April 3rd was one hundred days ago. Pretty much everybody in the house was on the mend from a nonspecific-at-the-time respiratory illness, and while we were all quite happy to be on the other side of it, we were bored, and the kid needed some creative distraction. I drew the first edition of The Daily Kina (shown at the bottom of this newsletter) in crayon on a folded-up piece of construction paper. The top headline that day was “YOU A CHEESE FIEND, HUH”, and the illustration was Kina’s moose. We scrawled a picture of her at the top right of the page and decided together that the newspaper cost twenty-five cents.

Every day since then, we have (or, mostly, I have, with her prodding) spent about half an hour drawing the newspaper before I go to work. Just after I’ve asked her what to charge for it, I take a picture of the print edition on the trunk in our bedroom and tape it up on the kitchen cupboard, where we can read the news in passing—an old city newspaper tradition that I wish all newspapers would bring back.

Since early April, both Kina and this august publication have changed (and, in many ways, the world has changed around them). For Kina’s part, significantly: She’s taller and more patient, her friends have variously entered and left the scene, she graduated quietly from her first year of school, and she reliably poops in the potty (a miracle worth documenting). The paper evolves, too, in more superficial ways: I’ve gotten better for the most part at drawing her portrait, the price is now more consistently in the $30 range (having spent the first several weeks at $3, “because I’m three”), and we now have four headlines on A1 instead of three (hence the price increase). In the main, though, The Daily Kina is still mostly just horizontal lines and a portrait of my kid. That we all remain entertained by it is a testament mostly to her.

It’s neat to have gotten here. A hundred of anything is hard to make, but it has helped that this is an enjoyable task—both the reading and the writing of it. Lots of friends have said that The Daily Kina is one of the only things they look forward to reading—which, given the alternatives, makes a ton of sense. Most of the news is factually very bad, and while the news here is not all happy, it’s about somebody who for the most part is heading in a good direction. “This will be an amazing memory for her,” people say, and I hope that’s true. It’s also a great memory for Laurea and me and the rest of her family, and I think in some ways it’s a nice memory for all of you to have. It makes me happy to have the obligation to peer more closely at Kina, even in a moment that has us penned up together. I hope you find it equally enjoyable.

See you tomorrow for the Sunday.

dad

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I know I said Friday would be the hundredth edition of The Daily Kina, but then I sat and counted all the pages again and I realized that, technically, it’s tomorrow. So here’s the ninety-ninth edition of The Daily Kina, which is principally about Kina going to work.

Regarding Going to Work

Kina did not, before the pandemic, go to work. Her relationship with work emerged in March, as I began to lock myself in the bedroom and type. Shortly after that, she showed troubling signs of office labor, setting up her “computer” (a board book) on her “desk” (her chair) to “type” (whacking her fingers wildly on the cover of the book). She soon began to notice that I was frequently on the phone and began to take calls from an unnamed coworker: “Hello, yes? I am going to work.” Since then, her departures for work have become more urgent and unexpected—sometimes coming in the middle of a conversation, as she turns on her heel and breathlessly tells us, “I gotta go to work. I’m going to work” as she speed-walks through the kitchen. I’ve decided that this is probably a healthy response to a change in her surroundings, though I am mildly dismayed when she refuses to talk to me because her coworker is calling. That the entire charade has entered, like Inception, a new level of kid pretending to be at work asking if it’s okay for her kid to pretend to be at work is both a little sweet and conceptually exhausting. She has not yet given me my mid-year review, but I assume I will have some growth areas.

Regarding the Mushrooms

Speaking of growth: Kina’s Tita Cindy and Tito Giorgio sent a box that sprouts oyster mushrooms from spent coffee grounds. We’ve cut it, soaked it, and laid it on its side in our living room window. The instructions say to give it two teaspoons of water every day, and so Kina—the nation’s foremost expert on watering cans and rainbows—has converted her rainbow teapot into a watering can in which Laurea places two teaspoons of water every morning, and which Kina in turn decants onto the block of mushroom-inoculated coffee grounds. For the rest of the day, Kina asks us when the mushrooms will come, and we reply “in one or two weeks”, which the box guarantees will be the case.

