Kina doesn’t like it when you clap before the show is over.

dad

Kina’s favorite food is pasta, and among her favorite places to go to eat it is a Roman restaurant down the street from us. She reliably orders either the rigatoni in tomato sauce or the carbonara, relishing every starchy bite. Reliably, I suppose, until last night, when she instead chose a mixed-greens salad.

This felt significant to me in a way that I hadn’t considered might be inspired by a bowl of lettuce. Kina has eaten pasta since she started eating food, really, and Laurea and I take great joy in serving it to her and building our restaurant visits around access to various pastas (when we aren’t completely burned out on pasta, which happens with increasing regularity). To hear her order salad instead was a shot across the bow of the S.S. Someday She’ll Be An Adult and All You Can Do Is Sit By and Watch.

Periodically, I stop to wonder when Kina will stop wearing princess dresses. The conventional wisdom, as I understand it, is “usually sometime between six and seven years old”. It felt charming, two years ago, to be perplexed and overwhelmed by Kina’s forest of taffeta—to muse out loud about how we hadn’t expected or facilitated this, or to roll our eyes in dramatic exasperation. We had, what, three years of this? Princess dresses, every single day.

I didn’t want to put her pukey day on blast in our last issue, but it felt notable that Kina had more or less no conscious interaction with the world—with the exception of a bite of breakfast and a spoon of soup at lunch—at all yesterday. This is classic Sick Kina, I should say; she stays almost entirely still for 24 hours, runs a steady fever, and then pops up suddenly like a marionette and asks for popsicles. It’s very worrisome, until it’s not.

Today she’s fine. Who knows.

dad

I wish we were available to go to a musical in the middle of the day with my kid and her entire first grade class. I mean, really, I really do. The outcome would either be devastatingly charming or pure chaos. It would be lovely, indeed.

A lot more lovely than what we endured last night. But that’s for tomorrow.

dad

I love the games that kids invent on playgrounds.

dad

According to this Paper of Record, Kina’s lower left incisor started wiggling on January 22, over a month ago. We would periodically forget that it was wiggly, then be reminded suddenly as Kina’s mouth squirmed on the couch while she fussed at the tooth with the tip of her tongue. Just over a week ago, we reported on the “good news” of Kina’s still-wiggly tooth (and the solemn end of carnival).

Yesterday, “just after pack-up”, Kina’s tooth finally fell out, as her jubilant classmates cheered her great accomplishment. The tooth came home in an envelope. The envelope came home in a backpack. The backpack came home on the back of a newly-untoothed child whose first question was where she would have to put the envelope in order to be found by the Tooth Fairy.

The Tooth Fairy is the one myth we have not shattered. I’m not sure why. It’s probably because the Tooth Fairy is the only imaginary creature whose sole interest is Kina—and Kina’s teeth, specifically.1 There’s something transactional about the Fairy that is fascinating, and I should by all accounts dislike the idea of the Fairy, but the Fairy delivered as expected. Having once delivered a million-dollar bill, she dropped her rate to a mere ten dollars (nine dollars more than I typically received from the same fairy, though that was over 40 years ago).

Playing Marco Polo inside the relatively confining passages of a New York City apartment is murder on the toes and not nearly as refreshing as when you play it in a cold swimming pool in the middle of a summer scorcher. I was heretofore unfamiliar with the whole pregame involving Eenie Meenie Miney Moe and all the players switching around like a game of human three-card Monte, but we take our joys where we can get them.

I will also note that Kina’s approach to Marco Polo is basically “Marco”, because she believes you shouldn’t have to yell “Polo”, and that the Marco just needs to use their superhuman sense of hearing to detect subtle movements from several feet away. Great idea for those whose ears have not been battered for years by city noise and poor choices regarding loud music.

dad

Kina has made a habit for weeks now of drawing elaborate pictures of rainbows and cats and pizza for any restaurant she visits. Invariably, whoever takes the picture from her puts it up on the pass in the kitchen or at the host’s stand at the entrance or next to the Heimlich instructions. It happens with such frequency now that I fully expect her drawings to become a topic of conversation among cooks and servers at the places that cooks and servers go after work—which, presumably, would be a restaurant with a Kina picture behind the bar.

Every card that Kina makes for her friends the servers is signed “FOR YOU FROM KINA”, which I like because it is not nearly as self-centered as an autograph, but rather conveys a sense of personal gratitude—which is the intended effect. It makes me want to eat out more often, and I hope it makes you want to draw little pictures for your servers at restaurants, too.

