This is all going pretty nicely for the kid, in that she has had our undivided attention for five days now. If it wasn’t for the bit where we actually have Covid, I think I’d tell you that we are enjoying ourselves as well. It was a beautiful weekend outside, but you all missed out on the party here at our house. A party full of forts, movies, baking, and intermittent naps. We have been here before, reader; we know how it’s done.

No Parade today. Kina missed the deadline, despite never leaving the house. I’ll give her a pass. Here’s last week’s, which she finished on Monday.

Wear your masks, people!!!

We’re not exactly writing King Lear over here, folks. Good news for the newsletter folks: I’m negative now. Give the rest of my captives a couple more days. I’ll keep her entertained with tummy farts in the meantime.

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The convalescents will not be taking questions at this time. (We are fine, though, thank you.)

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We are getting by. Thanks for the love. Paxlovid works, but it makes your mouth taste funny.

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As most of you know, this esteemed publication was founded in the wake of our first bout with Covid as a family, to stave off boredom and try to find meaning in it all. This time around, we have boxes of rapid tests and know how to isolate effectively, so the boredom is sequestered, as I am in this room, to me. So far, I’ve received at least four notes and one performance of Beethoven’s 9th symphony to keep me occupied. The paper helps, too.

My case is mild, and I have what I need to get better, thankfully, but the spike in cases is real, folks. Wear your masks and kiss your children—not in that order.

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This is actually something Kina has hated for a while now. It’s just easier for her to think when we aren’t talking, and if something occurs to her in the middle of a story that one of us is telling, we can see the spark rise and extinguish itself, and then we get an earful. The solution might be to stop talking entirely, so that Kina can think of important things to tell us all the time, but that seems somehow impractical in a house (like ours) of constant talkers. I really do feel her pain, and I’ve spent countless hours trying to backtrack through conversations and other friendly encounters to figure out what it was that caught my fancy; truth be told, I hate it. But I’ve come to live with it—and to accept the wispy shape of my own thoughts. It’ll come to me, much as Kina has. Just have to be patient.

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p.s. If you can’t read it, the thing she finally remembered she needed to ask me was, “Was Pokémon alive when you were small?” The answer is no. Sorry for the trouble, Kina.

A real Wonderland is probably something I also wanted when I was six, because it seems like a fun place to be when you’re a kid. As an adult, all I can think about is how stressful it would be to live in constant fear of the local warlord queen.

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The peaceful sleep in one’s own bed upon returning from vacation is almost as good as the vacation itself—especially when you barely slept the night before. Kina took great care to memorialize her latest wake-up time in recent memory, drawing an enormous 7:41 on leftover sketch paper while her parents slept for another 45 minutes. Bliss.

In over three years we have never been late with a Parade, and yet there is no Parade today. Our printing facility apologizes; there is a Parade that we will deliver to you tomorrow. It is “not done yet”. Our regrets.

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After the first three random false alarms on our last night in Maine, this really turned into a sort of cruel joke.

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If you have not dug your hole, have you gone to the beach at all?

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If you think about it, motels are just storage units for highways.

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This afternoon, she just went and finished the 150 piece puzzle on her own. Give this kid a MacArthur grant!

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I don’t make ‘em up, I just transcribe ‘em.

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It got a little boomy at the beach.

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Up in Maine for the next week as we gorge ourselves on ice cream and let the Cousins Coconut bathe with each other.

Kina drew this at a local lobster pound. I basically had to trick her into making this a Parade.

There was a really torrid crush triangle involving Joel Margolis, and Laurea had to pause just a bit before moving on.

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Milestones, in short:

1. One week

2. 100 days

3. Until school starts

4. At the end of the pandemic (ha)

5. One year

6. After kindergarten

7. Two years

8. When she asks me to stop

9. Three years

10. When she’s lived more days as the publisher of The Daily Kina than not, which is today, more or less—something I realized only as I drifted off to sleep last night and reminded myself furiously to recall first thing in the morning. Imagine writing a daily newspaper about your newborn child for the first three years of her life, until you are stopped in your tracks by a global pandemic and a terrible bout of Covid. Imagine that everything stops. Now imagine the inverse, in which your child is three years and four months old, and that same pandemic shocks you into a realization that today matters, and you draw a moose on construction paper for your kid. Imagine you do it the next day. Now imagine just… continuing? Forever, presumably? That is what this feels like. It feels like a second chance that just spools out into the rest of time, or until she asks me to stop.

11. Who knows?

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Every once in a while, I have a solo moment with Kina that just consumes me; I will never forget this one (but I will always forget Glimmer from She-Ra, sorry). Also: I realized halfway through this edition that should have painted the sunset first, because all my markers are water soluble. Another thing I will always forget.

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I forgot how much I loved these things, and now Kina loves them, too.

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Use your hearing chances wisely!

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Kina really likes the sound effects on today’s edition, and she says the drawings are “actually pretty good”.

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This isn’t as simple as saying Kina doesn’t get animism, but it’s a very specific form of it that includes houses, sidewalks, bikes, and strollers. It’s a walkable urban animism.

There’s a fine line between minimal and lazy in art, and I’m going to give Kina the benefit of the doubt, because we are all a bit tired here.

Yes, I do know how to sew. No, I am not sure I could produce a non-creepy doll version of Laurea.

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I’d go for at least three weekend days, for the record.

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They are just so tall!

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It’s rare that Kina wakes up after us, so you can rest assured that Laurea and I were less concerned about this state of affairs than Old Man Kina.

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This is an activity that athletic Sloane and bouncy Kina vociferously agree is amazing.