While she’s generally pretty entertaining with language, there are moments that unlock a rush of dopamine and oxytocin as they give us a view of how she sees the universe—a version of the world that is not collapsing or frightening, rather nourishing and curious. It is this world, in which the sun and the moon work together to keep her baby mushrooms warm and help them grow, that I like to retreat when we write The Daily Kina every morning. Every day, it’s good to remind yourself that in a matter of weeks (maybe several weeks), the heavens will bring forth mushrooms.

I hope your mushrooms, too, will come, that your babysitters are safe, and that your rainbows are delicious. Tomorrow is one hundred.

dad

Regarding Witches

We are quickly running out of witch media. The kid spends every morning in witchy spaces: riding her broom, experimenting with runes, casting spells while cackling, admiring pointy hats, and watching witch shows for kids—which are not nearly as numerous as one might imagine, given the fixation kids have with witches. The Brits have the best options (of course), leading the pack with a fantastic animated version of Room on the Broom, acclaimed by my friends as probably the Best Witch Picture Book. The UK is also home to a book series called Winnie and Wilbur (Bookshop link to what appears to be only Spanish-language editions of W&W, which, sure!) whose short-lived series lasted only two episodes and can sometimes be found on YouTube. Aside from those two shows, one American entry that is so bad I won’t even link to it, and a surprising number of Japanese animated movies (Kiki’s Delivery Service, most notably), we’ve pretty much tapped the obvious candidates for witch things. With all this stuff on repeat for now—and Room on the Broom actually does hold up to repeat viewings—we either need the kid to find a new passion (ergo our recent unsealing of the Octonauts archive), or we need our community to send us more witchy media. All of which is to say: if you know of great witch books, witch TV, witch cinema—reply, reply.

Regarding Handsy Babies

Kina was legitimately alarmed.

Regarding Whispered Stories

I don’t know where she picked up the phrase “and so the days went by…”, but the unending barrage of days seems to be the entire plot of the stories she whispers to her friend the Unicorn, in a sort of fairytale ASMR, while gently combing her hair in the corner. When we inquire from across the room about the rest of the story, she screams “NO! STOP IT! THIS IS MY STORY!” and then immediately returns to the murmured passage of time. I find this alternately very charming and mildly irritating, as it reminds me that, yes, the days have so gone by, are so going by, will so for the foreseeable future go by.

We’re hoping for the best on the mushrooms. Will keep you in the loop.

dad

Regarding Pizza

I cannot for the life of me get this kid to eat pizza in any reasonable way, and maybe I need to just get over it. In addition to the chaotically evil “chomp it from the side” approach seen here, I have seen her consume a slice of pizza from the top down—picking off the pepperoni, eating all the cheese, and then literally scraping off the top layer of crust with her fingernails. At best, she eats it flat like a Californian—an abominal approach she shares with her mother. Kina seems only to enjoy pizza so long as the process of eating it entertains her, which means that Laurea and I often end up eating the damp crusts of deconstructed, ruinous slices of pizza. “This is the work of parenthood,” we say, as we clean up after her. “WASH MY SAUCEY HANDS,” she screams in response.

Regarding Trains

Kina has always been extremely into the wooden train sets at dentists’ offices and toy stores, so we bought her a box of train tracks at the New York Historical Society just before the pandemic. They came with a single subway car (we bought the N train), which we figured was just enough train for our apartment. Despite her passion for pre-assembled tracks, it’s only recently that Kina has developed an interest in building her own track layouts. She seems to prefer the “long, straight track” approach to route design, but today she built a more circuitous two-station line and asked me to be the train conductor. We decided between us that the first station would be Eldert Street—the home of a pool where she took swimming lessons a year ago—and the second one would be Avenue Street, which is by far her favorite imaginary train destination. In the midst of this transit crisis, the most soothing reminder of the Before Times is hearing Kina yell, “The next station is… Avenue Street! Stand clear of the closing doors, please! Ding, ding!” It’s so much cheaper than buying a MetroCard, and reminds me of what we ultimately are going to have to recover.

