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

It was crazy hot out yesterday, so after Kina woke up from her nap(!) I offered her a choice: Go run in a hydrant or watch a movie. As soon as I said it, I knew I’d made a critical error in judgement, and so I spent the next ten minutes trying to convince her of the merits of running through the water before the rain started, telling her we’d go buy a snack, offering to take her out on the scooter. But the movie prevailed, as I should have foreseen, and per the child’s demand, Moana was cued up.

A few minutes into the movie, I was feeling better overall. The air conditioning was a lot better than a rando hydrant on a 93 degree day, and Moana is actually a really good movie that holds up to repeat viewings. The soundtrack is good, the jokes are good, The Rock is outstanding, the emotional climax is good. You know what else is good? Taking a nap while your child sings along to a Disney movie featuring a non-white princess.

This morning, Kina requested some time with the Moana activity book, which is basically a coloring book of the entire movie, peppered throughout with Moana-themed spelling exercises. At the back of the book is a single, precious sheet of stickers; from it, Kina peeled off a particularly angry-looking Moana decal, affixing it to my upper arm like a tattoo while I looked at my email. I finally noticed it at lunch today, having walked all over the city on my day off like a huge Moana fan (pictured below).

In closing, true Moana heads will understand how thrilled I am with today’s logo.

Local Artist Discusses New Commission

When I asked Kina to draw in the bottom right corner the “something beautiful” that she was pretty sure I would like, Kina instructed me instead to draw a picture of a folded napkin, which I think means I have become an art fabricator in the studio of a tiny Jeff Koons. On most days, the beautiful things she’s drawing for us are abstractions in orange and pink marker. Today’s (which will likely make the Parade on Sunday) featured “a boot”. Kina is no rote drafter, does not draw horses, has no love of figure. She is proud of her work, though, even as she resists the public’s efforts to understand it. Less Koons, more Twombly, maybe. You’ll probably like it. If you do, let her know.

dad

As Kina becomes less and less a toddler (which, let’s face it, that ship has sailed) and more and more a kid, we’re all wrestling with the question of what it means for her to grow up. We talk with her all the time about the fact that she’s literally growing up (It seems her legs have grown four inches since we’ve been locked down), but it’s started to become apparent to her that growth is happening, and she doesn’t like it. The other day, she asked to sit on Laurea’s lap to eat dinner (which happens more often than we’d like, but it’s clear that they both find comfort in the arrangement, and so it persists). Kina’s legs have now gotten so long that she has to sit side-saddle on her mom’s lap, and so she could look Laurea directly in the eye and tell her that she really didn’t want to grow up, and that she wanted to stay with Mommy forever. Similarly, last night, she refused to let me leave the room at bedtime and begged me to hug her and never stop. Bedtime has rituals (a storyline that charter subscribers will remember), but I also didn’t want to let her go.

We’re all torn up over the idea of growing up generally, but there are really two things that I hate about this moment: First, that she doesn’t like the idea of growing up, which is unfair and totally out of my control; and second, that I’m frankly scared these days by the idea that she will have to grow up and navigate this version of the world. I have to believe that as callous as this society has become, it’s still more likely to give three-year-olds a pass on some of the interpersonal horrors this year, but such is not true for adults (or, tragically, even older kids), and so we find ourselves grabbing Kina into bear hugs at every opportunity and squeezing her tight—trying to hold her in, wrap her up, pack her molecules together so densely that whatever life throws at her will shatter on contact. I reckon that no parent wants their kid to grow up, even in the best of circumstances, but I feel like the pandemic should allow kids to stay the same height and age until a vaccine is produced and a new president is procured. Just a little hold up while things settle down, and then we’ll all feel better.

