

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Back when our friend Kelli first released This Book Is a Planetarium, Kina wasn’t yet a year old, which didn’t bode well for a popup book (no matter how well-built it is), and so we left it high up on a shelf for, well, a moment and an age like this. Given Kina’s skyrocketing curiosity, we decided finally to break it out and give her a tour of its many functioning machines. The spirograph got a bit of play a couple weeks ago, but today’s discovery was maybe the best spread in the book—a planetarium. We turned off the lights, switched on my phone’s flashlight, placed it under the dome, and stared in collective amazement at the stars of the Northern Hemisphere projected on our living room ceiling. Kina was rapt.

I’m not entirely sure that Kina grasps what stars are, to be honest, aside from characters in a song she loves. The idea that those stars are part of something bigger, that people without phones told stories about the stars, that we stitch the stars together to make sense of things—it feels like she’s beginning to encounter those ideas. I almost hesitate to explain it all to her, because then she’ll know it, and I can’t open that book for the first time again. Laurea makes fun of me because I’m scared of the vastness of space; I find comfort in the way that stars break up the darkness, but it frightens me that they’re so far away. I don’t know if I want Kina to feel at peace with the stars in their distance or to maintain an innocence about them, to know them only by the outlines they trace. Sometimes a giant bear is the less-scary option, and that’s the story I want to tell. Eventually, I’ll have to tell her the other story, another way that being a parent is about growing up twice.

Local Shelter Now Home to 4 Young Water Balloons

We think she’s hustling these balloons from unsuspecting parents, hovering close to the water fountain and looking sweet until they hand one over. When we’ve seen her do this, she always says “Thank you”, which feels like the appropriate exchange rate for a kid her age. Laurea and I joke that she’s a balloon rescuer, because she never, ever, throws these water balloons. She looks on in horror when other children toss them at the ground or pelt other kids with them. They’re spending mere seconds with their balloons; Kina keeps hers for literal weeks. She’s figured out a way of storing them in cups so they don’t burst, and only occasionally takes them out to cradle them in her hands. When one started to leak yesterday, she mourned it. This is not something I prepared for as a parent, and I’m assuming the phase will pass, touching as it is. Until then, we are going to have to find more cups. Think of Kina next time you see some little ruffian throwing a balloon, and send it comfort.

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Do I need to explain this headline? I do not want to have to explain it. I am glad she is potty trained.

“Talk To Puppy. He Knows Me and My Angries.”

Yesterday, Kina made it clear to me that Puppy could have unlimited hugs, even as my affections were unwelcome. She repeatedly told me to have Puppy declare his love for her, to which she invariably replied, “Awwww!” and drew him close for a snuggle. Between each snuggle, she would tell me also to confess my love, replying, “I’m not dealing with this, Daddy. I am not. Dealing. With. This.” Then, this morning, as we were exploring her frustrations, she redirected me to Puppy, her anger agent, who explained to me at length why Kina was angry—silently, in a language that only Kina can understand. I remain perplexed.

Local Physician Buys New Doctor Kit

The house doctor got a new kit yesterday, complete with stethoscope (fake), syringe (fake), and cloth bandages (real). This means that (fake) checkups conducted on our couch no longer require that she use a duck call to listen to my heart, nor a ballpoint pen to give me a shot. When I came out of the bedroom this morning, I encountered several meters of gauze unspooled across the living room, and a pediatrician intent on giving me an injection in my knuckles. She applied a liberal smearing of fake Neosporin and shushed me. I’m feeling great.

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At the playground yesterday, as Kina cavorted in solitude, a little girl came up to her and asked very sweetly, “Will you play with me?” Kina took a moment before replying, “I’m playing on my own right now, but I’ll see you soon,” and sprinting off. This, in a nutshell, is also how my playground brain works, and I’m actively watching our child fill in our shared portion of her Mendel square. Kina’s inherited choosiness about how and when she shares space with other people—including random kids, her family, and apparently her own shadow—is becoming evident in every aspect of her life.

