Stands for ten seconds with arms outstretched once music ends, soaks up adulation; this follows one hour of Taylor Swift
Yes, there may have been thirty other children performing Taylor Swift songs, knock-knock jokes, and dribbling basketballs, but the applause was all for Kina.
kid has heard enough about Mommy’s breathless first experiences in America, the land of milk and bathtubs
I mean, if you had drunk evaporated milk your entire life and only ever taken showers, you’d talk endlessly about your first fresh milk and hot bath for the rest of your life, too.
Students prepare monument to worm’s short, exciting life
RIP Pinky, we hardly knew ye. I mean, literally, I first heard of you yesterday, when Kina said, “We made a grave for Pinky at recess,” which caught me by surprise—as it would anybody, I think.
Maybe Pinky will come back as an animal, as one does. Until then, Kina and her friends will be watering the apple seed they planted for you.
enjoys 2.5 hours of puppetry, surreptitiously touches elephant
Kina has been waiting to go to the theater with the most avid theater goer that either she and I know for many years now, and she finally hit the jackpot with a trip to The Lion King with my brother Ken. She spent the whole prior day protecting her braids in preparation for the show, and a mani-pedi with Laurea and a walk through Times Square made for just about the perfect day.
She has been singing a random song from The Lion King ever since. I have no idea what it is, because I have never watched anything related to this Disney enterprise, and that is why I’m glad Ken loves theater. Thanks, Uncle Ken!
Kina tells stylist Christina about Mommy’s inspirational spa habits
As today’s headlines might suggest, Laurea spent a good part of the day at the spa, and the only things Kina knows about spas are that Mommy loves the hot saunas and encourages strangers to jump into the cold plunge, screaming at them to “get in there!” People apparently enjoy this. Kina and I are skeptical.
Mythical figures come under scrutiny; Mommy on fence re aliens
Kina’s erstwhile fascination with the Tooth Fairy was a bit of a surprise. You’d think that kids would quickly pick up on the whole “supernatural being who is said to arrive overnight” pattern, but teeth come out late in a kid’s life, and there aren’t many myths to go around.
The Fairy has visited four times, and four times did she place underneath Kina’s pillow a lengthy and prosaic note, containing probably more money than a tooth is worth. I took great pleasure in writing each of these notes, sneaking in after the clock struck ten to replace her fallen incisor with the Fairy’s gift.
Kina seemed to relish the myth of the Tooth Fairy, and so it came as some surprise last night when Kina (who has not recently lost a tooth, but has discovered a newly-wiggly cuspid) asked—finally—if the Tooth Fairy was real.
She celebrates his eventual awakening with sweet whispers, juicy dumplings, obstacle course, and dance party
It feels like Oatie is always asleep when we get dim sum as a family, but yesterday we just sat and sat and sat and ate and ate and ate until he woke up and got his fill of dumplings and buns. Good thing he ate, too, since we then decamped to a nearby playground for family obstacle course and dance party time. It was the perfect New Year breakfast with the kids.
Later, as you can see, I perfected my popcorn technique by using an alarming quantity of ghee and tossing it with everything I love dearly (salt, sugar, and MSG). I am proud of both the real popcorn I made and this drawing of a popcorn kernel.
Ollie and Lulu visit once again for jaunt through gigantic indoor playground, followed by dinner of tasty pasta + mozz sticks
I’ve been a day behind with these emails for almost a week, so you’re getting two today—the first of which is about Kina’s beloved child friends from Philly, who always love coming to New York because they get to see Kina and invariably jump on trampolines.
Kina and Futura roam the streets of Chinatown in search of roving troupes of lion dancers, are rewarded for persistence and generosity, eat pork buns
The middle Saturday of every Lunar New Year in Manhattan’s Chinatown is “Super Saturday”, when all the local king fu schools bring out their lion troupes and walk the streets to collect red envelopes from local businesses and—if they are lucky—Kina and her small friends. We saw lions of all different colors and sizes (kids too!) and even one troupe that climbed up to the second story of a building on Baxter Street to fetch a cabbage and some money from a pole stretched over the road. Kina and Futura got to pet that dragon on the nose after they gave it two bucks in a red envelope. Great value. Happy new year!
Conks out on couch with fever while Daddy works next to her. She then watches Castle in the Sky, drinks juice, feels better.
I mean, there wasn't exactly a lot of snow to begin with, and she seemed happy enough to sleep. Ten hour fever and we were out of the woods. Happy (retroactive) Valentine's Day!
Daddy and Kina work together to produce twenty cards for her classmates; in hindsight, she regrets the custom notes
I told her twenty custom messages would be a lot, but I am also the guy who busted out the hot glue gun and metallic ink for the stamped letters, so I’m not quite sure who’s walking the walk here.
It’s basically a basketball field in the shape of a bowl, but red and also a little bit green,” says kid as she describes biggest sporting event in U.S.
