It is absolutely one the best things to hear your kid singing herself to sleep with a song that includes the lyric “breathe in a bag”.

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I think you can probably tell from today’s edition that Kina is getting more curious about things that feel threatening. Tonight she asked if we could watch tsunami videos or maybe just videos of “people being hit by huge waves”, which is fortunately a search term with relatively underwhelming results on Youtube. In any case, this recent obsession with natural disaster hasn’t resulted in any commensurate increase in nightmares, and so I’m playing along by making bowls of oobleck for Kina in the minutes before bedtime and watching her figure out how to extract herself from quicksand—should she ever need to.

Short answer: it takes a long time to sink, but don’t get too comfortable.

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Happy continued New Year from the world’s most committed celebrant.

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In just two months, this newspaper will be the same age Kina was when I first starting drawing it. She still remembers that time, and the kids and teachers at her little preschool—where she looked down from the rooftop playground and smiled as she thought about me.

Hi to all the teachers from Small World!

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Still working on the new Kina figure. Posture is tricky when you add detail!

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The kid has started to show an interest in that part of our lives that predated her arrival, focusing largely on the bits after we met (Kina having traditionally believed that we were somehow always together.) We collectively spent a few hours yesterday filling her in on the things she wasn’t there to see about our relationship, all of which she listened to voraciously.

In her mind, everything about our lives as a couple—from the day Laurea first shook my hand—was aimed squarely at marriage (and really, squarely at a wedding day). This could not be further from the truth. What we didn’t talk to Kina about was how uncertain both of us were about pursuing a long-distance relationship back in 2002, how reticent Laurea was to get married, and how long it took for us to get our heads around having a baby.

With that long arc in mind, there were many stories with which to regale our darling daughter about our brilliant and carefree lives before she arrived. Laurea and I have often talked about those years, but always in the quiet hours after Kina goes to sleep—fearful, I suppose, that she’d feel both insulted by our nostalgia and left out by our stories. It felt good to be able to talk to Kina about the parties, the travel, the jobs, the friends, the wedding—and she was soaking it all up.

Thanks to Uncle Ken for the makings of a fort. Thanks to Mommy for tolerating a garish nylon mansion in the middle of Kina’s room.

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I have spent a not-insignificant part of my career explaining how Google Docs works, and so it is both a little impressive and a little scary that Kina just went for it this way, because she is six and has never used Google Docs.

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This is the “stop hitting yourself” of manipulative kid questions.

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As we reckon with this moment in which the child no longer wants her father to stand nearby at drop-off, sending him into a spiral of separation anxiety, I will direct you to the last two times I got stuck to the fence.

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I appreciate Kina’s concern for my well being, but I think it’s a bit early for the child to become the parent—even as I see myself in her this way.

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p.s. “Is there any, like, nineties day?”

Mommy comes back with trinkets, is exhausted, loved by daughter beyond measure.

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The problem with justice is that gymnastics always gets in the way. Aside: Still tinkering with figure stuff here, and introducing Wammawink from Centaurworld, which I will have to write about here someday.

To be fair, the mandarins were really small, but she ate another dozen later this evening. We agree that mandarins are really good and probably better than candy.

For fun, tried out a more detailed Kina figure today, but not sure I have the patience to work it out.

The orange is great, tho. Weekend energy.

I only have the one kid, so I can’t tell if Kina is more obsessed with danger and darkness than the average child, but this week’s emergent theme of harm and threat seems very much in line with Kina’s fascinations in general over the last year. She binge-watches videos about insect stings, fast-forwards her cartoons to the bits where a tornado sucks up all the main characters, and will calmly enjoy the bits from Princess Mononoke in which people’s limbs are sliced off as she eats kernels of popcorn.

I’m not particularly inclined to say she’s been desensitized to violence, so much as that she’s not yet sure what the violence signifies or leads to. Still, after a recent spate of nightmares, it seems that she’s starting to evaluate the risk of being near things that are dangerous, and that includes New York.

As she and I quietly drove back from her cousin’s birthday on Wednesday night, she randomly asked me whether or not there were things in the city that were dangerous, and drew as examples upon the things she’s most likely to think are dangerous: tornadoes and earthquakes principally, with a slightly less pointed curiosity about limb-slashing.

Happy birthday to Kina’s only cousin and spiritual brother, who could not bring himself to smash a cake specifically produced for that purpose. Otis, your sister-cousin enjoyed the unsmashed slice of cake she was able to eat as a result. Bless you, flower king.