Tip well!

Spent the day with Kina yesterday, as Laurea spent a little time at the spa. This gave me the chance to watch her destroy a beef patty in order “to find the pudding”, to help her buy two completely non-princess dresses, and to convince her to let us converse in operatic recitative for over half an hour—probably the greatest triumph of them all.

Amidst all of this, I was clearly gazing at her lovingly, which she interpreted as having something to do with employment. It’s an oddball headline, but it’s Sunday and we’ll take it.

For a later Daily Kina, I’ll come back to this question of the fading interest in princess dresses. The feeling is subtle but present, and Kina’s dress purchase yesterday signified something to me that I’ll have to confirm in a few months. The end of an era, maybe.

Sound of one hand clapping.

dad

The NYC public school system has over one million students, all of whom are eligible for free lunch and breakfast. Kina avails herself of both, in addition to the breakfast she eats at home. She shares her table with kids from families all over the neighborhood—some well-off, some below the poverty line. The fact that they all eat breakfast, for free, without question or distinction, means that nobody has to be singled out, pitied, or shamed. This is one of the greatest and most important social programs in the city. Kina loves the yogurt.

dad

It is funny to be a kid and believe that you need to have a favorite planet, and then deliberate on the matter and make a choice that involves your parents. That is not how cosmology works, kid!

dad

I really do try not to annoy Kina, but she desperately hates it when I sing, and I went to college for a degree in music performance, so we are at loggerheads here. Still, as annoying as I can be, I am equally lovable in ways that cannot be ignored. This is how family works.

dad

That damn tooth has been wiggly for literal months. I have no idea what it has to do with carnival, but I’m quite proud of her imagined costume and felt it merited top coverage.

dad

It was nice having Lala in town for a few days this week, even if her granddaughter pressed her continually for frilly dresses. That is just their love language. That, and truth.

dad

Thank you to Kina’s darling Lala, here for the weekend, who watched Kina overnight as her parents overate and stayed in a fancy hotel and read the printed Sunday paper like old fashioned humans.

Thank you also to Kina for this chaotic Parade. I helped out with the little Kinas hanging everywhere. If you read this as “for people who goth,” know that I did, too. It actually says “for people who join,” which is apparently her sales pitch for becoming a pledged subscriber. Unique value!

Look. At. Me.

dad

Kina’s Lala is here. Her Mommy’s Mommy, coincidentally, is also here—and it’s been a long time. So in the area grandparental affection, there’s an issue of scarcity and mutual exclusivity that Kina has been wrestling with all day.

There are moments, even without my mother-in-law around, in which Kina doesn’t like us talking to each other. Sometimes she says it’s because it’s distracting. Sometimes she frets that it’s boring. I suspect much of it is about her not being part of the story.

I think readers of this paper can appreciate that Kina is the center of the universe, no? Imagine what it must be like to be the sun—or daughter—when the satellites that orbit you had once themselves been the center of their own respective solar systems, and what it might feel like when two of your satellites begin to orbit each other instead.

The Lala has landed. Let the games begin.

dad

The kid knows a lot about skin and the sea of germs through which our guts meander, separated by mere millimeters from a thorough blobbing-out and horrible sickness that could require the emergency application of a band aid or medicine.

dad

It must be a strange thing to come to that moment in your childhood when you realize that your life is actually, technically, your own. It’s certainly not the case that your parents feel that way, having spent the prior half decade ensuring you do not fall into holes or starve to death; your life is their problem, as far as they are concerned. It’s not even the case that you know what agency in your life truly means—and it is probably a good thing that you don’t.

It’s just that you really wanted a third consecutive pasta meal, and you have come to understand that it is reasonably arbitrary that another human being gets to choose otherwise on your behalf.

I get it. It sucks. They also write newspapers about you every day, which I imagine will also someday be an issue. Until then, it is your life; we just cannot eat another bowl of pasta.

This may well be one if my favorite headlines ever. Living with a kid this age is incredible. She’s sound asleep in the other room, and in the center of the universe. What a gift.

dad

I cannot tell you how proud I am of Kina and her commitment to gowns-for-all in the face of insidious societal transphobia. She’s a fantastic daughter and a great friend to Nicky, whom she’s known for her entire life and who looks totally fetching in his prince’s dress.