Her continued exasperation and periodic shouts of “For the honor! of! Grayskull!” from across the apartment suggest she’s still Not Wanting To Deal with us and our unreasonable requests for her to—for example—stop swinging a cane around like a sword. This quest for independence and solitude is itself a double-edged cane, though, in that it brings with it some peace and quiet in the mornings; she’s been playing contentedly in the living room when she wakes up, saving her bombastic wake-up alerts for our agreed-upon deadline of 6:24 AM. We do not know when exactly she is waking up, and it’s not an investigation we care to take up anytime soon, but it’s conceivable she’s spending an hour or more with her stuffies—the only people she truly cares about.

Today’s Parade started with a beautiful watercolor that Laurea did of our big Greenmarket haul yesterday (see “Blueberries Are For Playground, Blackberries Are For Home”), and at first I hated to see her chop it up, but it seems that the Parade is more than the sum of its parts, which also include Kina’s trademark strip-o-papers and a selection of sticker page edges. This was the first week we’ve done the Greenmarket in almost two months, so it’s nice to see it celebrated here.

Today’s price gives our readership three options: Pay the steep price of $22, hand over your finest sippy cup, or (very controversially) be somebody with whom Kina is Not Dealing—a large and distinguished community, as we all well know.

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The ongoing fish research project that Kina and I are conducting has progressed to its jellyfish phase. After an initial obsession with the Cassiopeia jellyfish, which sunbathes lazily on the shallow coastal seabed, Kina has moved on to deeper sea invertebrates. She finds the humble moon jelly fascinating, but has shown interest in its scarier and weirder cousins—the kitschy Atolla, the spaghettilike Lion’s Mane, the unfathomable Stygiomedusa Gigantea). I am no fan of jellyfish and live in constant fear of encountering one in the wild, so our shared YouTubing here is a form of exposure therapy for me.

As it turns out, most of this morning’s headlines are about marine life. She encountered a photo of a hammerhead shark yesterday and very understandably lost it. (Have you looked at one recently?) In the world of large oceangoing things, Kina rates hammerheads well above most other sharks and whales, though still well behind her beloved and goofy ocean sunfish. (As with jellyfish, you can count me out when it comes to swimming with the things. Don’t trust something that can put its mouth around my head.) The other ocean headline here is a major plotline from the Octonauts Christmas special, which is mainly an opportunity for the Vegimals to strut their stuff by saving Captain Barnacles and the other non-Vegimal crew from certain death in a “snot blob” made of decayed organic matter. Today you will learn—as I have—that sea snot is a real thing, and that it is, of course, spreading wildly due to climate change. I’m trying to keep her inspired by the ocean, but these Wikipedia articles are depressing!

Becky + Joe, Bees, Seen Cavorting On Lavender

For our morning Daddy/daughter hang on Friday, we skipped off to the local coffee shop for our cheddar-cheese-and-bacon sandwich and sat outside by a patch of lavender. Kina hates bugs, longtime readers may recall, and I’ve been trying to make her comfortable and familiar with bees so that she doesn’t develop an irrational fear of these very important (and largely harmless) pollinators. So, to that end, the two bees who were drinking lavender nectar while we ate our sandwich came to be known as Becky and Joe; now she kind of thinks that all bees are either Becky or Joe, and she’s really hoping to meet more bees. I can’t help feeling that I’ve set my own trap here.

The price today, “$Katra”, is a reference to a villain from She-Ra. She was Katra all day at the playground today (except when she was frustrated and self-identified as She-Ra herself). Katra’s super mean and underhanded but you kind of get that she’s been hurt in the past. I dunno, I’m getting too into this show.

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I think I know what she means when she says she does impressive things to scare people—most of those impressive things look a lot like walking around with a stick or cane yelling “For the honor! Of! Grayskull!” at the top of her lungs. If you aren’t expecting that at 5:30 AM, it is quite scary, but otherwise it’s merely impressive. On a more existential level, though, the impressive things she does—comforting us with gentle whispers, sounding out words, learning what rules mean, building absurdly large towers—are in fact quite scary, in the way that watching a human brain acquire skills is scary. I find on most days that I’m impressed with her, and that what’s scary is setting this person up to be okay in the world outside the apartment door, but I’ll let her believe it’s the shouting.

Kid “Not Dealing With This”

Today, she is Dealing with:

• Mommy

• Andrew

• Des

• Grandma

• Lala

Today, she is Not Dealing with:

• Daddy

• Nikola (sorry, Nik, she wavers on this)

The way you know she is not dealing is that she is walking around quietly shaking her head, muttering to herself, “I am not dealing with this” and waving her hand around behind her. Neither Laurea nor I have any comment on the matter of where she learned this.

