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!

dad

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.

dad

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.

dad

I dunno. Sometimes you just feel a little stinky.

dad

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

dad

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.

dad

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?

dad

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.

dad

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.

dad

How many ways can she possibly shut me down?

dad

“Do you want to touch it?”

“No.”

dad

I feel like we need to recondition Kina‘a expectations about business trips.

dad

I think she’s just telling me that while she’s capable of not eating candy, she’s unwilling to not eat candy. And we all have our boundaries.

dad

Wherever you filed the edition on empathy, you can probably file this, too. It’s important to remember that everybody is different, and that not everybody likes the same things you do, in quite the same way—whether flavors of ice cream, colors of nail polish, or whether or not they like chocolate.

Also, the story on the last headline today is that I was cleaning up in the kitchen while Kina was going to the bathroom last night, and after a few minutes of silence, she called out through the door, “You know, Daddy, someday you’ll be famous,” which was very nice of her to say but also strangely premonitory in tone. At least it’ll be for this, according to the kiddo. Monkey’s paw, and all that.

dad

I’m still exhausted from all the driving (and thank you, Ken, for sharing the load), but let me tell you—it is a wildly different thing to drive around with another adult in the passenger seat, instead of having them posted up behind you on Kina snack duty. As somebody who literally bought a car with the idea that his partner would be spending most of her time in the back seat with Kina, this is a novel and exciting development. Did it cost us two Kinder Eggs and seven hours of iPad time? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes.

I know I keep saying such and such this week’s Parade is my favorite yet, but this week’s parade is my favorite yet. Kina asked me to sketch a gem, and the rest was all her art direction: “only makeup colors, and mostly pink”. I think it turned out beautifully. It glitters.

I am the smooth dad.

dad

I was flat on my back after dinner, but this kid was running around like a maniac, lost between lunch and dinner.

dad

Staying in other houses is always tricky at bedtime, and there are some trips when I will wake up in the middle of the night and find myself alone in bed, with Laurea fast asleep in Kina’s borrowed bedroom. This is the only way either of us has any insight into Kina’s waking dynamic, which is aggressively forward-looking, as it turns out.

dad

Our apologies regarding the oxygen. We hope the non-stop iPad time helped with your suffering as we navigated bumper to bumper traffic through four states.

dad

I can’t believe she published before I did.

dad

In the last week, Kina’s favorite new sentence construction has been, “How would you feel if I [did what you are currently doing?]”. She always says this with an air of patient superiority, as if she’s been waiting to teach me a lesson about my behavior for years—which, in some cases, is probably true. The suggestion of empathy as a corrective tool is novel, but it’s hard sometimes to imagine what it must be like to be roughly six years old.

It is clearly overwhelming sometimes, and focus and respect are hard to come by. People are interrupting you constantly and not helping you in the ways that you expect (or need) to be helped. Weekends end too soon, and tasks leak into the joyful spaces that you’ve set aside for yourself. The fear and anxiety of the people around you can be hard to manage, and this hardly seems like something they, as adults, should be putting on you, but they’ve come to depend on you for comfort and approval—which is strange, since you are a child. You desperately want to be getting better and growing up, but it all goes so slowly. Nobody orders the right potatoes.

I guess I’d never thought of it that way before.

We took Kina to my Uncle Chris’ funeral yesterday, figuring she was old enough to reason with what was going on, and assuming that a kid her age both could and should be able to see others grieve.

Kina had met Chris only one time that she could remember—at my cousin Matt’s wedding, after Chris had already grown relatively frail. Still, I was pleased to see how entertained he was by Kina, both of them funny and sharp; they were good for each other, and they got along swimmingly.

I had assumed the service—in a Brooklyn church that Chris and my Aunt Mary have attended for the last several years—would be closed-casket, but it wasn’t, and so Kina and I found ourselves a few rows from Uncle Chris, and she struggled occasionally to get on her tiptoes so she could see his face, to no avail.

First field trip proves grand success. Erstwhile abstract artist vindicated, arranges show of early Parade issues to capitalize on newfound interest in squiggles.

dad

THE DAY HAS FINALLY COME.

dad

There is some serious The Publisher’s Mother energy in how Kina is rallying all the girls in first grade to confront one boy who made one girl cry and said sorry but not exactly what he was sorry for.

I’m proud of her.

dad

First, it became important to leave the kitchen light on—not just gently, but at full blast, with her bedroom door open.

Then we dimmed the lights in the living room overnight and accidentally left the smart bulb in our entryway at a setting that looked vaguely lavender, which freaked her out.

Then we left the lights bright in the living room, which she also hated.

The box says “6 ICE CREAM SANDWICHES”.

Hannah and Kina each ate one (1) ice cream sandwich, as a treat, on Friday evening.

Laurea offered Kina one (1) ice cream sandwich yesterday evening.

SOMEHOW SHE ALWAYS WINS

DAD

Kina has Knuffle Bunny home from school for the long weekend, and the powers that be at school have asked for thorough documentation. Kina’s working on her own notebook of K.B.’s time in the sun this weekend, but I printed out extra pictures of our day out yesterday gathering leaves and running around a maze and doing gymnastics and visiting our local dry cleaner, so that I could put together this rare photographic edition for all of you. The picture of Kina and K.B. sitting on the boob lady beanbag is not going in the first grade notebook; that’s exclusive.