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It was a real roller coaster up there. I’m exhausted!

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Just got home. Very tired. No Parade. C’est la vie.

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The fog has been the most welcome guest during this last week of vacation—a welcome respite from the punishing heat of New York, a dream to jog through, and always conscientious about leaving room for the sun to shine in the afternoon. Kina enjoyed every bite.

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She fell asleep not long after saying this, so I’m not sure what there is to learn from a little curious princess, unless you all can think of anything?

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Went to the legendary Tonga Room for the first time last night with some of Laurea’s oldest friends, and Kina made herself right at home with the Pulp Fiction dance scene vibes.

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There is no 50% in this child’s life. Everything is adventure.

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Our marriage is as old as Bali, who was a newborn when Laurea and I tied the knot. Now she is by far the closest thing Kina has to an older sister—despite the fact that she is actually the closest thing Laurea has to a younger sister—and she is doing just a great job of it.

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I don’t think we’d ever noticed how Kina says “Sure!” when she means “yes”, or that she says “I’m good!” when she means “no”, but I can tell you for sure that people in California notice it, and so it must be a New York thing.

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This is a special time. No further comment.

Today’s Parade is a collaboration with Tita Cindy and Tito Giorgio, and just one of Kina’s many natural artworks from the last day.

Bonnie is really the only deer in Kina’s life, to be fair, but the two are fast friends and cautious neighbors here on the mountain. I do not think there is a human she was more excited to see this week. We woke up today to find Bonnie standing directly at our door, waiting for this girl who comes just once a year. Kina knew it would be like this, she reminded us—she had told us the night before.

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Off to the next stop. Farewell, hot tub.

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It is not that easy for me, but now she’s best friends with Jasper, a boy she met this morning, so I guess it’s Laurea’s side.

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She did ask the little girl her name, seeing as she had (according to Kina’s journal entry) “the igsact same birthday as me”, and yet she ultimately did not remember the little girl’s name, and so I cannot tell you more specifically about the child who was born at the same time (more or less) than Kina. I can tell you they got along well, and that her birthday twin did not at all want to go to day camp, having found one of the few people she will ever meet who shares her birthday. This is special stuff. Camp can wait.

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I don’t know that I know anybody who loves California as much as Kina does. It’s a fascination that seems to have cropped up in the past year, and it’s made up of equal parts novelty, Lala, ice cream, playgrounds, sunshine, princess dresses, and unimpeded time with her parents. The sense of discovery I see in her is dizzying—she really is just absorbing this place, and it’s pushed aside any other part of her life; friends are a distant memory, teachers living in wistful shadow, the subway a relic of another age. Instead: so many beautiful flowers, ripe avocados, hot tubs, and adoration. It’s a fair trade, I think. No space left in the brain. Just California.

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Honestly, I don’t even want to know.

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The first morning in California with Kina has traditionally been a real doozy, usually starting at 4 AM and requiring our full attention and commitment. It’s hard for us to stay asleep, too, of course, but we know better than to succumb to the instinct to get up and play with toys. This year is better than all previous years combined—not because she woke up any later today, which she did not, but because she didn’t come get us. We mainly laid here in the dark, listening to her sing Disney tunes and whack on a carpentry set, grateful that we didn’t have to entertain her for once. Things do get better, as it turns out.

So, this is the Parade. As you can see, it is Califo(r)nia themed. It was originally meant to read “CALIFORNIA HERE WE COME PARADE”

Was too jet-lagged to send this last night.

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I don’t invent the headlines, I just report them.

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The controversial First-Class Plane Dad in question. Charmingly, Kina declared that the whole family should sit in the big seat up front. Very fair.

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I spent an actual dollar on a breath-filled water balloon this morning, so Kina is definitely on track to be a billionaire.

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Kina has not been alive long enough to really contemplate what the ideal superpower would be, and so, with limited information, she has chosen a very specific power that maximizes the joy she hopes to feel in this exact moment. There is something to that initiative that I admire—that sense of focus. The right answer to the question of “which is the best superpower”, which she will discover at some point in her adulthood, is the manipulation of time. I have not yet developed that power, unfortunately, but I do have ready access to Fruit Roll-Ups, which is apparently a miracle in and of itself.

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When I was a little kid, younger than Kina, I would watch Spidey Super Stories, the first live-action Spider-Man show, which was basically an extended segment on The Electric Company—a show for kids that somehow had cast both Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman. It was the seventies.

Anyhow, Spider-Man could climb walls, which seemed like a huge win, and I was just old enough to recognize that this was an exclusive skill and just young enough not to know it was also an impossible skill. I would stand in the family room and grip the walls, hoping to figure out how it was done, to no avail.

Eventually, I found a bottle of Elmer’s glue and just slathered the whole thing on the palms of my hands and waited for it to soak into my skin, which I figured would make me permanently sticky. It made me sticky. It was not permanent.

If you are reading these daily newsletters and thinking “dang they are spending a lot of time at the beach this year,” you are not mistaken. Ever since Kina took to dunking in the ocean last year, we’ve realized that all her greatest strides in swimming and other forms of marine independence come in the waves—plus, it’s really nice when the air is thick and still and 88 degrees.

Yesterday, Kina swam between me and Laurea on our way out to the sandbar about 150 feet out from shore (It was low tide, so not actually that deep). We jumped around in the waves as they broke on the sandbar, then retreated to the deeper waters closer to the beach and swam in the swells. It was… it was swell.

After all these days in the ocean, some two years or so into wearing basically the same swimsuit every trip, her rash guard basically gave out, so Laurea tossed it in the trash can. Farewell, sweet rash guard.