This is language she’s constructed for herself, by the way, which is amazing to me. She’s building a moral case for dresses out of plain cloth. It’s sad that she’s having to do this out of a sense of opposition to ignorance, but she’ll need that later on.

We hope that this daily front page has been clear in its commitment to trans lives, and we can promise you that it always will be.

It can’t possibly get much bigger than a hundred and one, can it?

dad

Kina doesn’t see a lot of value in proper tea etiquette.

dad

You heard it here first, folks.

dad

To be fair, caftans are pretty comfortable even when you’re six. She wrote the fake glasses today, too, once the other fake elders finally arrived.

dad

It was truly such an epic weekend that even the sight of Kina on a dance floor at the local bowling alley dancing to a Beyoncé cover band and tearing into a chicken leg was just another passing example of the reckless abandon she brings to her favorite days of the week. Happy birthday, Georgia.

dad

For a very long time now, Kina has asked us to take her to a place of her own invention, where you can dress up in costumes and do makeup things and hang out with your friends and without parents and have your pick of tiaras. Ha! Ha! says her father—surely that is either nonexistent or will cost a million dollars.

Reader, it exists, and you can drop your child off for two hours to the tune of just forty-five U.S. dollars. And! And! They will feed your child high tea and ply her with pink lemonade and take a cute polaroid picture of her dressed up as some princess or another and actually do a reasonably good job with the eye shadow.

Afterwards, when your child is wearing her normal princess dress that she brought from home, they will usher you out into the shadows of 19th Street between 7th and 8th, where your child and her friend will take each other by the arm and start walking down the sidewalk gossiping and laughing, completely ignoring that you are there and being extremely charming to passers-by.

It’s hard to imagine being able to write this newsletter without the invention of movable type by Johannes Dooginsberg. We can all thank Mister Dooginsberg for the advent of affordable bibles and other literature, efforts that underlie outstanding and ironically hand-drawn newsletters like the Daily Kina, to which you can still pledge your eternal allegiance.

Urk.

dad

She really must insist.

dad

Kina tells me that this elaborate spying ritual is all in service of preparing for a huge prank to be pulled on the boys crew sometime in the near future. When I ask her what the prank will look like, she describes the same roles: Distracter, Spy, Lookout. I explain to her that she’s missing the actual Pranker, but she seems unperturbed. The prank is just that the boys exist, and the prank is that the girls are spying on them, and the prank is forever.

dad

Honestly, ensuring that everybody gets valentines is the right move from a sociological perspective. What feels like chaotic neutral behavior is being maybe the one kid in class who receives all the valentines and hands none out because she does not have the patience to write twenty-three names out by hand, even as she writes me detailed notes about how I have failed her as a father by pooping for too long? Let’s see how this plays out.

dad

Another clutch parenting tip down the drain as Kina grooms her stuffies until well past 8 in the morning.

dad

Andrew won a Grammy®1 last night—her second, astonishingly—as the cellist of the Attacca Quartet, playing the music of Caroline Shaw. The newsroom here is very proud of her, having known her since before she was a Grammy®-award-winning artist, even before the publisher of this newspaper was born, even (if we may) when Andrew was Kina’s age and did not yet know how to play the cello.

That it is possible to grow from being a person I did not know to play the cello to being a person who now wins Grammys® for it seems like a minor miracle, but I can assure you it is the combination of a tremendous gift and many years of hard work that, frankly, I cannot imagine having put in the way Andrew has.

The last time Andrew won a Grammy® (words that I never imagined I’d say about a child whose musical gifts were once limited to playing the Jaws theme over and over), it was February of 2020, just a few weeks before the lockdown. To win an award like this comes with real privileges, and the Attacca Quartet got very few of them that year—a massive victory, but a real letdown of a parade. 2020 was a bad year for musicians, and I watched Andrew adapt and the quartet grow (sprouting not just a new second violinist, but also two additional children). It occurred to me that most musicians do not see an award like this even once in a lifetime, and it was good for Andrew to make the most of the one they got, even though times were tough.

The last time I wrote in this paper about the American Museum of Natural History was back in 2021, when we patted ourselves on the back about how wonderful it was to walk through the best museum in the entire world with a curious four-year-old. I still stand by that, but I can straight up tell you right now that it is even better with a six-year-old. Kina can read now, which means she can figure out what all the animals are, express her formidable opinions about gems (including the almost-certainly purloined Star of India, with its glittering star and complete absence of the color pink). She liked the dinosaurs enough, and she spent a very significant little moment under the belly of our friend the whale. All in all, an outstanding way to spend the coldest day of the year—and we didn’t even succumb to the call of the gift shop!