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The funny thing about Truth or Dare for six year olds is that all the truth stuff is super factual, like “do birds fly?” and “do you love Mommy?”

Both, of course, truly yes answers.

I’m scared to go “dare”, but I will keep you informed as things unfold.

Strangely enough, I remember this feeling from when I was small—smaller, even, than I felt I ought to have been at the time. We never quite feel like the person we see in the mirror, which leads me to wonder who we think we are, and where that person comes from.

Lately, I look in the mirror and feel somewhat older than I ought to be—which has been an ongoing process, obviously, in ways that are different than simply being shorter than you might expect. I suspect my assumption about how old I am is shifting about as quickly as the person looking back at me (and out at all of you), but that’s likely a process of continual begrudging acceptance. I’m not thirty anymore, and I’m very quickly realizing that I’m not forty anymore, and that line of reasoning becomes increasingly untenable as a human being, and so I just don’t spend much time with mirrors.

So, who is this person who isn’t reflected in the mirror?

It’s kind of hard to explain how fun it was yesterday to take Kina to Central Park (which we are obligated by our Standards desk to call “Zentals Park”) and just let her tell us what to do. Having started at one of the Central Park East playgrounds, we found ourselves crowded out by billionaires and fled to the common fields, where Kina had a significantly better time climbing rando boulders for the next two hours in her frilly princess dress (complete with formal gloves). We traded tips on how to climb some of the more complex rocks, did some sketching in the ethereal golden light, and took in the unusually warm January air together—though I was probably underdressed for the occasion in ways that Kina and her mother were not, for which Kina fully roasted me.

At one point, after climbing a particularly tall boulder, Kina sat with me and mused quietly, “This is so fun.” I think I have never been happier as a parent than I was in that moment, sitting with a literal princess in Zentals Park and knowing that she recognized how special it was to be there.

I love this kid.

And with that, the end of the third calendar year of this cursed pandemic and the blessed publication of The Daily Kina. Kina is now six, and the year is now 2023, and the time she spends with her friends is more independent and sassy and full of nonsense drama that sometimes makes all the friends cry at the very same time.

Faithful readers will recall that we spent last New Year’s Eve with Futura, too. In that short newsletter, I offered the wish that “…this year (the third calendar year of this august publication) [might] be better, for all of us, than the last.” The good thing about Kina’s childhood, in the main, is that each year is a bit better than the last—in the sense that Kina has become something greater this year than she was a year ago (though she was no less cute in 2021 than today, I’d offer). Kids, in other words (if you are lucky), trend towards improvement.

In the waning hours of 2022, we wish you treasure and health as you advance into the new year.

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Babies don’t know these things intuitively.

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Date day is always the best Christmas present.

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The speeches were the best part.

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Socialites gather in the waning hours of 2022.

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It’s hard to explain the soup game, but easy to explain dopamine stress.

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It’s that day again—no time to write; if you celebrate, Merry Christmas to you.

Kina used one of her Christmas presents to produce today’s slightly small edition of Parade at Des and Andrew’s place, about an hour before she totally melted down. Big day for kids!

Our critic is a pierogi minimalist. Delicioso!

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It can be hard to say sorry, and we should all be sorry sometimes.

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I am very nearly certain she learned this from Octonauts, but it is also possible that she really believes this horrible and yet hypothetically effective myth. Better not pout—I’m telling you why.

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I swear I looked up the quietest possible humidifier, and she still wakes us up complaining about all the humidifier noise. Don’t even get her started on how she can hear Laurea whispering to me from two rooms away. Kina’s ears are like her tongue—sharp.

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Something something the sun.

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In the quarter century I have lived in this city, I have never once been to the ballet. It is with a slight twinge of envy, then, that I escorted Kina to the Upper West Side for a date with my sibling Andrew, who had obtained for the occasion two tickets to the annual New York City Ballet performance of The Nutcracker, which is apparently a Very Important Holiday Tradition for thousands of New Yorkers.

For a little girl whose exposure to ballet has until now been a series of small classes conducted in her friend’s living room in the midst of a global pandemic (and a handful of more traditional classes in an actual studio), I think the opportunity to see real live ballerinas on stage performing an entire ballet was revelatory.

After the performance, Andrew took Kina around to the side door of the theater and introduced her to their friend Mary Liz, who had performed the role of Frau Stahlbaum (and has danced Nutcracker in the company for nearly twenty years now). After complimenting Kina on her gorgeous dress and flawless arabesque, she placed in Kina’s hands a little baggie full of the paper’s confetti “snow” that falls from the rafters at the end of the performance, along with a signed pair of the pointe shoes she had worn that very night. “To Kina,” they read, “Keep smiling and dancing!”

