You want to see those napkins? Enjoy.

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Imagine being six, not yet a decade old, and knowing that something has been around longer than you’ve been alive. A decade is unfathomably long to her—the equivalent of eighty years for me. To me, a decade is a bit less than a fifth of my life. It doesn’t feel so far off today from 2013, when Obama was president and Lorde released “Royals”…. Maybe it does. Maybe it’s forever. Can you believe it?

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I would give anything to sleep so deeply that all your memories of your conscious life and family are knocked straight out of you, and you wake up to a world unfolding with mystery—like being born fresh every single morning.

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This whole edition is basically about an extremely rainy Saturday in Brooklyn and what you end up having to do about it, and realizing you know at least two other families in the same situation. At least we all got to talk, eventually.

It’s been a long time since I took the reins of the Parade, but here we are. The wax-resist watercolor pieces are 100% by Kina, but the giant PARAdE is by me.

Kina loves many things, but princesses and puzzles are both up there. Thanks to her teachers for letting her borrow this book.

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Laurea spent all morning teaching Kina radio etiquette just so we could walk to school saying “go for mommy” into our sleeves.

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The Book of Losers is a massive tome. Keep your noses clean, readers.

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I wrote a thing about not-best-friends last year that I still really like, because it explores the concept of a friend-for-the-moment—a kind of friend I really love and have come to accept that I’ve become accustomed to, having grown up in a lot of different places and built up countless ephemeral friendships. I don’t know what that says about me as a friend in general, or what it must be like to be my friend when your experience of friendship carries with the kind of commitment that requires ranking and competition. I have a few friendships I value tremendously, but I have no best friend, and I’m cool with that.

Is that somehow akin to this idea Kina has of “backup friends” at school—a designation she’s given to almost every friend she has had since kindergarten? Maybe; it feels like it. These friends all know slightly different Kinas, as my friends all know slightly different Davids. Those Davids are “backup Davids” in a way—the Davids at the edge of other people. Kina’s just taking the other view, that these people are all there to meet a different edge of her.

Kina has tremendous fun with all her backup friends, and they all rub different edges of her as they pass through. They are (as I wrote last year) the running friend, the new home friend, the shoes friend, the friend to talk to at lunch, the falling-down friend, the parkour friend. They move in and out of focus, pass by at school dropoff, walk through the gates with Kina—who is at equal ease with each of them as they stroll across the yard. Together, they make up her collective best friend, who was never missing to begin with.

It has, according to our esteemed publisher, been like this since the very first day of school. A vibrant bazaar, full of unreasonable bartering.

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We honestly had planned to take Kina to the movies long ago, but, you know, global pandemic.

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Yesterday, was, in fact, a fairly ordinary day, when measured against all the many days that I have lived. Gymnastics—check. Playground—check. Family time—check. Car nap—well, okay, some of it was unusual, but this falls into the category of Days We Have Known.

But for Kina, it was special. Her mother was back in town, she was able to visit the Japanese grocery in Industry City. While there, she was able to spend time with her whole New-York-based family, including her tiny cousin Otis. She did a flip. She took a nap.

I think back to when I was small, sometimes, and marvel at the myriad little sacraments that made up my otherwise normal life. Talking to robins in the trees, libraries with carpeted conversation pits, spaghetti and meatballs. Everything that was happening for me, in my life, was a secret joy. Secret, in that only I could feel and see and hear it for the first time—the robins, the soft carpet, the impossibly deep snow.

Mommy’s back after a long and rewarding week of work, and this delightful daddy-daughter week makes its gentle, satisfying exit.

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At the end of the day, I wasn’t really that suspicious at all.

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Kina stopped waking us up at night (again) several weeks ago, but she clearly hasn’t stopped waking herself up at night from time to time, as evidenced by her impromptu couch nest from this morning—allegedly assembled “halfway through sleeping”, as one does.

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When the cat (Mom) is away, the mice (Dad) will play (drop Kina off at the actual schoolyard, instead of at the opposite corner, and also stand and wave for two minutes as Kina backs away from him across the yard, gesticulating lovingly throughout).

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Kina, like many small children, tends to get a lot of scrapes and bruises in the course of navigating the world at top speed. I’ve grown accustomed to discovering abrasions when I give her a hug after school, or seeing a wine-red contusion on her shin after a day in the playground. In the moment, these injuries are naturally a giant drama, but the pain passes after a while and we move on.

This is a metaphor for life.