“Close Your Eyes / And Think Of Something Happy / You Can Think, Think, Think / About Your Favorite Things”

All I have to say about this particular Daniel Tiger song is that I had only ever heard Kina sing it until about one minute ago, and that when she says “think”, it still comes out as “tink”—so when we sing this song at night, it’s mindblowingly sweet to hear her sing “You can tink, tink, tink about your faaaavorite tings”.

Have a good weekend, and may you deal with all your tings.

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Kina’s room (once our home office) is small and oddly-shaped, a triangle roughly thirteen feet from end to end. At its narrowest point, it is six feet across; at its longest, ten. On its most spacious side, next to a closet, are six precious square feet of IKEA changing table (STUVA/FRITIDS). That STUVA/FRITIDS holds many swaddling blankets, a folding crib, a toy barn, and a dispenser of wipes—none of which (except for the barn) is useful to us anymore. Back when she was eighteen inches long, we would lay her down on that table to change her diapers, and it was very cute (the baby, not the diapers). But the other day, two things happened: I measured her, finding that she is now literally twice as big—three feet tall; and I actually looked at her while I was putting her pajamas on, enormous—her legs dangling completely off the table—realizing suddenly that what she was teetering on was a very large piece of baby nostalgia.

This is a person who can put on her own clothes now, who no longer craps in her own pants, who is so tall when she stands on the changing table that it is difficult to dress her from that position. We have waited too long to carry STUVA/FRITIDS downstairs. We have done so because we are having trouble coming to terms with her big-kidness, and that denial manifests in several other objects in this house: the book Pat the Bunny, two artisanal rattles, an ice pack for milk bottles, many swaddling blankets, and 164 diapers. While I will probably keep the expensive rattles, we need to get rid of everything else—including the changing table. Laurea, Kina, and I have discussed on multiple occasions the right piece of furniture to replace it, settling ultimately on “a tent or teepee”—the kind of space that is Kina’s alone, and not a place we share, which feels unfair (given the number of diapers we’ve changed) but is just. Her small triangular bedroom-née-office is growing up, and while I’m not entirely comfortable with it, I’m perfectly capable of buying a teepee and obviously need to get over it.

Tiny Forensic Detective Hunts Down Source of Blood on Floor

It looked like tiny splashes of raspberry juice on the linoleum. Kina wanted to know what it was. She crawled around the living room floor, identifying little patches here and there. We were stumped, because nobody had identified a booboo. As it turned out, the booboo was secret and small, and on Kina’s big toe. We put a Hello Kitty bandage on it. We cleaned the floor. As the resident anxious person, I have spent the rest of the day looking for the little sharp culprit, which remains at large.

Welcome, new readers of The Daily Kina. I hope you like reading about a specific three-year-old every night. There are a number of back issues to read in our archives, which—if read carefully—will explain things like the fluctuations in price, Kina’s obsession with rainbows, the television show Octonauts, and my progress as an amateur portrait artist. We are one hundred and thirty three days into the life of this publication. Let’s see how long we can keep this up together.

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I remember bouncing around the living room with Kina when she was six months old, singing along to “Mahna Mahna”, the classic Sesame Street jazzy absurdity. She’d stare at me, puzzled, as I scatted my way through the verses, then laugh as I bopped her around for the chorus like a Muppet. “Mahna Mahna” is a classic of the genre. “Mahna Mahna” is on my playlist of emergency toddler car songs. It is only in the five minutes that preceded my first draft of this newsletter that I discovered the origins of “Mahna Mahna”—a scene from an Italian mondo documentary about Swedish sexual mores. From its Wikipedia page: “The song accompanied a scene in the film set in a sauna which gave its original title ‘Viva la Sauna Svedese’ (Hooray for the Swedish Sauna).” This tawdry new information does not in any way diminish the joy I felt when my kid, out of nowhere, strutted across the living room yesterday singing our favorite song. I am looking forward to the day when she randomly bursts into our second favorite song: Midnight Star’s groundbreaking 1983 classic “No Parking on the Dancefloor” (whose origins, best I can tell, are less spicy).

“Lemme Show You. You Don’t Know What I’m Talkin’ About!!!”