It is bowl time. Get the foam fingers and bowl-ball bats out of the closet.
attention-starved scientists shocked to discover that structure works
I don’t know why I was so surprised that letting Kina put her own to-do list together every night would make chores work. It’s just foreign to me. Glad she’s figuring this out now.
“It’s just first grade and second grade mixed together,” notes second-grader trying out third grade math
I think it is a little ironic that Kina’s internal arithmetic model for third grade just yields a slightly-diluted second grade. What she would like you to take away, though, is that she is very advanced in many ways. And she is.
after a long week, family takes an easy Sunday of play and relaxation; Kina reflects fondly on our relationship
I guess it was a long week, no? Kina had a lot of strife and turmoil to deal with, and I think we all deserved a good Sunday together. I took her to her original baby swings at Rodney Playground, we all had a fancy lunch and washed it down with cupcakes, watched a movie at home (well, Kina did while we slept), and we ate picadillo and had some fun conversations. All told, it was sort of our gift to Kina after a short series of moments that were not, strictly speaking, fun for her.
In exchange, later in the evening, she vanished into her bedroom and produced two ornamental shells. On mine, she wrote “I love you, Daddy” and painted hearts in every heart-shaped divot. On Laurea’s, she wrote “LISTEN TO CHILL OUT”. Both were perfectly crafted to remind us how wonderfully special this kid is.
It’s an honor to have her as a boss, a roommate, and a kid. Unlike pasta, she is absolutely perfect.
Laurea’s astronaut ambitions stifled by child who is perfectly satisfied by Earth; “I don’t want you to get lost out there,” she says
One of Laurea’s most endearing qualities is her certainty that, someday, she will go to space. I have had many years to become accustomed to this plan, but Kina only learned about it yesterday, and let me tell you, she does not find this endearing.
Space is a very large destination, full of nothingness and devoid of cell-phone towers, so it’s a little tricky to pin down where basically anything up there is at any given time, if you are seven.
This difficulty in geolocation (when one has basically left the geo), coupled with a slight resurgence in separation anxiety, has led Kina to her recent ruling that no mommies shall go to space, no how. It’s just too hard to find your way home, and home is the most important thing to Kina right now.
Digit gets dinged on door in the hallway at school; Mommy is summoned; X-ray shows tiny fracture in tip of finger; she eats dumplings
Not a stellar day yesterday, but we are all okay. Kina was being helpful and holding the door open for some classmates, and then the door was closing and then it was closed, and a parent was running over to her.
Laurea texted me at work in the middle of a meeting to say she was taking Kina to the urgent care, which all went well for them but not as well for the daddy stuck at work and wondering how the kid’s finger was. But the finger is fundamentally fine, if a bit purple, and it is splinted and Kina is comfortable enough to have since attended a birthday party, a tasty brunch, and three hours at the New York Hall of Science. All good.
kid forced to wear school uniform for photographic proof of her scholarship; Kina is allowed to hold the sign
A slightly lighter topic today, though no less fraught for our publisher, who knows full well the importance of a school photo and the power of a well-selected outfit—a selection she was denied in the face of green/beige homogeneity. We must all suffer indignities from time to time.
Parents later explain the importance of apologies, promise to do better, and everybody gets a hug
It’s surprising how little I’ve heard from other parents about whether or not they fight in front of their kids. I suppose it is the sort of topic that we’re afraid might invite judgement (a fear I shared even as I wrote the headline on today’s paper), but conflict is such a significant part of sharing a life together that I’m curious why the topic doesn’t come up more often.
Laurea and I had an argument yesterday in Kina’s presence—something we prefer to avoid—and it ended with me shouting as we walked out the front door of our building, which I am not proud of. Kina, judging by her demeanor and plugged-up ears, wasn’t proud either. Recognizing that things had gotten too noisy, we cut our losses, and I took Kina to school in silence as Laurea made her way back upstairs.
Kina didn’t know this at the time, but I ran home right after dropping her off so that I could catch Laurea before she went to work. We had a calm and clear conversation about what we wished had gone differently, apologized for our parts in the argument, and pivoted to talking about how we would address this with Kina.
Kina’s memory of spilled ice cream draws a blank in the over-40 set
I would not have started writing this newspaper if I didn't care about remembering the various little things that happen to Kina every day. Despite that effort, Kina has started to be able to recall more minor dramas from her youth than we find ourselves able to remember. Whether, as in the case of the fallen fish-shaped ice cream cone, these are events that actually happened or are mere constructions of her mind, it feels at times as though things are slipping away from us—not least of those things being Kina’s childhood. I think this process of writing and drawing gives me some sense of control over that distance of memory, but it’s insufficient. I never thought, in 2020, that the real repository of stories from Kina’s childhood would be Kina herself, but as her brain develops and the stories add up, I’m surprised (though I should not be) that she has her own take on her life: which moments startled her, which of them dug deep, which felt pivotal or silly or sad.