Kina’s insights about us, her lifelong roommates, have become more and more insightful and shocking as she navigates her own emotions and finds parallels with our own. Of those insights, the most recent was that Laurea is always in a rush to get out of the house and offers only the most cursory of smooches when she’s on her way to work. “Gotta go!” chirped Kina, in imitation of her mother’s speedy departures, as she planted a little smacker on Laurea’s cheek.

Love is love, even when it’s fleeting.

This kid is a bandit.

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Kina galaxy-braining TGIF into TGIW.

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Playing whack-a-mole with the kid’s control issues. Snuggle-a-mole, I guess. Whatever, I slept great.

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We haven’t really talked about this here, but Kina’s back on the middle-of-the-night wake-ups, a trend in sleep regression that we have come to accept as normal and natural and survivable. Usually, we get something back in return—an expanded vocabulary, more sophisticated sense of humor, or increased patience. In this case, we think it’s attached to a developing awareness of her own emotions.

We took her to the New York Hall of Science last weekend to hide out from the rain and do a little sciencing, and her favorite exhibit—unexpectedly—was the Happiness Experiment, an exhibit designed to explore different emotions and their relationship to color, movement, and expression. There was a little station set up where you could write down an event in your life that had made you feel a particular emotion, and Kina just posted up there for half an hour with a stack of cards, writing down different emotions and the events that had elicited them:

“IT MAX ME SAD WEN MY DAD PUS ME IN MY RUM”

Tag yourself—I’m “won’t chase”. Bingo!

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Despite her birthday yesterday, our teenager is a caaaallllllmmmm teenager, but she is not an adult. This is a great comfort to all of us.

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It has been a crazy long weekend, and yesterday was a particularly long day of assembly and adventures for Kina and her family. As I write this, Kina is (probably) asleep in her new loft bed, having aged today (by her measure) half a year in a single moment—from “five and a half” to “six” at the stroke of midnight.

I don’t have much to say about six that I didn’t say about five, or four. Kina is a miracle, and she’s kept us alive and kicking through the last six years (and the last three of those in particular). Today, as she chanted the traditional “Are you one! Are you two! Are you three!” she just kept going past six to ten and then eighteen and thirty-one, and it made me remember all those birthdays of my own, and how long it’s taken me to become who I am.

Who was I at six? A little boy spreading Elmer’s glue on his hands and hoping to become Spider-Man, who would run into the snow drifts to hide outside his house when he felt slighted, who loved his first grade teacher because she knew he loved to read and gave him the space to do more of it, who would soon move to another town in another state, and another, and another.

We are still just approaching Kina’s birthday, but the official party was last night, at a furiously whimsical play space about ten minutes from our house. Kina and her friends took the spot over and tan themselves ragged for an hour and a half, then screamed as the back wall disappeared, revealing a glowing room full of unicorns and pizza.

It was mind-boggling. The kids lost it. Best birthday ever, and a noted departure from her fourth birthday, in 2020, which you get to read about every year—as a reminder of why this newspaper exists.

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I dunno. Sometimes you just feel a little stinky.

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In reality, she was calling out all these activities herself and shooting them all down instantly. It was impressive.

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Let me first say: If you ever hoped to be inspired by the majesty of newspapers, you could not do better than to visit the New York Times printing plant in Flushing at 8:30 in the evening. It reminds you of everything we are holding onto in journalism, and everything that we have lost. It is also a very cool place full of very cool people who have been working on something very impossible every single day for as long as anybody can remember.

It is also full of robots and things that spin at some ungodly speed in the service of printed news. Kina would absolutely love it.

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Certainly we can agree that robots are trustworthy and not at all ominous. Also, why didn’t anybody point out that I have been stamping these as 2023?

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Listen: I’m just saying, when you have a mix of vegetarian and meat chilis at the cook-off, and a significant portion of your Brooklyn elementary school parent audience is vegetarian, you’re not going to get a clean view of the field.

I mean, just speaking statistically.

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Gonna close off this chili storyline tomorrow, once all the cumin and meat smells are fully exorcised from the apartment for the night. We have lit candles, y’all.

Real Warhol vibes today, as Kina goes multimedia on the rainbows for the first time. She had originally intended for the rainbows to emerge from a giant pot of chili, but the integrity of her vision is obviously more flexible than my own.

I feel both honored and personally attacked here.

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How many ways can she possibly shut me down?

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