At Futura’s birthday party on Saturday, Kina took a spill while chasing after some boys, and another parent escorted her back to me with a concerned look and a full first-aid kit. Kina sobbed on my shoulder as I asked her to tell me where she’d gotten hurt, pointing at the most likely points of impact. Head? No. Knees? No. Stinky feet? No (chuckle, sob.) Elbow? Nodding head.

It is very important to me that I know how to do Kina’s hair. This concern dates back to July 5, 2020, when haircuts were not viable and all of us looked like Zoom neanderthals, and I got to watching lots of videos about curly hair, which Kina has in spades. From this particular pandemic research rabbit hole, I eventually came to realize that the smooth move for little kids with type-2B hair is to pull that mess together into some braids. And as a man who really, really wants to show up for the women in his life, I decided to be braid dad.

Let me tell you, other dads: This is not as easy as it sounds.

I have spent, intermittently, much of the last three years experimenting with brushing, pulling, gathering, wrapping, pinning, and—yes—braiding Kina’s hair, with very limited success. It has been humbling. Hairs out of place, loose and wobbly braids, poorly-placed ponytails—I have run the gamut of follicular abuse, and I have strived to be better. For that, I turn to my role models.

I’ve been thinking a lot about who we’ve become, which is connected somewhat to the question of who we have been. Some of that—without spending too much time diving into this—is how money has undermined our hard-wired intrinsic reward systems about giving gifts. The idea that pre-economic, post-monkey humans were somehow exchanging finite supplies of beaver pelts for finite supplies of literally everything else a single human being needs to survive seems inefficient at best; these societies have to have been built on the foundation of communal sufficiency, contribution, and gratitude. We’re not out here running around feeling a primal sense of joy when we pick out gifts or see them sitting under a tree for nothing. We are hard-wired to show up for each other and keep each other alive.

That’s the monkey.

What I worry about, instead, is what replaces that monkey: A zero-sum game of power and control that leverages scarcity for influence, that incentivizes hoarding, that creates myths about superiority and rifts in culture. The people out there who claim that life is nasty, brutish, and short—who preach the cult of the alpha wolf and prep to be the last ones standing on Earth or the first ones standing on Mars—are telling us a story about the market-based past that is self-fulfilling. Money, the abstract container of value, which can’t feed any of us or keep us warm, is driving our evolution to our worst possible selves.

Laurea’s on the road—Kina’s Event Parent—and we get a little solo time together here at TDKHQ for the next week. We would have celebrated with cupcakes, but the store that Kina spotted the cupcakes in was actually a soap store. Who’s out here bathing with cupcakes? This neighborhood.

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I mean, we are all equally baffled by the size of her feet. It is a collective puzzlement.

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It was 90 degrees in Brooklyn today, and while the scuttlebutt on the playground was that the water-spurting turtles were on, they were dry as a bone by the time Kina arrived at the scene. A climate reminder: It is not yet halfway through April.

For a little more context on the turtles, and the equity of water features in New York City, a couple prior editions for you to peruse on your fire escapes, or with your face firmly planted in front of a dusty box fan in the window:

Purple is compassion, or calm. Red is mad. Green is happy.

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We never plan for spring break in this house, so it’s fake school all week here at the Daily Kina.

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Being six means being the kind of person who actually questions whether or not the sky is quite as empty as we believe it to be.

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We had expected more of a huntable egg hunt than what the Isle of Governors laid out for Kina and a few hundred of her closest five-to-eight-year-old friends yesterday. Instead, a field strewn with gaily-painted wooden eggs was penned in by yellow nylon twine, sheltered from the hungry pawing of the massed crowd. A lone person in a creepy easter bunny outfit roamed the edges of the field, like a monarch before their troops, urging them into greater frenzies.

As the hour of the battle neared, the children pressed in against the rope inch by inch, until a few pink eggs slid into arms’ reach; the marauders swept them up in silence while the referees were otherwise distracted. “Take three big steps backwards,” said one of the adults, and the children relented, even as their little hands clutched the rope.

And then, suddenly, the clock struck eleven, and the border was breached. The children on the southern front, with Kina, rushed in screaming, yanking the eggs from the grass and tossing them into the baskets at their hips. Kina fell to her knees in a cluster of pink eggs, sweeping great numbers of them into her pail as the thunder of footsteps echoed around her.

Today’s stop in the longest thing on earth: Governor’s Island (aka Staten Island, aka Long Island), our little pop-up newsroom.

