How can such a busy day not produce a pithy headline? Kina was on the back of my bike for most of it. She was probably being hilarious just out of earshot.

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Those of you who have been with us since before the days of the newsletter editions will remember Kina’s early trials with potty training, in which her parents connived to trick her into pooping in the toilet with all sorts of enticements. Ultimately, as the top headline of April 14, 2020 tells us, “Small Poop Seen In Potty”1, which suggests that nothing that either Laurea or I offered her in exchange for civil pooping did anything at all, and the thing we probably should have just committed to was… waiting.

So, too, it goes with swimming, apparently. We took Kina to swim lessons in the dank basement pool of a condo building in Ridgewood back in 2019, and boy did that not take. Year after year, I tried to get her to swim in the ocean while I held onto her, but it was only this year that she discovered the joys of dunking, which seems to have unlocked all the other skills necessary to actually propel herself through the water unaided (and without floaties!)

The child believes in the zen of archery and the uselessness of worry.

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A record three of three illustrations drawn by Kina today, in celebration of her interstate splash pad odyssey.

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Not a lot to add here. My apologies to all Swedish subscribers for what is admittedly a travesty of accent. She just won’t let me get her dressed if I am not Juergen. It will pass.

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It’s odd how parents latch onto things like class assignments in the days leading up to a new year of school, by which I mean: It is odd how I latch onto things like class assignments in the days leading up to a new year of school. I shouldn’t care about the species of tree my child’s first grade class is named after, but it has claimed a not-insignificant part of my day.

Also—look at all those illustrations by our publisher! I am kvelling!!!

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A little marine science for today’s edition. Also very proud of my apologetic nose.

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First of all, Kina, it’s an apartment, not a house. Apples and oranges.

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Back home from vacation. It was very possibly the longest drive I’ve taken from Maine to New York in the last twenty-five years, but the whole car was aglow with the memory of a great week at the beach with family, and none of us was the worse for the delay. Kina did poop in the Bronx; I’m sorry, the Bronx.

Two Parade covers today. This one up above is the first one that Kina wants you to see—the side of the paper that is signed—

I have decided that New York City does not have enough porches, sparklers, or beaches. Kina loves two of these things and hates the third—an exercise for the reader.

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The best day of your entire life is when you learn to jump over waves on your very own, and your own daddy is very impressed and excited for you, and you go with your little butt to buy a tiny gift at the toy store, and then you get pasta.

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The other day, as I was sitting on the clay sand beach by our vacation rental, I saw two kids making drip castles from the silt at the bottom of a hole in the sand. Despite having grown up on this beach, I had never seen nor contemplated this style of sand castle. The next day, as Kina frolicked in the waves, I spent an hour slowly drizzling a stream of wet sand over the foundations of a drippy little cathedral. It was so meditative! I felt restored! Laurea made several jokes about Gaudí and we took loads of pictures to commemorate this ephemeral tide sculpture.

Then Kina stomped the everliving shit out of it. The root of suffering is attachment, etc etc.

Also, Kina jumped over the waves on her very own today! Ocean parent!

The Goldenrod has been in business since 1896, longer than anybody I have ever known has been in business, or alive, or making saltwater taffy. When I was a kid, I would stand outside the windows and watch the taffy being made—guessing the flavors, examining the machines, counting the wrapped kisses. Some four decades later, here I am again, watching my kid watch the machines and pick her own pound of taffy.

It’s all very romantic, except it turns out Kina doesn’t like taffy. “Taste-tes weird,” she says.

They’ve made it 120 years without her liking taffy; I’m sure they’ll be okay.

We picked six quarts. She picked one cup.

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Day 3: Jealousy sets in. The brother’s cuteness becomes a problem.

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After playing with her little cousin Otis for about twenty minutes this morning, Kina declared that he was actually her brother, which is convenient, since we don’t actually have to feed or raise him—a win-win situation.

Today’s Parade was dashed off in haste as Kina scurried to the beach. She left a little secret on the back for you.1 DON’T TELL ANYONE.

I’m very proud of my map.

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Kina has been watching her step at camp for the last two weeks, with the understanding that only star students are eligible for The Surprise, which turned out to be a donut. I didn’t even think she liked donuts, but she loves recognition nonetheless.

She told us we needed to be Star Parents the other night. Maybe she’s buying the donuts. I think we at least deserve a bubble party.

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So many poo jokes. Also, the standards department has decided that Nicky is spelled “Nicky” now.

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I have been putting off my first colonoscopy for something like three and a half years now—ever since my friend Jason died of colon cancer, just before the lockdowns. I am prone to health anxiety, and the fear of a scary outcome somehow outweighed the constant sense of dread I lived with during that delay. I’ve had a colonoscopy prep kit stuffed in my sock drawer for over a year, left unopened and unexamined, taunting me every morning as I got dressed.