There are forty of you now, and we are nearing the hundredth issue of The Daily Kina on Friday. Our subscriber growth is healthy, but if you want to give TDK as a gift, great—just remember that it’s free and totally not guaranteed to last a year. Tick, tick!

dad

Pandemic parenting is a double-edged sword, and while the extremely sharp and long edge is having to care for your child full-time at home while working, the other edge (which parents often cite, in an effort to make it all feel manageable) is being able to watch your child grow and learn in ways that would be otherwise largely the domain of teachers at their school. I feel privileged to be so heavily invested in helping my kid learn to read, and it’s clear that Kina is at an advantage in that I can work from home and that we do have the energy to read to her every night, but working on this is still just a slog. She’s supposed to be able to write her name when she starts school in September, but I have no recollection of being able to do the same at her age, and my capacity to get her to sit down and do anything more than draw a single vertical line (“I drew an ‘I’, Daddy!”) is pretty limited. So when we have a moment like last night, in which she slowly sounded out the letters that spell CAT in her favorite Richard Scarry book (an endless series of scenes and words that she often chooses in an effort to delay bedtime) I was overjoyed. It was—and longtime readers will understand what I mean here—easily as exciting as when she first took a crap in the toilet. It made the hard work worthwhile. We’re working on “dog” now.

Re: Jokes. I keep trying to teach Kina what a joke is—not in an academic way, but in terms she can understand, which means we are starting with knock-knock jokes. Every few months, I get her a little farther on the concept: First, you say “knock knock”, then the other person says “who’s there”, and that is about as far as we’ve gotten. The next bit is a hurdle—there’s nothing gratifying about saying “orange”—and the part after that is the crux of the conceptual challenge in a way that I’m really, really looking forward to introducing, but the moment I’m saving up for is when I can bring her to the payoff, when the whole thing comes together and she just collapses in guffaws. I seriously think about that moment a lot. If you had told me before a kid that I would be investing heavily in a multi-year exposition of the knock-knock form, I would honestly first be totally thrilled, but also slightly puzzled? Parenthood is about the long game. In this game, I’m in about the third inning, which has my toddler spitting out her food after telling a joke that has literally no form or comedic tension. I did laugh, though; you had to be there.

Today’s price is three dollars. Felt like you all needed a break on the pricing. Pay it forward, tell a friend a knock-knock joke (or pass the newsletter on if it helps).

dad

Longtime readers whose subscription to the Daily Kina predates the existence of this newsletter will recall that the family have rented what Kina calls “the Rice Car”—a domestic hybrid with unremarkable acceleration that we use to get out of the neighborhood and into isolated locations where Kina can scoot around and picnic. One of those locations, early on, was Jacob Riis Park—a beach at the southwestern end of the Rockaway Peninsula that’s just far enough away to be readily accessible and not terribly crowded. When we took first trip out there, at the very beginning of May, the beach was almost entirely empty—thousands of feet separated us and our nearest fellow beachgoers; Riis quickly became one of our favorite spots. The beach has grown gradually more populous, though not nearly so crowded as we’ve seen it in past years—there’s plenty of space to breathe and relax. Yesterday’s visit (our fourth this year) felt safe and comfortable enough for us to finally dip in the water, jumping together over the waves as she clung to us and taking the intermittent dunk, which she weathered like a champ. Kina loved the whole thing, and we stayed all day. I have a terrible sunburn.

The illustration I’m proudest of today is the twelve-foot boundary I’ve drawn around our spot on the sand, which I maintained religiously yesterday. Part of that impregnable boundary was an enormous hole, dug over the course of several hours and filled, ultimately, by me. Highly recommend being buried by a preschooler, if you ever get the opportunity. At the end of it, she placed a shell on my chest, which was touching.