In today’s episode of “Lemme show you. You don’t know what I’m talkin’ about”, we are sitting at the breakfast table, and Kina is explaining to us why she does not like toast. “It makes my teeth grind,” she says, then thinks for a moment about her choice of words. “Grind! Grind like the pink box with the pig!” We have no recollection of any box with a pig on it, no pink boxes, no grinders. It sounds ominous. We ask her, repeatedly, to describe the pink grinding box with a pig on it, as she grows progressively more frustrated. Finally, she takes Laurea’s hand and says, “Come, let me show you.” She takes Laurea to the kitchen, points to the top of the pantry at a bag of pork rinds—pink, with a pig on it. “Those are pork rinds,” Laurea tells her. “Rinds! Grinds! Pork Grinds!” She is thrilled. We feed her pork rinds for breakfast. She makes a little sandwich of them with her toast. We live, we learn.

Doot dooo da doo doo

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After almost an entire summer and one very long tirade at the playground, Kina finally convinced us to buy her one (1) pack of water balloons. Most typical kids would burn through a pack of twenty balloons in five minutes, but given Kina’s predilection for nurturing water balloons as pets—as noted in last month’s “Water Balloon Lasts All Day”—we’ve made our way through exactly two of them in four days. After the first exploded on her way back from the playground, I intentionally under-filled the second balloon, which she managed to keep around for long enough that I began to worry she was developing an attachment disorder, so I hid it in our room overnight. My concern proved warranted, because she felt strongly enough about its absence to knock repeatedly on our door at five in the morning (a glaring loophole in our morning rules, which I will lay out shortly), saying that the water balloon had “gotten lost”. Naturally, I had forgotten that we’d hidden the balloon in the first place, so I went hunting in the living room for a few minutes before waking Laurea up. She pointed to the radiator, and we sent Kina back to play house with her precious inflatable child. I don’t know why we try to out-maneuver our our daughter, or why we care so much about restricting her access to water balloons. (Of all the environmentally-wasteful things we could be paying attention to, they consume a disproportionate amount of our attention.) All I know is that she managed to lose the balloon herself sometime later in the day, which means there is an unexploded piece of water ordnance somewhere in our home. I have already produced a third water balloon for her. She has already popped it.

Knocking On Door At 5 AM Technically Does Not Break Rules

Here are the morning rules, in order of their creation:

1. If you have to go potty in the middle of the night, you can take yourself, because the gate is open. Afterwards, you can put yourself back to sleep. Do not wake Mommy and Daddy.

2. In the morning, you may not open Mommy and Daddy’s door until the light is green (on her wake-up clock).

3. No scritchety-scratching at the door.

We did not technically forbid knocking. Rule three has now been amended accordingly.

“Nice Place Ya Got Here,” Says Bunny Puppet

It is only after writing the amazing dek on this story—“Stuffed Rabbit Issues Hollow Threat”—that I realized it should have been the main headline. I’ll tell you about the bunny at another time. He’s a troublemaker.

In the last minutes before going to press, Kina insisted I make this issue The Daily Tunip, in honor of the intrepid “Vegimal” from The Octonauts. That is why there is so much Tunip furniture and so little Tunip journalism.

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Given the loving soliloquy about Rice Car the other day, you’d think we didn’t care about the subway, but you’d be wrong. I am a massive fan of New York City’s subway system, having watched its recovery over the last twenty years; we as a family are card-carrying straphangers. Laurea and I actually talked about getting a car years ago, in the months before Kina was born, but we decided to lean into public transportation instead—and that decision served us well, carrying us all over the city with our newborn kid. Kina’s grown up on the train. She knows the different lines, learned the letters “L”, “J”, and “M” by watching for approaching trains, and habitually waves at train operators (all of whom wave back heartily, if prospective parents are curious). In the months preceding the pandemic, we realized she didn’t need a stroller anymore, and getting in and out of stations was suddenly a breeze. Soon she’d give up her nap, and our ride radius would balloon! We could ride to Central Park and not come home until after dinner! We could do the Transit Museum and Chinatown in the same day! Then, of course, the thing happened, and all bets were off (cue Rice Car).