Colon cancer, the doctor told me this morning, grows slowly, and when caught early is usually treatable. This was news to me; nobody had ever talked to me about what colon cancer is or how it works. Probably just as well, because it would have likely led me to delay my procedure even longer than I already had.

Kina busted out her tough-monster voice, which sounds a little like Gwar meets Oscar the Grouch, for this rendition of an otherwise inoffensive song from Gabby’s Dollhouse. I don’t think Kina’s aiming precisely for death metal or Oscar in this particular growl (which she also uses when she sneaks up on us and barks, “Baby Lucy!”, for no discernible reason), but it ticks the slightly-angry, slightly-silly box pretty well.

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It’s like, you know, when you’re playing in the sprinklers with your friend, and you get all wet, and the wooden platform at the top of the stairs is super warm, and you decide to make funny little wet trails on the planks with your butt, except they haven’t sanded the platform in several years, and Mommy picks like two giant splinters out with her fingers and spends the rest of the afternoon removing all the little slivers from your swimsuit.

That is a feeling you never forget.

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We here at the Daily Kina welcome the one-day break in this epic heat wave, which gave us the freedom to bike all over Manhattan yesterday, buying light-up shoes and stamps1 and getting our hair cut and eating some bangin’ fish ball soup and just generally toodling around. Laurea was lucky enough to score three consecutive fancy electric Citibikes, so we all got to feel the wind in our hair as we cruised around the tip of Manhattan, with Kina wearing my sunglasses and fish balls in our tummies. Not pictured: our final stop at Little Owl, where Kina complained that our table smelled like eggs.

After shopping for stamps (as noted in today’s edition), Kina and I agreed that the week’s Parade simply had to be made of rubber stamps and watercolors. And so it was.

Nothing like watching your child enjoy a little nitrous and chatter incessantly to the dentist before zoning out hard on some Gabby’s Dollhouse as they drilled out a cavity on her lower left molar. Makes me want to switch dentists.

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A true epicure knows that the best bite on a plate of food is the entire plate of food.

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Like father, like daughter.

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If you, a newer reader of this publication do not know about Chuckie Avocado, you need to know three things:

1. He is a stuffed avocado

2. He is named Chuckie because she got it as a gift from Laurea’s friend Chuckie

3. He decides how far open the bedroom door will be every night, and he guards it zealously. That is now his only job. At all times of day, he can invariably be found by Kina’s door, smiling and green.

Now you know Chuckie Avocado.

When we arrived at the beach at Jacob Riis yesterday at 10 AM, Kina was steadfastly opposed to putting her face even close to the water. This is no different from prior visits to the beach in the last few seasons—our notoriously beach-loving publisher will spend hours being battered by the most frigid of waves but draws the line at wet faces.

Coming off an adventurous day at McCarren Pool (see “Child Takes Leap of Faith” in yesterday’s edition), though, I was able to show her how Burlingame—my anthropomorphic talking fist—could take a quick breath and close his mouth before dipping under the water with a little splash. As she watched my fist jump and frolic in the Atlantic Ocean, Kina was ultimately sold; when the tide came in and the surf grew more adventurous, she took a deep gulp of air and dipped under a crashing wave with me. She emerged gleeful, reborn.

Two hours later, she was still begging me to go back in the water with her for “one more dunkie”, hooked on the adrenaline rush of subaquatic life for the first time. Laurea and I are now fully convinced that this child loves the beach more than both of us combined; we were at the beach for six hours, and Kina spent at least four of them in the water with one of us—and frequently fully-submerged with me. The Sea Parent strikes again, and he has the waterlogged ears to prove it.

HIPAA prevents me from writing about her royal highness’ oral hygiene, but not bad for three years since her last visit, says a highly-placed source.

As she was drawing this, I didn’t think much of it—a sun and a rainbow? But stepping back and looking at it now, this piece is ready for the modern galleries at the Met. A proud father’s ambitions for his child’s creative work knows no bounds.

I cannot walk in this heat, no matter how skimpy or flowy my clothing. Kina can run for hours in the direct sun while wearing a dress made of literal plastic thread. This is childhood.

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I stepped in a pothole but I’m okay, because I have these three butts and know how to cry.

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Kina has lately become obsessed with a Ted Ed video about the Salem witch trials, insisting on watching it every day. If you, either as a sympathetic watcher of Ted Ed videos or as a loyal reader of this newsletter, have watched said video, you will know that it is Very Creepy1 (and one of the better animated Ted Ed videos, I would offer).

As we were getting ready this morning, she was role-playing an ergot-addled Betty Parris in my bedroom and waddling towards me like a zombie, until she suddenly jumped in shock and ran into my arms, having finally scared herself after several days of ghost-embellished animated hallucinations. So I wrote about it, but now that I am writing this, Kina is calling out from her bedroom to ask about today’s edition and if the spooky eyes were real. I yelled back to tell her they were a joke and that we wouldn’t watch that video anymore.