Don’t go growing up too fast, any of you, and get some rest.

dad

Our neighborhood has not seen anywhere near the troubling number of sleep-depriving fireworks displays as other areas of the city in recent weeks, but we’ve become accustomed to the occasional concussive blast or whistling bottle rocket, and last night was for sure a real hoot. If this year is anything like the last twenty years I’ve lived in my building, we’ll see some smaller inventory-clearance shows over the course of the next week, but we are “on the other side of the mountain”, to use the absurd (and similarly wishful) language of the governor.

In other news, I got it in my head this week that I have to take Kina’s tangled mop of curls more seriously, having let it more or less go to seed between visits to Christina—a regular star of Kina’s role-playing games, and by far her favorite (and only) stylist. Casual Googling will suggest that people have “types” of hair, and that Kina’s is “type” 2B, for which brushing is strongly contraindicated and leave-in conditioner is a must. I learned all of this after brushing her hair for fifteen minutes while in the bathtub (a huge no-no) and washing with the same foofy apple cider vinegar wash that her mom and I use (an excellent choice). Left well enough alone, my hair would take on a puffy wave, and Laurea’s hair is super straight and heavy, so we’ve Mendel-squared Kina’s situation out to some combination of my wavy hair and Laurea’s mother’s mane and the inexplicable mysteries of childhood traits. Sometime in the next several months, Kina will go back to Christina for a cut, and it will look amazing. Until then, I’ll be trying not to brush her hair, drying it off with a t-shirt, leaving conditioner in it, and being one with the mess of it all.

Today’s Parade is a collaboration between Laurea and Kina, and depicts with some faithfulness the fireworks display from outside our window last night. It is probably my favorite so far.

Will leave you to your respective July fifths. We are going to find an isolated patch of sand and take a nap. Rest assured that the fish is fine. Take care.

dad

Kina is proof that nachos find a way. Truly, one of nature’s most fundamental foodstuffs. Keeping it short today, as we are out in the sun, stopping diligently at crosswalks and blowing bubbles.

Today’s logo comes to you courtesy of a diagram I saw yesterday that showed every Doritos logo in history.

I hope all your fish are safe and sound. Keep those fireworks at a distance tonight!

dad

“Gentle pushover” is a game Kina invented because I was being lazy one day and wouldn’t engage in more active games like “chase me, Daddy”, “swing me upside down, Daddy”, or “come, Horsey, eat in the kitchen”. It involves my sitting on the edge of the bed and allowing her to tip me over repeatedly, as long as she pushes me by a different part of my body each time. It’s a good way to teach basic anatomy and the names of various tiny parts of your face, and you can sit on your bed the whole time (quite nice, as games go). We haven’t played it in a while, which is the kind of thing she always remarks on—even if it’s only been a week. “We haven’t readed this one in a long tiiiiime!” she will say, or “Daddy, it’s been a long time since we played this game!” Her greatest thrill, though, is reserved for those moments in which we listen to songs she hasn’t heard in months or years. On the occasional break from the Moana Official Motion Picture Soundtrack, we will bust out a classic from one of the thousands of Sesame Street albums, or “In The Mountains” by Sarah Siskind (a reliable source of instant calm when Kina was a screaming newborn). When she was younger, songs filled an aural space that would otherwise be occupied by crying, but her relationship with music now is more nuanced and emotional—she knows that some songs are funny, while others are sad, and her sad dance is different from her funny dance. In her brain are lodged errant strands of lyrical DNA from random kids’ gospel songs that Spotify used to autoplay, and which Laurea and I would scream for Google to skip from across the apartment; now we play those songs for her out of nostalgia, and Kina absentmindedly mouths random syllables from them, like she’s dusting off old scrolls. If you want to hear the music of her youth, you, too, can dust off this poorly-sequenced Spotify playlist that we haven’t really changed since before she could walk (except to replace songs that were removed). Maybe it will keep you from crying, too.