Before we go, a quick correction to yesterday’s edition, prompted by our Canadian friend Davin: Our description of the show Octonauts yesterday suggested merely that it was “British”, but the show is in fact a Canadian creation, based on a series of children’s books by Vicki Wong and Michael Murphy at meomi.com. Davin suggests they are lovely, and we have no reason to dispute that. We regret the error.

dad

This is a pretty straightforward edition, really. Not a lot to explain here, with the exception of the existence of Octonauts, a British marine biology cartoon styled roughly after Thunderbirds, featuring a cast of animals who all have more or less the exact same head (which I only realized after drawing them this morning) and a variety of special skills in undersea rescue, all paired somewhat inexplicably with a crew of energetically loyal but preverbal vegetables who perform simple tasks like opening hatches. They all live and work together in a fortress beneath the waves and maintain a fleet of custom submersibles, to which they repair at the slightest sign of fish trouble; they then tootle off to resolve these emergencies by, variously: towing a creature to safer seas, carrying it back to Octonaut headquarters, separating it from other fish, and careful counseling. Invariably, the fish (all of whom are experiencing challenges plausibly specific to their species) are saved by a pirate cat, an engineer bunny, a doctor penguin, or (very occasionally) an erudite octopus. Leading this ragtag fauna is The Captain, a bear with good ideas and a booming voice. He is best known for leading the charge into an after-episode segment known as “Creature Report”, whose theme song, with which I will close this issue of the newsletter, goes as follows:

Creature report, creature report

(anthropomorphic turnip) Creature report!

Whale sharks are definitely (check check check)

the biggest fish in all the sea (check check check)

They open up their mouth really wide (creature report creature report)

and eats whatever swims inside (creature report creature report)

Though their mouths are oh so huge (check check check)

whale sharks all like to eat teeny tiny food (check check check)

(Dance break!)

Go whale sharks! Go whale sharks!

Creature report! Creature report!

(anthropomorphic turnip) Creature report!

We’re done with our mission!

Octonauts, at ease, until the next adventure!

dad

And, just like that, she’s entered the Scientist phase of child development. I take notes every day of the things she says and does, so that I have material for the next day’s edition of The Daily Kina, and when I looked at my notes from yesterday it was all about Kina’s fascination with basically everything. In the last few days, Laurea and I have come to expect a constant barrage of the following sort of question:

“Where do XXXXXX come from, mostly than XXXXXX?”

For example, “Where do muffins come from, mostly than muffins?” or “Where do Legos come from, mostly than Legos?” I have no idea what inspired that sentence construction, but it’s cute and we always try our hardest to answer the question. As it turns out, lots of things come from either farms or the ocean!

Speaking of the ocean, she’s also really into fish, and has taken to asking me if we can watch videos of marine life whenever we have a free moment. My approach to this is to search YouTube for “bbc FISHNAME”, which usually yields a high-quality David Attenborough video about parrotfish and the fine sandy parrotfish poop that makes up most tropical beaches. Also, we have learned that ocean sunfish skin has over forty kinds of parasites, and that the sunfish float listlessly among schools of cleaner fish that eat those parasites. (A side note here: Laurea and I, after first seeing a giant ocean sunfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, made up a little song for it called “Fish Head With Fins”) Kina’s favorite fish video as of today, I think (based on a conversation we just had at dinner) is a video about flying fish, which “have wings like birds [flap flap flap]” and live in a sort of hellish ocean surface hunting ground where they are consumed alternately by mahi mahi (another Kina favorite) and marauding birds.

Speaking of birds, we have befriended a shabby-looking pigeon who comes to roost on our fire escape. We recognize him because of his rakish little white underwings, and because he’s utterly imperturbable. Kina talks to him while sitting on our dresser, asking him how he’s doing, and telling him that he can be my (Dad’s) little brother. In return, he stares at her with his beady little orange eyes. They are the best of friends.

Speaking of orange, I have no idea why she got it in her head that oranges melt, but I’m glad she asked. I suppose they eventually melt, but not fast enough to deny our home’s most avid orange fan her daily snack.

Gotta read up for tomorrow’s quiz. Everybody have a good night, and may your dreams be filled with zoned-out mola mola.

dad

I remember the moment, as a kid, when I first told my Mom that I was jealous of my younger brother. I was probably about eight years old, and we were sitting in the front seat of the car. She told me that she was so proud that I could talk about my emotions, and I remember feeling that pride reflected in myself. It is one of the weirdly pivotal moments in the development of my identity as a man who reckons with his feelings. Accordingly, I was very proud of our kid when she walked up to me this morning, crossed her arms in front of her body, and declared, “I am feeling very angry.” Whatever it was I’d denied her just moments before (see also: “I Don’t Like Limits. Don’t Limit Me”), she’d decided not to Hulk out on good old Dad, choosing instead to point out that I had a chance to turn this one around. I got down on her level, explained that being angry was normal and that I was proud she could talk about it, then asked what was making her angry. She scowled intently for a few moments. “There’s probably sand in my ears,” she replied, then picked up a balloon and bopped it across the room. I’m very proud of my sandy-eared rage child.