Yesterday was our first time on the train as a family in five months, and it wasn’t stressful in the least. We had a bench all to ourselves, and Kina wore her mask patiently. (A note here on kids and masks: People tend to assume that kids won’t tolerate them, but Kina is totally nonchalant about wearing hers, and I’ve seen similar behavior from other three year olds. To them, it’s no more absurd than being told to wear pants.) We traveled only one stop, to the Lower East Side, but I would have felt comfortable going all the way across town, and Kina was excited to be back on the J. Moreover, I was excited, and grateful for a transit system that is still holding it together (even as it confronts the reality of massive losses). I want Kina to grow up with the subway, as challenging as that sounds, but I’ll take every ride we can get.

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P.S. The price today comes with a horrible discount, but if you do eat eggs with your butt, please send along a note and we’ll refund your twenty-two bucks.

We used to be a cussin’ house, but ever since Kina started to speak, we have pulled sharply back—not because we are afraid of her becoming a linguistic ruffian, but because we are frankly too lazy to deal with the judgment of other parents in the matter of coarse language. This means that I, too, have become a “frickin” person, which is a source of endless amusement to Laurea—we assume Kina picked it up from me, but I can’t say I’ve heard her use the word before today. As a miracle of language acquisition, she is using it appropriately, in its nuanced “yet another irritating…" sense: “I have [yet another irritating] booboo”, “I stubbed [yet another irritating] toe”. The bathtub booboo is, to be fair, a relatively common issue in our house (which explains the “frickin”), and it must always be respected; no heavy scrubbing of the booboo, the occasional standing bath to avoid dipping the booboo, the immediate bandaging of the booboo after. It’s no small source of pride to me that our daughter is constantly crashing into things and tumbling off platforms—we wear our bruises well here—but of course we want her to weather the booboos well. In a way, then, it feels good to know that she can vent her frustration, as it takes the pressure off of us to keep her from experiencing it in the first place. In this frickin’ frustrating year, it’s nice to fire off a mild obscenity to clear the air—I’d encourage you all to do it, in Kina’s honor.

Someone Puked on the McCarren Swings

File this under “things Kina says that she will say again in sixteen years”—when she is a college student on the way to the dining hall on a Sunday morning (should that ever happen to college students again). She would want me to tell you that the puker was not her.

“Daddy’s Talking And Disturbing Me. That’s What ‘Disturbing’ Means”

In case you were wondering, the sound of me talking is the very definition of the word “disturbing”—a concept she is exploring in some depth this week. Besides the sound of my voice, you can also find me disturbing her by sitting on the couch and pausing her TV show.

Parade is pretty much all Kina today, with the exception of one or two construction paper cuttings. The inverted green teardrop is from me, as is the rushed wordmark at the top (as always). The theme today was supposed to be “boats”—we leave it to you to find the connection.

Hope your week is frickin’ fine, and may the chaos of the world leave you all undisturbed. Send this newsletter along to a friend if you think they need some mindless toddler news.

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I started a daily ritual of reading Goodnight Moon to Kina before she could understand books, rituals, or the moon. We shared it consistently every night until she was almost two and a half. With all that traffic, it’s gotten some wear; there’s a little bite mark (two tiny incisors and a canine) that serves as a reminder of how small she was when we started reading it, and the spread that includes the passage “Goodnight little house, and goodnight mouse” is a bit sticky from all the times she leaned in to smooch the little mouse cameo. Kina, like many kids, will get obsessed with a book for weeks on end, learning it until she has it memorized (She once accurately recited the entirety of Madeline to me while I was changing her diaper.) But Goodnight Moon was the very first book she memorized with us, and in our nightly litany, she’d finish every page herself—leaning particularly hard into the last word of “Goodnight to the old lady whispering ‘hush’”.

Though we get a lot of mileage out of each book she owns, she’s begun to forget them as her library grows, the dialogue no longer in her head, the names less familiar. “It’s been a long time since we read this,” she’ll tell us, as we set off to relearn Pierre or Corduroy or Little Owl’s Night. As we read, I try to dwell a moment to let her finish the lines; sometimes she does (“hush”), but when she doesn’t, we just rest on the page quietly—the kind of silence that follows a recalled memory.

Ever since we first read Goodnight Moon, I’ve always amended the last farewell of the book, a goodnight to noises, to say, “Goodnight Kinas everywhere”. She does remember that part; it’s less fanciful, but this is our book, and it’s one of my favorite things to say to her before I take her to bed.