The stories I remember from Kina’s day now include her own, sometimes from years ago, and I feel lucky to be able to write down the moments that I truly did once forget, having been reintroduced to them by the person who was there in the first place.
city inspector banned from room after filing violation
As the inspection report shows, the only thing keeping this swing from collapsing is two small, tight knots wedged between the bedframe and the shelf hanging from its side. Any reasonable assessor would smack a stop-work order all over this.
“I’ll just be dry again after,” she claims raspily
Why even chug water out of these gigantic Stanley cups like we’re water billionaires when the winter air is just gonna suck it all out of us and leave us as wrinkly dusty hunks of skin after ten minutes? The ruse is exhausting.
Kid wants to know why dogs are called “dogs”, cats “cats”
Our little etymologist is fascinated by the origins of words—both the where and why of them. Who called it a dog? Why? Why do we still call them dogs? Why do we not call them “cats”? What other random syllables might we assemble to name the thing currently named “dog”? Language is an agreement, Laurea tells her in the bath one night, that things should be called things and not something(s) else. Kina’s own language is an agreement that she formed with us in the first few years of her life (and, notably, in one extremely solitary and formative year of her life in 2020—we see that take shape in the absurdist headlines of this newspaper.) It feels strange at times to watch as her language evolves as an agreement with others, too—as she becomes a New Yorker in her choice of words and accents. She’s part of the big agreement now, as are her parents and their parents and her friends and their parents.
scrappy little kid reassures daddy, who just bit his own cheek
This kid has had some tough run-ins with the pavement in the past, but also, yesterday, with a little kid in her class who just wouldn’t stop yelling at her, which made her cry, which made Mr. Ortiz call Laurea, which made both of us really mad until we remembered that these people are literally seven years old and living complicated lives with very little impulse control, and when Kina came home, it was like nothing at all had happened that day—a total walk in the park. Laurea and I had agreed not to make a big deal about anything Kina wasn’t prepared to make a big deal about, and the worst that came of last evening was that I bit the living daylights out of my cheek, and Kina found herself comforting me on a day that I thought would have been really hard for her. Think of that next time you get a pretty bad cut.
dad
p.s. Thanks to EV, JSM, MB, and C+GF for upgrading your subscriptions. Every bit of support is welcome. The newsroom appreciates your ongoing readership.
facial hair appears to be sole requirement to manage
I don’t know why she felt the need to reinforce her preexisting status as boss of this household by holding two balloons onto her upper lip. Everybody likes balloons, I suppose.
child is fascinated by the connection of family to olfactory memory
I can remember with great clarity the smell of my grandmother’s house when I was Kina’s age. There is a specific sort of dustiness in the walls that underlies something green and cool. And there is the smell of sugar and milk from the kitchen, where the water had a specific flavor, sort of floral, rocky, with just a little aldehyde. The cement floor of the breezeway smelled as cement does, and the drywall boards after years of damp did, too. I smell the dirt and the roots of the trees from the basement even through the wall, and the sweeter ground of that basement giving way to the smell of old carpet and French toast as I walked upstairs for breakfast. I smell my grandmother’s cigarettes for a while at bedtime, and then I don’t after a few more years. I recall the smell of those cigarettes and the French toast at five in the morning, when she’d arrive at the house, and her smell lingering there over breakfast and in the car. I can smell the flowers she grew in the breezeway—with the cement and the wallboard—with real subtlety. In the afternoon, with the sliding door open to the deck out back, you could just take in a bit of the river from the cove beyond the tracks. The lazy, fernlike aroma of the grass, damp at the bottom of the hill, where the air was gravelly and green.
A bird and a tree
Kina built this Parade off of a sticker, fulfilling the long-held promise of a tree.
so she can always be wherever Mommy is; also, a bed that is also a car so they can go places and snuggle
Kina has not done a lot of research on transportation machines, but her devotion to her mother is substantial, which bodes well for the whole enterprise.
critics applaud coziness of nook, which is situated under kid’s bed where the kitchen used to be; a fine nook
The nook is a criminally underrated structure, in my opinion, and Kina’s nook is one of the finest there is. It is also why we got her a loft bed. To not build a nook under one’s bed feels like a dereliction of duty to coziness.
our investigation chases down the original hugger to ask them why hugs look that way, with some arms on top and some on bottom
Wikipedia’s entry for “hug” is suspiciously mum on the inventor of the hug and their rationale for why some arms are on top and others below, which leaves our newsroom wondering what exactly they are trying to hide.
Thanks to those of you who have chipped a buck or two in so far. It all makes the next several years of writing these a bit less expensive. Let’s hope Kina’s snuggles last as long as I do.