Napping In Car, Child Misses Ice Cream Stop

On our way back from the beach yesterday (which explains Kina’s sandy ears), she asked for a scoop of strawberry ice cream with rainbow sprinkles. This, of course, elicited no protest from us, and we headed off into Rockaway to the local ice cream shop. Just two minutes into the drive, however, she announced she would be taking a nap in preparation for her ice cream, falling immediately into a slumber so deep that not even a loud announcement of our arrival at the scoop shop could rouse her. I bought her the ice cream anyway, in case she woke up—which she didn’t—then ate it (reluctantly) myself. We got home forty-five minutes later, and the very first thing she asked when she opened her eyes was, “Where’s the ice cream?” This, in hindsight, is probably why she was angry at me this morning.

I think I’ve decided that the enemy of head-on portraits is the human nose. A while back, I drew a Tintin-themed A1 and drew Kina’s portrait accordingly. It’s always been one of my favorite Kina portraits, and I think it’s because the nose isn’t grotesque. If I take up this angle more frequently, it will be 100% button noses all day—I have no idea how professional cartoonists deal with this. I’ll point out, by the way, that the portrait was intended to just be “cute angry”, but then she walked up to me, stared at the portrait, and said “Do my eyes pink” (which means red, in Kina’s taxonomy of marker colors). I averred that it looked cute as it was, and she looked me dead in the eyes and said “Do. My. Eyes. Pink.” So, a perfect representation.

dad

Saturday was a big day on the playground. Fountains on, balloons everywhere, Kina’s favorite hairstylist on surreptitious rounds with scissors in a holster like an old-timey sheriff. As regular readers will recall, we’ve been learning a lot about curly hair in recent weeks, and the tangles of her ever-lengthening tresses were threatening to overwhelm even the most patient of gentle brushes. In the wake of yesterday’s masked-up playground cut, however, Kina’s hair no longer rests on her shoulders, her curls are tight and bouncy, and her considerable mane is more manageable for the stickiest months of the summer. Plus we got some A+ tips for dealing with tangles. She spent the rest of the morning—and much of the afternoon—running through the Rodney sprinklers, chasing a pink balloon, and eating pizza. Don’t know that there’s a whole lot to add; it was a do-little day in the tradition of a typical summer, which feels like a luxury in this particularly atypical one.

Today’s Parade, as with many of our recent inserts, is a collaborative cover effort involving both Kina and Laurea. Kina’s entry is a gorgeous abstraction in pastels. Laurea’s illustration of poppies is a reflection of her most recent pandemic obsession (flower arrangements, not opiates) and is, I would say, pretty spot-on. Laurea also pasted on Giovanni Boldini’s Gossip here, which is the kind of scene we all wish we could reproduce on a Sunday at brunch this year. We hope this newsletter passes for a sort of gossip, and that you’re sufficiently scandalized by the idea of a child’s hairstylist roaming the parks of Williamsburg in a mask. But don’t tell! We’re respecting you to be quiet!