I wasn’t sure what to make of today’s Parade as it was coming together, but it’s got a real cubist paste unicorn thing going on, now that I see it in the light of day. She’s really into drawing braids these days. And unicorns. Always unicorns.

Kina has been making me watch clips of Supernanny—a reality show trafficking in relatively real-talk notions of parental discipline, doled out by the eponymous super nanny, with whom Kina is straight-up fascinated.

To her detriment, as it seems—as I, Kina’s Daddy, have begun to internalize Jo Frost’s advice and set productive boundaries for Kina and myself, all of which leads to somewhat less candy and television.

dad

To be very clear, the tattoo artist was Kina, and the ink is water soluble. She did press really hard, though, so it felt honest.

dad

I just want to say, as somebody who draws every morning, that this song is a brilliant recipe for a drawing of a pig. Thank you to Ms. Hart, from whom I picked up Knuffle Bunny after school today—and who apparently learned this song in grad school—for teaching it to my newly-avid pig portraitist.

[sung to the tune of “one little, two little, three little fingers”]

Little circle, little circle, biiiiig circle [draw pig’s nose]
Little circle, little circle, biiiiig circle [draw rest of pig’s face]
Triangle, triangle, biiiiig circle [draw pig’s ears and giant body]
W! W! [draw pig’s feet]
e-e-e! [squiggle pig’s tail]

Apparently you have to give Knuffle Bunny a bath before he goes back to school, which, let’s face it, is probably universally good advice, bunny or not.

dad

This is the second election cycle of The Daily Kina, and I wish it were significantly less consequential than the last election edition, but it is not, and here we are. Because all headlines in this newspaper are in all caps, the reader is often left to establish whether or not any given headline is an urgent headline, but you can turn to the subject line of evening newsletter to learn the truth and learn that today, in fact, is urgent.

If you receive this newsletter and the polls are still open and you have not, in fact, voted—

PLEASE VOTE.

I just think she doesn’t understand why running down Bedford and sweating is worth the investment.

dad

I have been to many art openings in studio buildings in my day, and I can confidently assert that there is not much difference between an opening party with no children at 11pm and an opening party with mostly children at 3:45pm. Damage is almost assured.

Today’s Parade is almost shockingly new in style. Pastels were squooshed. It is gorgeous.

I have told the story of our meet-cute before, a decade ago, in celebration of our tenth year together. The relevant bit here is that I remember thinking how firm Laurea’s handshake was, and that we ended up having Kina, who now plays out that moment whenever she thinks of it. Wild.

Firm handshake Laurea circa 2002 would be absolutely appalled.

dad

The truth is, I never told her there were no bedbugs in New York. She can arrive at that conclusion on her own.

dad

p.s. On further investigation, I learned that “Little Baby Klepto” is a line from Centaurworld—one of our shared favorite shows. She is, to the best of my knowledge, not an actual infant kleptomaniac.

I guess what happened—and the narrative here is unclear—is that yesterday, in the schoolyard, there were parents of an unknown Kina who were recognized by some teacher or another. Somehow, this (our) Kina became aware of that teacher having recognized the parents of the other Kina—who is, apparently, in second grade at the very same school she currently attends. It is only possible that our Kina would know this because the aforementioned teacher had told her directly that the other Kina was in second grade, that being a fact which no other human being (the other Kina’s parents included) could plausibly have disclosed. This defies all probability, because Kina’s name is so vanishingly rare—a feature that her mother more or less demanded when we were thinking of names1—that she appears to share it only with the singer Kina Grannis (after whom we did not name Kina) and a nineteenth-century Bulgarian suffragist (after whom we sort of did2). The likelihood that there would be another Kina in the grade immediately above her, and that nobody had thought in three years to mention how strange it was that there were two Kinas in adjacent class years is hilariously distant3, yet tantalizing.

I do not intend to ask whether or not there is actually a second grader named Kina, because I like the idea that there is exactly one Kina enrolled each year at the school around the corner, living just out of view and being an absolute charmer in ways that everybody keeps as their own precious secret.

dad

Sorry bro.

dad

1. The newsroom has seen a lot of incoming questions from our private morning edition regarding our assertion that Kina ate fourteen actual lollipops. That number is an estimate, and we now expect the final count to come in far short of that—but it is still a ton.

2. The peanut butter cups were tasty. Kina is safe. A win-win situation, really.

dad

If only the world knew that every day in Kina’s life is Halloween.

dad

There are some times of day in which it still feels like Kina is a baby. Those times, which do not include the many hours of scolding and sassy gossip we exchange with her, the bits where she eats great quantities of food at dinner, or the walks to school, are growing fewer and farther between. One of the last remaining such rituals is bathtime.

We first bathed Kina about a week after coming back from the hospital, even though she still had the floral baby smell thing going for her. She was a temperamental infant, which had us assuming the worst about this first bath. We watched four YouTube videos about bathing infants, filled a basin with warm water, and braced ourselves.

When do they teach you in school that your heart is located squarely on the left side of your chest? Why do I have no heartbeat?

dad

Really, though, Mommy should pace herself.

dad

Sorry so late. It all washes out in time.

dad

“Give me a task,” she says. Who are we to refuse?

dad