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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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The early wake-ups are killing us. We recently took down the gate in front of Kina’s room, hoping that she’d walk herself to the bathroom when she woke up—which maybe she is—who knows—but it does not appear to have slaked her thirst for our attention in the wee hours o’ the morning. Our most recent countermeasure is to pretend that we are in a slumber so deep that we cannot be roused, hoping that the creepy velociraptor that is our child will move on to some other form of entertainment. This works, for short stints, as long as she has something amusing. For each of the last few days, that amusement has been the 36 cans of Play-Doh that I accidentally bought on Amazon, which she passes through her little pasta extruder, making long chubby noodles in different color gradients: lavender to pink, green to orange, yellow to sky blue. She saves them for us until she thinks we should wake up, which I’d like to say is at a reasonable time like 6:24, when the wake-up light turns green, but is usually half an hour after she’s initially tried to wake us—today, she gave us until about 5:45. This is manifestly unacceptable. We have re-enlisted the help of a woman we call “Dr. Pam” (not actually a doctor), a Canadian child sleep aficionado who got us through our last bout of horrible sleep practices by telling us sternly not to be weaklings. This time, her strict admonition is that we are to walk her silently back to bed over and over again until it is reasonable for her to wake up, and to make “the rules” very clear to her at night. We dread this, but will report back. Until then, noodles.

“Kina? I Don’t Know Her. Is She a Boy or a Girl?”

The kid is now spending most of her time with us as an Octonaut—Dashi, the “sweet-natured IT officer” dog—and has taken to asking us about Kina the strange human and what he/she/they are like. I will go so far as to role play as Captain Barnacles, but refuse to engage in deliberate dissociation. I have my limits. Also, I will reiterate that once you know how to draw one Octonaut, you can draw all of them. It’s all in the ears.

“I Couldn’t Do Tracing Cuz My Lip Hurts”

You know how you’ll be trying to do a thing these days—work, eat, wake up, take a shower—something simple and not exhausting, but all your energy is just drained by living through this year? You are tracing with a busted lip. This year is our busted lip. We trace nonetheless.

dad

The tropical storm is probably the most newsworthy headline in today’s edition—a rare cameo from actual current events in the world of The Daily Kina, a publication that exists in part to get me away from the news (most of which is frankly devastating; the news of the day in my other newspaper job is the horrible explosion in Beirut.) I try always to remember that there are three different audiences for this paper: Laurea and I, who need a place to reflect on Kina’s absurdity; Future Kina, whom I want someday to read these and see what she was like in this weird sliver of time; and all of you, who are reading this both to understand the mental state of a preschooler who is largely unaware of [waves hands wildly] and to give yourselves some shelter emotionally from [waves hands wildly]. All of this is to say that, while it’ll be good for Kina to know there was a storm on August 4th, it’s probable that at least one of you still has no power and didn’t open these pages to be reminded of it, but I can assure you that your frustration likely pales in comparison to the annoyance the leaf booboo has caused her.

“Daddy, Why Did You Come Out of Your Room?!”

I took last week off, after realizing suddenly that I was spending sixteen hours a day in my bedroom and seeing how that might have been affecting my emotional health. I have worked from home in the past, but not since Kina was born, and so we’ve had to adapt to sharing this apartment for our respective jobs (mine, taking video calls and typing loudly in the bedroom; hers, playing with Legos and singing in the living room). Inevitably, I do have to open my door, and I always have to explain myself to her: I’m going to the bathroom, or I’m grabbing lunch, or I just wanted to see her. Half the time, she shepherds me back to the room, joining me very occasionally to see coworkers and talk about gummies (as noted in a minor story from the July 25th issue). I like being able to see the kid during the day, honestly, and I’m incredibly grateful that we are able to work with Hannah to help us balance child care. That I am, for the most part, trapped in my room while working is an extremely small price to pay—in comparison both to the challenges others are facing with lost work right now, and to what this would have been like if Kina were still a baby. That she can tell me specifically what she needs me to do is actually a whole lot better than being screamed at, on the whole. On my way into the bedroom-office yesterday, Kina suggested that my job is essentially to talk about coffee with coworkers, which is a more useful and pointed midyear review of my work than I think I’ve ever gotten from a manager. I’d say that I hope someday to work for her, except that I actually do.