dad

Kina’s annoyance with us, in the midst of our spending so much time together, has started to grow fangs. It shows itself in a variety of extremely normal situations— when I am drinking imaginary rainbow tea, for example, or stocking her tent with imaginary meat. She might get flustered with us when we refuse to call her by the correct doctor’s name (on one day, the name of her actual doctor; on another, “Doctor Elsa from Frozen”). She is often annoyed that I sit on the wrong chair or cushion when I have been told already very clearly where to sit and the specific logic behind that seating arrangement. Whatever of the context, though, she gets very annoyed with us and typically responds with a bog-standard toddler scream or, charmingly, an exasperated sigh. But today she rolled her eyes—like, an almost Olympian ocular gesture—and it really hit home in a way that induced both a flood of parental dread and basically no surprise at all. (Laurea and I are world-class eye rollers; The Roll is a favored expression in our home, deployed for the most minor of transgressions.) In some ways, we should have seen this coming earlier—and might have, were we not rolling our eyes at each other so often—but here we are, unprepared for a searing premonition of the teenager we are raising. When schools shut down, I worried that she’d go into a sort of suspended animation, cut off from the professionals charged with her growth (and the children growing alongside her), but I think she’s simply charted a different course—one that emulates ours in excruciating detail. The last few weeks have been emotionally difficult for us as she wrestles with some new developmental hurdle we haven’t yet fully understood, but the eye rolling and spike of tantrums is all part of a personality continuum that has it upsides, too. She comforts us now when we’re frustrated, keeps my coworkers occupied at the start of video calls, summons us for “family hugs”, and engages us in conversations that make just enough sense to convince us we’re seeing the person she’ll be in twenty years. It makes us see the people we are today, too, and honestly got me thinking about whether or not I should pay closer attention to my own eyes when they roll.

“There Is Something in My Teeth”

I took the 5:30 shift this morning, after Kina deployed this new early wake-up tactic. Laurea was inclined to let it go (no pun intended) and see if she’d return to bed on her own, but I am a charter member of Camp Annoyed-By-Stuff-Between-Teeth, and I couldn’t bring myself to let her suffer. You will be totally unsurprised—as Laurea was—that there was nothing in her teeth to floss away, and so I absorbed the subsequent half-hour tantrum that emerged from my not being Mommy as a gullibility tax. After considerable calm coaxing—and the occasional roll of my eyes—I finally got her to watch a YouTube video about jellyfish and took a nap on the couch. That’s the job.

See you tomorrow. Share the word and floss your teeth.

dad

Let’s add hiccups to the growing list of things Kina dreads (see also: rain, bugs, ricotta). I realized last night, as Kina was begging me to MAKE THE HICCUPS STOP, that I do not remember the last time I actually had the hiccups, nor when in my life they stopped. Is this normal? Am I an evolutionary oddity? I could just be forgetful, because I also don’t remember the last time Kina had the hiccups, but it’s likely just because she didn’t care about them until having finally realized that hiccups are a thing to which nature is subjecting her. I tried a few angles last night:

“Hiccups are like a friend stopping by to say hello. They’ll leave soon.”

“Let’s rub your tummy and breathe.”

“Just close your eyes and they’ll go away.”

Laurea stopped by the door and offered a drink of water, which goes against our rule of “no drinks before bed or she’ll wake up to pee at 4:30”. Kina wasn’t interested, in any case.

At the end, I just ended up checking in on her a bunch for maybe half an hour or so, as she required my reassurance that, yes, hiccups go away—and no, you will not be hiccuping forever. I am, it bears noting, living proof of it.

Local Resident Declares Pride in Neighborhood

Sometime down the line, when this has passed, I will be insufferable about having never left the city. People will talk about The Hard Time, and I will say “but did you live through it? Did you walk the empty streets like Will Smith?” I am particularly proud of having stuck by my neighborhood, and am also proud of Kina, who insufferably sighs that she is “from Williamsburg”—and in particular “from Borinquen Place”. She will always be from here, even if we leave, which of course we won’t, because we’re stubborn and insufferable.

Off to bed with all of you!

dad

I had always heard about this pivotal moment in the development of a child’s mind—the sudden realization that things do things in ways that you cannot control and that may, if you are not careful, make your life unpleasant. I had been thinking about this recently as it related, in particular, to thunder. It’s been a torrential summer (for us. For you, too?) and she has seemed not at all to notice the rain, let alone the flash and bang of the passing storms. But lightning struck close last night—about a block away—and the sudden peal of thunder startled her enough to distract her from an episode of She-Ra (a big deal). Staring intently at us, she then spent about ten minutes at the window asking about where the thunder was, and why we kept the window closed in a storm. What would happen, she asked, if we were to open the window? Would the rain get on the front door across the room? (No.) Would it get our stuff wet? (Probably.) Would it come and take us away? (No, the rain will never take us away.) It took some time for her to wrestle with the idea, and she had us lift her up to look out a few rain-slicked windows before she let the matter rest, but I know she’s thinking about thunder now, reckoning with the mystery of it—in ways that I think I am, too.