Imagine having to try to make your brain scary—youth is wasted on the young.

Detective Kina on the case, trying to figure out when, in fact, Daddy will return from his rooftop work ever and if, in fact, he would have preferred the ravioli for dinner.

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Unfazed, ready for action, festooned with a bow.

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Good news: She didn’t wake us up. Bad news: It was the equivalent of four in the morning when we woke her up.

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We are back. We visited. We did not move. We slept. It is over, but it was glorious.

Another landscape! I am proud of two things here: first, that she completed a Parade that she had originally abandoned as “ruined” in JFK two weeks ago; and second, that she respected the sanctity of the P in the masthead when she painted a tree behind it this morning. It’s the details that count.

Define “today”, I suppose, the editor said after placing his child in her bed in Brooklyn at 12:40 AM the next day.

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Last time we took Kina to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, she was not yet quite three and seemed generally uninterested in the miracles of science demonstrated there. She rambled around aimlessly, oblivious to the wonder around her. It was fun enough, but I did a lot more exploring than Kina.

Yesterday’s visit was much more of a Kina jam, and while her interests leaned towards exhibits that were artsy and dancey (see the main illustration of the trippy color room), she got her fill of fluid dynamics and surface tension and electricity in ways that two-year-old Kina never did.

At the end of the day, we were more worn out than she was, and we sat on the pier of the Embarcadero, watching her frolic in the rain simulator and shout into the echo tunnel—a happy five-year-old scientist from New York wearing a little princess gown and showing the locals how to spin around.

Bali, the daughter of Laurea’s ex-stepdad, is a living reminder of how long Laurea and I have been married, having been born just a couple months before the grand event. In photographs of that day, infant Bali is largely memorialized as a stroller, but she’s grown into a fantastic young person who is somehow like a foot taller than when we last saw her. Before yesterday, Kina had met Bali on all of four occasions, but she only remembers her from the last of those visits, when the two of them danced together to Christmas tunes played by a reggae band at a shopping center in Marin.

This time, Kina was prepared and excited, asking us repeatedly in the idyllic days leading up to our lunch with Bali about when, exactly, our lunch with Bali would occur. It occurred yesterday.

She is down from the mountain for the first time that she can remember, with a stuffed deer and a little morning dew on her finger. What glory.

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Did I mention we were spending a little time this week living on a mountain? Have we talked about Kina’s love of climbing and jumping? I am exhausted.

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It’s big out here in the mountains. Kina can barely make sense of it.

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Just a small revelation here that speaking like an attendant at Buckingham Palace can get Kina to agree to anything—which, I imagine, could be the desired effect with the Queen herself.

Also, heads up: tooth fairy’s real.

This edition is a reminder to future Laurea and future me that a little time away from Kina is good for the brain (and your relationship), and the bonus is that Lala will draw all the Daily Kinas.

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Our guest editor really buried the lede here by putting Kina’s second lost tooth below the fold, but you should rest assured that the tooth fairy read all the news and took care of business. Thanks to Lala for running the newsroom for a second day, as the masthead took a little vacation to Half Moon Bay. We are revived.

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It’s Lala edition time, as Mommy and Daddy decamp to the beach for their twentieth anniversary as a couple. Enjoy the bathroom lock drama and pelican observations!

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Every once in a while, as a parent, you do get that stereotypical sense of overwhelming pride in your child. Such was that sense, for me, as I watched Kina make up a special and reasonably scientifically accurate butterfly metamorphosis dance (with at least four distinct steps) on a trampoline in California yesterday. Just, like, welling up with pride in my lepidopterist child choreographer.

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p.s. Tune in tomorrow for the first of two consecutive Lala editions! What hijinks will ensue?!

It’s been a long time since I went to any Fourth of July parade anywhere at all, and never with a five-year-old kid, and so I think I had forgotten what they really are: a celebration of obscure civic positions, vintage cars, and chambers of commerce. Highlights: the local dentist gave Kina a toothbrush, and a cute smiling BART train tootled past. Lowlights: the county assessor, whose luxury convertible sedan says a lot about assessment. Kina was not thrilled, but she’s up one toothbrush.

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Jet lag and trampolines were just made for each other.

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We made this edition at the gate for our early flight to San Francisco, penned in by bags and under a tight deadline. We are now in California, so the presses obviously ran as expected, though we are all a bit more tired than usual here at newsletter time and are deciding just now, late in a drawn-out second sentence, to hit the sack.

When you’re drawing the Parade on a narrow little counter in the boarding area, you produce what is strangely the first landscape edition of Parade in history.