A Jellyfish Flew All the Way Over From California and Knocked the Doorknob Off Lolo Tim’s Head + Put It In the Mud

That was literally the dream she had. So much better than any of mine. I’m fond of the little “PUNT” to illustrate the noise a jellyfish would make if it were kicking a doorknob off of somebody’s head.

I don’t want to always make these newsletters so moody and philosophical. I gotta pace myself. Thanks for humoring me today. While I’ve got you humoring, though, one last note about the real world—you should donate to the Lebanese Red Cross.

dad

I have two main theories for the origin of the term “Rice Car”, and neither of them is racist. The first theory comes from a headline in the April 26th edition of The Daily Kina: “Daddy Scolded on Madcap Drive to Corona Park / ‘Why You Going Like a Race Car, Man?!’” (I was driving 27 in a 25, for the record.)

It is plausible that Kina’s reference on that day to our “Race Car” would eventually drift, as many of her absurdist terms do, to “Rice Car”. The second theory is simply that the car—a late-model Ford Fusion hybrid—is white, and pretty much anything white in Kina’s world is “white like rice”. Now that I am writing this, though, it seems possible that both are true, which would bolster the argument for Kina’s evident cleverness.

In either case, the Rice Car was a welcome addition to the family, in that it gave us the freedom to visit places in this pandemic-stricken city that were hard to get to and sparsely populated: The Rice Car drove us to Randall’s Island, where we would eat picnics while watching boats traverse Hell Gate. We hid out from the rain and listened to George Michael in the Rice Car. It was on the hood of the Rice Car that we ate a Joe and Pat’s vodka sauce pie after hiking the Staten Island Greenbelt. Our many trips to Fort Tilden (a route I can now drive in my sleep) were made in the Rice Car. We visited Corona Park, the Cloisters, and FDR State Park in its cozy confines, and whenever we were headed home, Kina would point to it in the parking lot, saying “There’s the Rice Car!!!”

Our rental car got us out of the apartment at a critical and tense moment—in the weeks after our family’s two-week quarantined recovery from COVID-19, an extremely scary time when we desperately needed novelty and distraction—and during which long-term extendable deals on rental cars were incredibly cheap. It was on the same weekend, actually, that I started drawing The Daily Kina, though it isn’t formally named in these pages until May 19th (“Kid Demands New Car / ‘Why We Still Have This Rice Car?’”)

Most of the story of our weekends since then—and by extension all the weekend editions of this newspaper—is a product of having rented the Rice Car. I’m not sure what our life in the last four months would have been like had we not made the decision to spend our money on it, but that life would almost certainly have revolved around the part of this neighborhood we could have walked to, which includes very few trees, sparse open space for a kid to run amok, and considerably fewer vodka sauce pies.

I have not wanted to own a car in New York since a relatively brief stint in the early aughts, when I owned little red ‘94 Toyota stick-shift pickup. After it got rear-ended overnight by a trash truck, I drove the pickup back to my parents’ house and swore off NYC car ownership forever. The subway has served me well, and it’s served our family well; I am deeply committed to public transit, and I have been very happy not owning a car. But now that we’ve returned the Rice Car to its home, we’re considering buying a car of our own—a decision I never figured I’d make, but which makes just enough depressing sense to a parent in today’s New York to feel like the right move—we have discovered a part of this city that is hard to get to, and we need a way to get to it. Whatever we buy will be larger, more comfortable, less dopey, considerably less white, and absolutely no more lovable than the Rice Car. There are many white cars, but only one Rice Car—I thank Avis for making it available to us and I hope the next family who rents it loves it half as much as we did. I’m sorry about all the crumbs behind Kina’s seat.

dad

Discipline is an issue, and so politeness is the talk of the house these days. Of the three key phrases—“please”, “thank you”, and “I’m sorry”—we are in particular focused on two: “Please”, for Mommy, who faces a constant barrage of demands; and “I’m sorry”, for Daddy, who is the target of most of the physical abuse here. I sat her down on Sunday morning to explain how important it is to be polite and considerate, and how her parents also try to use these words in their lives with the people they care about. Still, after breakfast this morning, she tossed her used bib at Laurea in the kitchen, and we had to start the whole thing over. We used to threaten to call Ms. Ines—the most sophisticated disciplinarian in her classroom—and discuss incidents like these with her, but that promise has lost its sheen. So now, we do our best simply to demonstrate civility in an effort to build civility in Kina. For what it’s worth, in the minutes leading up to this morning’s print run, our publisher did in fact make a promise that she would not hold our supplies hostage, which seemed like progress—until she followed it up by demanding an episode of Octonauts. A ray of light, though: she did say “please”.