Sprinklers On at Rodney Playground

The editorial board here at The Daily Kina takes our mission very seriously, and when we’re called on to hold our local government to task, we rise to the occasion. So when Kina arrived home yesterday from her short afternoon walk soaked to the bone, we nodded solemnly in the knowledge that our work in defense of the Rodney Playground sprinklers was not in vain. Either that or the Parks Department just got around to it. I mean, honestly, they just got around to it. In any case, East Williamsburg got its water—a month and a half into the hot season. Stop by, bring a towel.

And make yourself a drink.

dad

Kina has figured out the trick where Laurea and I talk to each other by piping our conversation through her, and she is greatly displeased. So, with that tactic out of the picture, we’ve come up with the frankly brilliant idea to merge our child’s fascination with musical theater and our need to have the occasional adult conversation. The result looks a bit like Laurea and I performing chipper little Broadway numbers about interstate quarantine policy while Kina leaps and twirls around, emoting wildly. We did a long bit last night about a challenging work situation, in which we were able to rhyme “Daddy” and “gladly”. Kina boogied emphatically, unaware all along that her parents were communicating directly with each other. One of the rare win-win situations in this household.

Kid Teaches Mommy How to Eat a Cheeseburger

So sayeth the cheeseburger expert: “See, Mommy, you have to peel the paper, then you put your fingers on the bun and you can eat it!” For somebody who has never in her life eaten a cheeseburger, she’s got a lot of bright ideas about how you do it.

Stuffed Unicorn’s Hair a Total Mess

My parents got the kid a stuffed rainbow unicorn (which, careful readers will recall, is the optimal Kina animal). When we opened the box it came in, we were struck speechless by its gorgeous flowing mane of multicolor nylon monofilament and the comb tethered directly to its back. “Why would you stitch a comb to the back of a stuffed animal,” we asked, having never considered how the physical properties of human hair might differ from those of nylon monofilament. As it turns out, what we have is a mane-brushing routine masquerading as a unicorn. Since Kina sleeps with the unicorn every night, the tangles get worse and worse, and combing them out yields little nests of nylon. I never thought hair and mane care would occupy so much of my life in this pandemic.

If I may—I’m actually pretty proud of both the logo and the portrait today. Been a long time since this former music major wrote a good semiquaver, and I could do side profiles all day. Taking next week off work, so maybe I’ll work on different angles (and note durations). Thanks, all, for sticking with us; I can tell you that it feels ridiculous to produce a daily newsletter, and I can only assume it feels slightly ridiculous to read it. Regardless, I hope it’s a welcome and fortifying distraction from what is—let’s be honest—a scary moment in history. If it’s any comfort, Kina is happy.

dad

For the first couple months of this pandemic, I wasn’t thinking much about beating the heat, but as May set in—and with playgrounds closed—I started to wonder what would happen in summer if the playground sprinklers weren’t on. Being trapped in your house is no fun regardless of the weather, but for families who can’t afford air conditioners or the electricity to run them, the prospect of surviving July and August is bleak. (Cooling centers, which older folks in neighborhoods like ours rely on to get through the hottest months, are inconceivable when you contemplate the actual prospect of putting a couple dozen octogenarians in a gym.) Playgrounds, then, with their shade and spray (a communal suburban backyard), are literal oases for city families in need.

The problem with playground sprinklers is that nearly all of them somehow break over the winter, during which pipes split, valves break, drains fill up with debris, and electrical circuits corrode. So every year involves a delicate dance with beleaguered park workers, in which sweaty parents ask, “How soon until the water’s on?” and the workers reply, invariably, “A few days.” But in truth, the answer may depend on the block. In our neighborhood of Williamsburg, McCarren Park and East River State Park (pictured at top right in this morning’s edition)—parks that serve areas with higher median incomes—generally get their pipes fixed and water running just after Memorial Day. Our local playground, across the BQE on Rodney Street, by contrast, has not had water all summer—including yesterday, when the temperature reached 98 degrees.