Notes on the other two headlines: We were surprised yesterday to learn that remote school, recently ended, has simply become remote camp—an unexpected craft and dancing reprieve; it’s nice to have the teachers around again. And Kina came home yesterday saying that she’d met a boy in the park and that he was not quite big and not quite small and that, while he was capable of using a scooter, he was probably a baby. As it turns out, some of them can walk.

As always, our reporters and editors will be working through the holiday weekend, though my commentary here may be less elaborate. Remember that the safe thing to do this weekend is not to have too much fun, living instead vicariously through Kina. Hello, hello!

dad

It occurred to me recently that Kina’s been hitting me, and only me, whenever she gets angry lately. This, despite my best efforts to be a loving father and effective channel of strong Mister Rogers energy. I’m not really bothered by this, but I have been curious why it’s happening, and I chalk it up to this: When we’re angry at the world, it serves us best to find the thing it feels safest for us to be mad at. You can’t yell at SARS-CoV-2, but you can yell at the people who work alongside you or care for you (though you shouldn’t, obviously). I try as much as I can to check myself when I’m angry, to see if I’m accidentally redirecting my rage about [waves hands frantically everywhere] towards Laurea or Kina or the person working the desk at the car rental agency, and so I think I understand when Kina starts slapping my chest when her Lego tower falls down (which, careful readers will remember from yesterday, was quite tall and unstable), because she knows I get her, and that I’ve got her.

Notes on the two bits of food news: the bottom left headline refers to another weird thing that Kina’s gotten up to in the last few months, which is walking away from the dinner table halfway through her meal, turning into a cat, and demanding we muse out loud about where the cat is and whether or not she would like a spoonful of beans. It’s charming and slightly exhausting. Also, Laurea realized she could buy potato latkes for delivery from Russ & Daughters, for which she deserves (and repeatedly demanded) praise—you should all do likewise (buy latkes and praise Laurea).

There are now twenty-eight of you reading this. If you like it, find someone you love and punch them right in the gut. Ha ha just kidding, I mean share the newsletter with them.

dad

Themes that are emerging in the last week or so have included sudden storms and the end of school. I am trapped at the moment, in fact, in my car as another storm passes, reading an interview in the New York Times with a member of the American Association of Pediatricians, who have urged municipalities to provide in-person schooling in the fall. As much as Laurea and I are trying to figure out how best to care for and educate Kina in isolation from other children, we also recognize how privileged we are to be able to work from and near our home, to take parts of our day to work with Kina on lesson plans, to be able to afford safe and professional home care. Knowing how many people in New York City don’t have those privileges, it’s clear we have not fully reckoned with the enormous financial and educational impact on families (and particularly Black and brown families) of a decision not to provide in-person schooling this fall. The interview’s well worth reading—and gets into some of the tricky and scary issues of transmission and illness that make teachers and some families understandably nervous. (Including me!)

As a more specific comment on high-quality education, I’d like to thank the incomparable teachers at Small World—Ms. Mita, Ms. Ines, and Ms. Jamika (pictured above at top right)—who’ve helped Kina become a clever, radiant, and punchy 3.5-year-old kid. They taught her how to read her own name, how to share with others, how to be independent, and how to hold a pencil. Somehow, they also managed to adapt to a remote model of leading a group of three-year-olds better than we ever could have imagined. They’ve been amazing partners in care with us and Hannah (Kina’s amazing babysitter), and it’s super hard to say goodbye to them. Today’s teetering Lego tower goes out to them.

As always, love to each of you, who now number twenty-five. If you know fellow Kina fans or other individual potential subscribers, do feel free to invite them. Stay dry!

dad

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I can’t remember when the kid developed a fixation with rainbows—it’s been nearly as long as she’s been able to speak. She used to think anything curved was a rainbow, which meant that macaroni had strong rainbow energy, and that her dress with little macaronis on it was a rainbow dress. Her favorite color is rainbow. Her favorite story character, which she invented, is the Baby Rainbow Unicorn, whose Scheherazadean bedtime story titles make regular appearances on A1: “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Has All The Ice Cream”, “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Gets A Babysitter”, “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Goes To The Doctor”, “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Wants To Ride In The Car”. The houses in her bedtime stories have rainbow doors or rainbow windows. Her tea set is a rainbow tea set.