dad

I learned a lot about the integrity of sand holes yesterday, having spent an entire day slowly expanding one at the beach. I learned that that you cannot simply add stairs to an existing hole, that instead you must carve them into the land surrounding the hole. I learned that no amount of wet sand will actually prevent a giant hole from slowly filling up in a matter of minutes, and that it requires constant tending. I learned that kids at the beach love holes, and that you can quickly become the most popular parent at the beach if you put your back into it—which I did, with a little plastic shovel, to the detriment of my back. Kina, for her part, was proud to be the primary beneficiary of this enormous pit, and she guarded it jealously from invasive toddlers; when she was not in the water, she was tumbling into the hole and asking me to build more stairs. As a former kid who appreciated a good fort and bunker, I was pleased to make her requested improvements. Before we left the beach, when I started shoving sand into our construction project (safety first), a neighboring parent asked me to leave it empty so that her toddler, who had been eyeing it from inside his (much smaller) hole, could take ownership of our huge and well-appointed cavern. We graciously obliged—a good sand pit is hard to come by in this market.

Parents Claim TV Is Broken in Apparent Scam

We have come to beware a tired child bearing requests for TV shows, as it typically ends in disaster, tears, and misery. She was extremely tired last night as we unpacked our dinner (which, as noted elsewhere in this edition, she did not eat) and begged us for “a show”. Knowing better, we told her the TV was broken. She asked if I could fix it. No, I replied, I cannot, but Eddie the Super might be able to. She asked when he would fix it. Tomorrow, we ventured, at the earliest. She demanded proof that the TV was in fact broken. I handed her the remote while I unplugged the power strip. Pressing every button on the remote, she asked why the lamp had turned off, but reluctantly accepted our assertion and made off to the bathtub. This, reader, was a huge and hard-earned win, but it did not keep us from giving her an episode of Octonauts at 5:45 this morning, just for the extra sleep.

The Parade this week took shape over the course of the last few days. Our friend Kelli Anderson built an amazing popup book called This Book is a Planetarium, which we recently showed Kina for the first time. The last page in the book is a working spirograph, so we drew a bunch of these designs, and Laurea helped Kina watercolor them in. Kina’s neon abstraction this week, according to her, is a journey, which gives the magazine its weekly theme.

All of you, strangers or not, are beautiful. Remember that as you head into the mouth of this week. Don’t worry—we’ll keep the hole around for you.

dad

This edition is largely a collection of quotes I’ve been holding onto all week, but the headline quotation is reflective of Kina’s recent cognizance of her own newsworthiness. See this quote, from June 15th: “My favorite part of the whole day was eating cheese from the tacos! Put that in the newspaper, Daddy!” I regret in hindsight not including that on June 16th, as it seems you’d probably have wanted to know that nothing on the Ides of June could beat a cheesy taco.

Typically, I’ll try to look into whatever it is our publisher asks us to, but there is a longstanding division of church and state in this newsroom—as in most—that protects the integrity of our journalists (me) from the business interests of the publisher (Kina). This occasionally leads to internal strife, as when the publisher steals my markers or attempts to crumple up the morning edition—the editorial staff will simply print a new one, but this can seriously delay delivery to our subscribers. Lately, the newsroom has found that distracting the business office with an episode of Octonauts will give us enough time to report and close the edition before she has an opportunity to meddle. While we have always let the publisher set the price (which has hovered roughly in the $22.32.30 range or so for weeks now) and occasionally offer a quote for the portrait, we steadfastly refuse to allow her to dictate the tenor or direction of our coverage. After all, we’re working for free.

You can probably see that I was going to include a top hat in Kina’s formal portrait today, but I didn’t have time to see how top hats look on a real head, because the episode of Octonauts was nearing its end (“Creature report! Creature report!”). I am nonetheless proud of the way I drew our little W. Randolph Hearst, lording it over me with her cigar as I toil away, back bent, sitting on a rickety stool. This is the state of journalism today, people. Look it up.

See you for the Sunday edition, everybody.

dad