Kina wears fuzzy slippers, eats baked beans and orange slices at breakfast buffet, goes on unplanned easter egg hunt in hotel restaurants, then bids a fond farewell to London
Kina looks out over London on our last morning. What a trip.
The miracle of puppetry has publisher at the edge of her seat in Drury Lane
Eventually, this staged version of My Neighbor Totoro will make its way to New York, at which point all my NYC readers should make their way to see the giant Totoro puppet. So sayeth the Publisher.
Okay, needed a bit of a break after the fifth anniversary post, and now we’re in London, which I do want to get to. And so: Here’s everything in between, starting ten days ago.
“When I Graduate from College, Am I Supposed To Get an Apartment or a Job First?“
Kid gets pretty stressed out over customer entry to adulthood
One thousand eight hundred twenty-six of the most momentous days in the history of the world, as experienced by this one kid in Brooklyn
The other day, we were all sitting around and watching videos of a much younger Kina, laughing at her squeaky little voice as she wore headphones and stomped around our apartment dragging a tiny wooden wagon full of blankets, threatening to go to the seashore because I wasn't listening to her.
That video is from April 9, 2020. Kina was three years old, and The Daily Kina—the newspaper you are reading right now—was six days old. Today, she is eight, and this esteemed publication is exactly five years old. If I am correct that I have not missed a single day, then there are one thousand eight hundred and twenty-six (1,826) editions of this periodical expression of one child's life sitting in several archival boxes on a shelf in her room.
Looking through those boxes would show you a change so gradual that you'd barely notice how much Kina was changing. A day is still a day, and one to the next is much the same, on paper as in life. But give it an hour or so—at a minute per issue, say—and you'd see Kina getting more curious, learning to read, trying to express herself, making sense of time. You'd notice me as I stopped calling her “toddler”, as I drew her a bit taller (and with real limbs), as her participation in the tradition of drawing a Sunday Parade tapered off, and then again as she started drawing and writing some of these pages herself. By the time you reached today's edition, some thirty hours later, you'd feel like you watched Kina grow up, but even then you just barely did. You missed the tantrums and the sleeping and the goofy laugh and all the things I forgot to write down and the way she still holds my hand when she crosses the street. I sometimes turn to the paper to figure out when something happened; sometimes it's in the boxes, often it's not. There's so much here. You missed so much.
Publisher understands that even Mommies with expectations are nice
Kina’s helping me paint a lot of these editions lately. Sometimes she makes a little accidental blotch with the paint, and she says, “Sorry! I didn’t mean to!”
I tell her there are no apologies in art. It’s all there for a reason.
Mommy and Daddy shudder as they realize they’ve been doing this for years
What if we have been eating with our mouths open the entire time we have known each other, and the only way we finally found out is because our kid inherited the recessive gene trait of closed-mouth eating?
Challenged to find a question Daddy won’t answer, kid goes for broke
I have explained to Kina how people die and what it means to die, but I don’t think I had ever really thought about why we die. It seems nonsensical, like a fault in the laws of the universe. I understand entropy, of course, and the shortening of telemeres, the hardening of soft tissues and the brittleness of hard things. It’s hard to understand why things dissolve and what purpose it serves for us to… stop existing.
I don’t know how to answer that. It doesn’t make sense.
Volunteer stylist also dinged for brushing hair too hard
Kina makes me pretend to be a chatty hairstylist when I brush her hair, but I fear she has taken her role as a demanding client too seriously. Type 2Bs, amirite?
I am warning you right now, her rationale is a real gut punch
I think the alternatives she gave to us, her parents, for the ideal superpower were “going back in time” and “transporting yourself”, but she has picked “going back in time” so that she can live her life again and again and never lose the ones she loves. I think I’m still just a little heartbroken. I want us all to live forever, which is a superpower all unto itself, but it might also be nice to go back with Kina and the rest of my family to, well, another time.
Daddy recalls early pandemic sandwich walks with 4-year-old Kina
Cheddar Cheese and Bacon makes its first showing in The Daily Kina in a secondary headline on August 13 of 2020, in the height of outdoor dining, when Kina discovered the wonders of a good bacon, egg, and cheese. Then, about a year later, we had a celebratory visit to Cheddar Cheese and Bacon. We haven’t documented a morning visit to the mothership since then, and so it is with great pleasure thatKina and I walked to the local coffee shop for a sandwich on a day off from school, splitting it straight down the middle and talking about dogs. I missed it, really.
First client in the door on Sunday morning gets the onyx studs
I don’t know that I’ve felt the passage of time so keenly as I did when I watched Kina’s face transition between cusp-of-weeping anxiety and confident adulthood as she got holes punched in her earlobes.
I can’t say it any other way than that she is this much closer to growing up.
Publisher visits archives of The Daily Kina, unearths forgotten mysteries
For those of you who have been receiving your daily (sometimes) copy of this publication for more than four years, you may recall a storyline about a mysterious toy called “Oakwul” that consumed a few weeks of newspapers in the midst of the pandemic lockdown.
Last night, I pulled out one of seven archival storage boxes containing every edition of The Daily Kina and walked Kina through a few at random. Watching her read about herself at the tender age of three, from a time she barely recalls, was deeply satisfying for me.
I’ve always said that this newspaper is for Kina more than it is for anybody else, and now that I can give it to her in little chunks, it feels like I’ve kept a promise.
Ski Week is over and the teachers are healthy again; she brings home a poster with all the nice things classmates think about her cat drawings
It’s a bit late for Valentine’s Day, but the teachers got the flu (I thought they’d get off scot-free, but nope) and then there is a random week of vacation that probably should happen in December but doesn’t, and so here come the valentines.
It’s a nonsense holiday, but the way kids do it is kind of nice. People like her drawings and how she picks people up. It’s a vibe.
She refuses to tell me anything about it, but Ken says she had fun.
It’s really hard to paint a well-lit finale from a Broadway show with watercolors when you’ve never seen the show and your kid won’t tell you anything about it.
Client moves to the Big Girl Chair for the first time; we celebrate with hair decoration
I think that a publisher who gets out of the taxicab chair and sits in the Big Girl Chair after six years of haircuts deserves a little strand of fairy hair or two. Just a little older. Just a little.