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Start spreading the news etc etc

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Laurea and I are now well trained in recognizing the sound of Kina hitting the floor of her room at 6:30 AM. One can only imagine what it is like to live underneath her. Sorry, neighbor.

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I don’t know how it’s taken me three years to enter my cubist period.

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It’s not clear to this reporter who was really getting the most satisfaction from the nightly bath—the bather or the bathing assistant.

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Dear Kina,

The illustration at the top left of the page here is of the two of us, in 2020, drawing the first Daily Kina. You were three years old. If this newspaper were a person, it would be three now. That makes you six. You're good at math; you knew that.

The thing I've been thinking for the last few weeks is that I really don't know what three years feels like, and I don't think I'd ever fully considered it before—I've never stared squarely at that period of time. Until this very moment, three years didn't ever feel like a long time. It was shorter than most of the jobs I'd ever held, shorter than high school, shorter than a presidential administration.

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of this legacy media institution—don’t forget!—but this weekend was Top Spring, and we all know that Top Spring comes (like Daily Kina Day) but once a year. Kina made the most of it, as you can see. Boing crew and all.

Kina Oven Hands—for those who pay attention to the daily portrait—is the version of Kina I had to wrangle this morning as I finished the Sunday edition. She was a real charmer, and well-insulated from hot ovens.

A brief note before I begin: Monday is the third anniversary of the Daily Kina, and I’d like to invite you all to send over little mastheads, portraits, or headlines of your own in celebration of this auspicious occasion, which I will be pleased to share here. Thanks to all of you who find this newspaper a fulfilling daily ritual. We think of you often. Okay, let’s go:

There are seven and a half months every calendar year in which Kina and her oldest, dearest friend are the same age. That period has at last begun again, now that both of them are six.

You can help protect the Brooklyn Public Library from cuts by sending a note to your city council member and Mayor Adams, who—in addition to further reductions in education spending—has proposed vast cuts to services and hours in the public library systems of New York City in the upcoming budget, even as the NYPD blows through its half-billion dollar overtime allocation for fiscal year 2023. Libraries have consistently demonstrated their value to this city as safe and equitable spaces for New Yorkers of all ages. They support our citizens for a fraction of the cost of the carceral negligence our tax dollars otherwise fund. A library card is a powerful statement; bear it with pride.

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Just kidding—the grievances come more frequently than once a year.

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When she got home from the playground, she lifted them gently out of her pocket and lined them up perfectly on the coffee table, one by one, clearing everything else away, and then ran to get hair ties.

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It’s kind of just ingredients all the way down, isn’t it?

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Hat trick!

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It was too nice outside today, so I brought some construction paper to the playground and drew today’s edition as Kina bubbled around with her chums. This was a delightful distraction for her after a day of worrying about the random daddy longlegs she found in her toy bin whilst sorting yesterday. As I tried to gently nudge it out of her bedroom, Kina drew a little dance floor for it, which seemed to distract it for long enough to let Kina escape.

Life’s weird.

Says Kina after breakfast in response to an inquiry about the best way to spend this rainy day: “Let’s sort the toys.”

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Witches wear green.

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To be fair, it was nearly imperceptibly stinky yesterday. I would know, because she gets her sense of smell from me.

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2020 may as well have been the dawn of time, when I was once in first grade. Kina did all the illustrations today—first time in a while. I think they’re hilarious.

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Six years old, a teenager: a case study. (Not pictured here is Laurea, who is allowed to at least cross the street.)

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Here, Kina has drawn her own “Fudashins Bord”, which help her students to write their letters properly.

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Kina was, when she was younger, eerily at ease with having her blood drawn. This is convenient, as her allergies require an annual visit to the phlebotomist for tests, which was our morning occupation again yesterday.

The first time she had her blood drawn, it was in her doctor’s office, and we approached the process with the anticipation of certain doom, restraining her with all our might as she struggled and screamed, surrounded by three scowling nurses. It took hours for the adrenaline to wear off.

A year later, with a visit booked to a nondescript clinic on 14th Street, Laurea and I agreed to assume and expect nothing at all, and escorted our two-year-old child (whose long-term memory was still flimsy) through the door and into a fluorescent-lit back room festooned with Disney decals.

I love that Kina showed me her shady face and then was super shady to me in the same breath.

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School’s haunted.

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You know you’re six when the bus ride to midtown is as exciting as the musical you took the bus to see.

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I leave the house for one day and suddenly she can do a flip.

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