It’s typical for our playground, with its scenic view of a six-lane highway, to be served last, but it’s especially galling this year, in this place, with so many families in poverty, people out of work, and kids out of school. On a good year, entire families spend the whole day at Rodney in the sprinklers (and playing, for better or worse, in the lake that forms over the clogged drain). But this is not a good year, and people are on edge, so the prospect of not having water to help kids and their parents cool down is dramatically more fraught. What do families do in the meantime? We try to decamp to McCarren Park or the river, where the water features are on all day, but it involves a fifteen minute walk on hot asphalt in direct sunlight (hardly an easy escape). We turn on the hydrants, which puts kids in the middle of the street—fun to watch, but considerably riskier when you weigh it against recreation that doesn’t involve dodging cars. None of this is ideal, let alone safe.

It’s clear that city budgets play a role here, and there’s a lot to be said about that (I wonder where we might find the budget to maintain plumbing in corners of the budget that are… more padded?) but it does boil down—no pun intended—to somebody making a choice. Kids in tenements come last. Fountains stay broken, old equipment decays. The people who arguably need these common facilities most, who most benefit from the open space and cool water, will have to wait.

You will recall we went to “Zentals Park” on Sunday. The playgrounds there are absurdly nice. Clean, all surfaces padded. Adventure playgrounds! Three types of swings! Everything made of hardwood! And the water flowing, lead-free and in full working order. This is what park conservancies get you (the playgrounds in Central Park are governed by the “Playground Partners” subcommittee of The Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy, which is… a lot to unpack in 2020.) Laurea and I sometimes talk about forming the Rodney Playground Conservancy, an organization whose funds will be spent on finally killing that poison ivy in the corner, removing the exposed bolt from under the toddler playset, and putting new Belgian block stones in the holes that trip up running kids. Our Sprinkler subcommittee is seeking a treasurer. If you’re interested, we’ll invite you to our annual gala.

Kid Lists All Her Favorite Foods

That was a lot, so I’ll just lighten the mood here by pointing out that Kina’s list of favorite foods includes an actual inconceivably-large body of water and somehow no cheeseburgers. I suppose I’d take the ocean, too, if I had to choose.

Finally, a correction, which I will now render in house-style italics: I sent yesterday’s email out with the subject “Kind Enjoys Pasta Picnic in Zentals Park”, which would be more embarrassing if the headline didn’t include the hilarious word “Zentals”. I assume you all know that I meant “Kid enjoys…” because that’s the grammatical construction of 70% of our headlines. We regret the error.

dad

Kina has talked about visiting Zentals Park (or Lentils Park, or Sentol Park) several times during this pandemic. In her fantasy Park world, we take the train, or we drive, or we take a balloon. It’s never clear exactly what we’re supposed to do at Zentals Park, but yesterday we finally decided: a pasta picnic. So, having procured a parking spot and some noodles at Parm in the Upper West Side, we located a broad clearing at the edge of Central Park with nobody in it to enjoy a little nosh. Kina, as is her wont, went back and forth between eating spaghetti and sprinting around the trees, pumping her arms valiantly like an Olympian. As she chased starlings, Laurea and I talked about nothing in particular—a luxury Kina seldom allows us when we’re in close quarters. I don’t think I’ve felt so relaxed since, honestly, last year. Something about rediscovering a place in New York that I love so much and has felt so inaccessible to me since the start of the lockdown really helped us all reset a bit. It felt normal. After a run through the sprinklers, we grabbed some ice cream and drove home. On the way downtown, Kina said, “I’m going to take a nap now” and passed out cold. If you don’t see how amazing this all is, you clearly don’t read The Daily Kina.

Girl Spews Cantaloupe All Over Mom in Laughing Incident

The headline says it all, but the illustration really hammers it home, in my humble opinion. I felt bad for Laurea, of course, though hearing Kina laugh is one of the finer experiences in life. As somebody on whom Kina routinely slobbers, it all feels tolerable. We abide.

dad

Correction: I sent this email out with the subject “Kind Enjoys Pasta Picnic in Zentals Park”, which would be more embarrassing if the headline didn’t include the word “Zentals”.