So, yesterday, after we met up with her teacher, Ms. Mita, in Jackson Heights to say a sad goodbye and exchange gifts, after climbing back into the car to head home, after the clouds opened up for an appropriate and timely bout of sobbing, after driving fifteen minutes down a flooded Queens Boulevard, the sun came out—and with the sun, a brilliant rainbow. We pulled over into a parking lot and unbuckled Kina from her seat so we could stand outside and show her a real, wild rainbow. She adored it.

And then she asked to listen to Moana.

dad

The early editions of the Daily Kina don’t go into the sordid details of the reason for its existence—namely, the crushing boredom and anxiety occasioned by a virus whose infectious properties were largely obscure. “KID DEMANDS NOVELTY”, read one headline, conveniently leaving unsaid the context that the kid had not really left the house in days (and that when she did, it was to run the sidewalks of a ghost town). I haven’t minded really being trapped in my home in a city I love so badly that it breaks my heart. On the other hand, I am constantly enraged that this pandemic is depriving my kid of her early childhood—school, playgrounds, friends, human contact. So today’s top headline was a joy to write, as it reflects a precious (if temporary, but I hope not) opportunity to bring these two kids together at a distance and watch them explode with the thrill of seeing each other. Futura and Sloanie make frequent appearances in these pages, for good reason, and I’m glad to get them to the top of A1 from time to time.

On a completely unrelated note, today’s logo is a take on the Frozen title. I’m proud of it, and of the profile portrait I’ve drawn of Kina, which is the first profile that hasn’t looked like a weird bean.

As always, glad to see you here in the funny pages. Tell those who love Kina that they’re welcome to subscribe, and take care of yourselves.

dad

Sleep plays a major role in this Sunday’s edition, with naps re-entering the report and night friends taking a break for some deep cleaning. Trust that they were disgusting. The kid’s chant in solidarity with the BLM bike protest was a particular highlight of the day, and would otherwise have made the top of A1, but yeah the stuffies were gross.

Today’s special section is a collage of Highlights magazine cutouts, curated by the kid and glued by Mom. As always, both Sunday pages are full sheets of construction paper—a fact that tends to get lost in the Instagram posts.

Kina sends good wishes for the week ahead. Send those wishes, or this newsletter, to the ones you love.

dad

This is the eighty-sixth edition of the Daily Kina. The first edition was published on April 3, 2020, just as we were emerging from a family-wide bout of COVID-19. It was drawn entire in blue crayon, cost twenty-five cents, and led with the headline “YOU A CHEESE FIEND HUH”. Today’s edition, like every one of the preceding ninety-five, took shape in about thirty minutes while Kina was running around asking for “special treats” and stealing markers from me. I ripped it out of the notebook, took a picture of it on the trunk in our bedroom, and taped it up on the cabinets so Kina would know what the news of the day was without having to spend [checks image] $22.20 on a personal copy.

Kina is three and a half years old, New York is in a strange lull in course of this pandemic, and these daily editions are probably the things I’ve most enjoyed while it’s all been unfolding. Someday we’ll make a book of them so she can remember.

In the meantime, I am not exactly being deliberate about this newsletter, which exists for basically two reasons: First, and most importantly, I want you to have this in your email inbox so it’s not all horrible in there. Secondly, the Venn diagram of “people who love Kina” and “people who use Facebook products” is not a circle, so to whatever extent you know people who like Kina, and who also want email inboxes that are less horrible, let them know.

I may never write this much actual text in the newsletter again, so I’ll leave you with this note: Today, there are three of you reading this. None of you follows the others on Instagram, which makes Kina the one thing holding you together.

See you tomorrow!

dad