Kookoo bananas, for sure.

I’m not sure exactly what it feels like to be six and wake up feeling as though you’re not actually in your own body, but there is something about waking up from a dream and feeling in-between bodies, clawing for the edges of the dream while still making sense of your own eyeballs that does resonate with me. Bodies are strange things, and souls even stranger—nobody should have to reckon with them at 6:30 AM, in my opinion, but Kina seems to enjoy it enough, so I’ll leave the casual morning dissociation to her.

dad

Getting real “bingo” vibes off this drawing of Kina doing her finger guns thing—a development that has been extra amusing for her lucky parents.

I contemplated making “I’m Going Freestyle” the top headline today, but I was afraid I would not be able to do the shredded burrito justice in the big illustration.

So it goes.

When she wasn’t threatening to pluck out my chest hairs or watching videos about deadly slow lorises, Kina spent all morning defending her mother from my suggestions and mansplanations. Parry as I might with my own assertiob that I was being unfairly maligned, Kina came at me again and again, sticking her head out from her bedroom or yelling from the bathroom that “mommy was right”.

I seldom get the benefit of the doubt from my esteemed roommates here, but it is amusing at least to see somebody so small defend my wife’s honor in the matter of whether or not to parboil pierogies.

dad

Welcome, new subscribers, and thanks to those who have pledged their support of this august institution. I am clearly off to the races with an evening edition that arrives twelve hours late, but this is what the funding is for! Just kidding, I forgot and then I was asleep.

In any case, here we have Kina delaying her bedtime by insisting on what appeared at first to be three revolutionary products (à la Steve Jobs) but turned out to just be cutting out hearts together. It was lovable, fun, and crafty all at once.

I recognize, in the moment, that what Kina is doing here is complex; she does not want to go to sleep, she loves spending time with her parent friends, and she is a big fan of hearts. My first reaction to the “fun crafty loving” project—much of the time—is mostly to suggest that it might actually be time for bed, but I’m learning to relish the moment differently. I do enjoy spending time with my child friend, of course, and I’m getting used to the hearts.

Okay, setting aside Kina’s unwillingness to commit to a long-term relationship with the PBS gross nature videos channel, I think we are all a little reasonably skeptical of liking and subscribing to things. I do not like being pandered to, and I like pandering even less.

And yet, here we go.

I’ve been drawing this paper every day now for almost three years. I’ve got it down, nestled tightly in the space between Kina brushing her teeth and Kina being rushed out the door (much to her dismay) to school. I have worked through at least fifteen Canson mixed-media pads, three stacks of the best white construction paper in the entire world, and an irresponsible number of Crayola washable markers. I do this, as I have said, for my own mental well-being, for some future Kina who wants to know what this time was like, and for you, the person who is reading this.

Sometimes I scream while closing my mouth, too, but it doesn’t sound like whistling.

dad

Sorry to deliver this Sunday paper so late; Kina pranked away my energy to write newsletters yesterday. It is presumably to be found wherever she put Laurea’s purse.

“Don’t make this into a Parade!”

As of 6:30 PM, she liked the babysitter well enough, but the jury’s out.

dad

Kina gets her collector’s habit, I think, from me. Lately, as you can see, the collection is stones.

Also: I am proud of my zebra, and somewhat shocked that Kina knows what the African savannah is?

dad

It’s okay, folks, we figured it out.

dad

The school gates close at 8:30. She got dressed at 8:15 today. I will accept any and all strategies for solving this.

dad

She later admitted that the wound matched the shape of her thumbnail.

dad

Kina’s friend invited us out to a famous ice-dancing extravaganza that is actually much better than I thought it would be, but mostly because I got to watch Kina stare with astonishment at a bunch of skating princesses for two hours. There was snow, though, and a giant crab. And fire. They set fire to the skating rink. You had to be there.

dad

Happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate. Kina would like you to know that there are no rabbits in our family.

It might be difficult to discern, but I made this Parade myself at a Riso workshop run by Futura’s dad (which is why the girls were having a play date). It looks like a mess, but it is a slightly art-y mess, and it makes this whole project like 1% more zine-y.