What are the topics we’re hitting a lot these days? Pizza, witches, rainbows, beach, sleep. Weekends are intense, so the cost of a missed nap on a busy Saturday eclipses that of a weekday, which can make us all exhausted (though it hits the kid extra hard). An intense Saturday, then: We drove out to the beach, pitched our tent, drew our giant circle, and basically spent four hours in the water with Kina. She worked on swimming and dunking, built sand castles, performed “Let It Go”, ate chicken, coached us on very specific language we should use to appreciate boats (another version she wanted us to parrot back to her went, “Wow that’s very good; yes, I told you that that is very good for night.”), and asked me several dozen times to throw her as high into the air as possible—all while being buffeted by waves. By the time we strapped her into her car seat and got her home, she was totally fried and insisted that she and only she could climb the stairs to the apartment, that she needed to take her shoes off, and that only Mommy could give her a bath. Cue more or less an hour and a half of crying. I have no idea what my neighbors (many of whom I’ve shared my life with for the last twenty years) actually think about my screaming child, but I do know—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that they are aware of her.

She did fall promptly to sleep, I should point out, upon being offered the opportunity. I measure her exhaustion by how many Baby Rainbow Unicorn stories she will settle for, and the number last night was barely two (down from a steady four). And she woke up after six, which makes—and you heard it here first, friends—four straight days of wake-up times that start with the number 6. I think we unintentionally scared her into compliance by putting a potty in her room, and now she doesn’t yell for potty stuff—not because she intends to use the room potty, but because the thought of using it weirds her out, and she’d rather just sleep in. I guess most everybody hates the idea of peeing in their room. So, right, incentive.

“Hurry, Hurry, Before It Gets Late!”

With this headline, I just wanted to hammer home just how much of Kina’s role playing is based on rushing. Should I feel bad about that? Is that all New Yorkers? Is it genetic? I just imagine her telling me on the phone in twenty years that she is so busy these days, and that work is just crushing her, and I am one hundred thousand percent going to remember her sprinting back and forth from her room to the front door in her undies carrying her “toke bag” and breathlessly telling me to get a move on.

Today’s Parade is ice cream, which is probably the one Kina topic I have not sufficiently covered on A1. We’ll get a team on it. Might need to do some research. I assume all the scribbles here are sprinkles.

Getting started on the Monday edition. Everybody sleep well, and do feel free to share this with your friends and loved ones who enjoy ice cream, rushing around, the new She-Ra, or collapsing in tears at the smallest provocation.

dad

Now that she’s a real poopin’ pro, Kina has taken to instructing us on the finer points of the potty. In addition to the basic notes detailed in the dek here, we’re advised to ask for privacy and encouraged to use a stepstool as needed; it’s nice to revisit the basics sometimes. In other potty news: A couple of issues ago, I mentioned something about an in-room potty gambit that seemed to have corrected for 5:30 wake-ups, and our investigations desk is working up a related exciting piece for tomorrow.

Kid Hears Front Door From Bed, Checks to See if Mommy Still Here

In other sleeping news, the child continues to be roused by only the most delicate and subtle of noises. Car horns and fireworks are like white noise to her, and though the margarita palace across the street blasts a raucous and incredibly grating mariachi take on “Happy Birthday” at least once every night, she pays it no mind. On the other hand, we take great care not to leave the living room until an hour after she’s gone to bed, because she reacts to the sound of the front door opening like a well-trained guard dog. Her first assumption is always that Laurea has left us alone, and so I have to console our distraught and exhausted toddler until her mother comes back from picking up a package in the lobby. So last night, when Laurea did come back, and the door latch did make a mild clicking sound, and Kina did wake up, and I did go into her room to settle her, Kina demanded that Laurea prove she was actually here by yelling from the living room—a shortcut that she has not taken before. This appeared to resolve the matter, leaving us impressed by Kina’s diligence and bristly auditory nerves.

This edition’s illustrations are all of the stick figure variety, which is typically easy for me, but I found it tricky to draw a bow and curtsy. I think I did well nonetheless.

We remain yours, dopily.

dad