Honestly, she probably could have popped out the shorts. It’s my bad, really.

dad

It’s hard to pivot from airplanes to fertilization in a casual morning conversation about pregnancy and reproduction, and so we didn’t, electing instead to take the day and think about a strategy for explaining sex to our five year old. I asked friends on Instagram for answers, and got some good ideas. Mostly, they added up to “the truth”, but one friend put it very well:

“We gave [child who was Kina’s age] a very straightforward penis and vagina explanation, and then she would ask follow ups until she heard something she did not want to deal with.”

Righteous.

A little Daddy-Daughter time as Mommy checks out the Boston Convention Center. Pasta was consumed.

dad

Otis, Kina, and our beloved moose were excellent children for their respective Mommies and Amas, even if the weather outside was essentially winter. In May. Again.

dad

Kina’s Mommy is one of the most inspiring people I know, assiduously building a community of sharp-witted and astonishing women around her, and has been doing so for over a decade. She lifts her friends up and raises her daughter with equal calm and joy. Happy Mother’s Day to her.

Kina started painting this morning’s Parade before we even woke up. One of the figures is Kina, and the other is Laurea. In between is, I don’t exactly know—a uterus? It’s all very fitting for today.

Not allowed to make noise because it will disturb her, but must have music in my head that I can identify at a moment’s notice, because I serve at her majesty’s pleasure.

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“Hahahahahahahaha!!!! I love the morning!!!!! Hahahaha!!”

dad

Remember: I am old.

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I remember thinking this about my own parents when I was small, and even having learned that knowledge was acquired over time, I still thought them dauntingly wise—and do even today.

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There are many individual decisions that have brought us to this place—namely, the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the hastily and conservatively restaffed Supreme Court of the United States. Some of those decisions were public and monumental, like Senator Susan Collins’ solemn vote of confidence in Justices Kavanaugh (one of two justices accused of sexual misconduct who actually voted in favor of overturning this precedent) and Gorsuch to abide by principles of stare decisis and not strike down Roe v. Wade. Others were private and innocuous in a vacuum, as with individual voters (and non-voters) in 2016 that led to the election of our 45th president—who, in turn, nominated three judges (some barely qualified) to the highest court in our country. But there are also larger and more distant decisions, like Bush v. Gore (we all know how that turned out, and which justice who penned the majority opinion that leaked yesterday got nominated by the president who won that decision) and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (duh, follow the money) that have moved this court inexorably towards the opinion we read last night.

I tried for a while last night, as I stared at the ceiling of my bedroom, to make sense of all those decisions—to find the ones that really mattered so that I could be proportionally more angry at those, but it just made me angry at everybody in the world (including myself), and I was reminded that these decisions don’t exist in a vacuum. They represent—and emerge from—systems of patriarchy, of white supremacy, of unchecked capitalism. Last night (and this morning, as I was writing the newspaper, evidently), I was focused on the patriarchy, and how it has restructured our society’s view of pregnancy, birth, and abortion. The last of these, Laurea pointed out to me yesterday, was a common and largely accepted form of family planning as far back as the 19th century (talk about “rooted in history”). I have literally grown up in a country where legal abortion was the law of the land, and my friend Jess wrote an excellent newsletter just six days about the fact that this law is perilously close to vanishing. Horrible timing.

In any case, it’s late, and mostly what I wanted to tell you is that we cannot get caught in the details now. We have to fight the systems. That isn’t Kina’s job, it’s ours. Dismantle the patriarchy, and let’s take on the others, too.

Thank you, Spencer and family, for the fun party that we could leave Kina at!

dad

When I was a kid, I had what I thought was a lot of stuffed animals. I know now what a lot of stuffed animals looks like—because I have them in my house. When Kina was born, Laurea’s main concern was that Kina would have too many stuffies, and it appears that her worst fears were warranted, because Kina has acquired dozens of stuffed animals from her extended family over the last five years, and that menagerie has taken over her room in ways that her extremely tidy mother can no longer tolerate.

With that in mind, we put the future of Kina’s collection directly in her hands and told her to pick which stuffies she’d take with her past kindergarten. Surprisingly, for a kid with a real stuffie addiction, she did a reasonably good job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

She kept all the olympic mascots, her early friend the bucklewhale (whose many clasps kept her occupied in her infancy), various bunnies, all her most precious bedtime stuffies, a magnetic turtle we bought in Florida at the turtle preserve, and (to the relief of long-time readers) Chuckie Avocado and the moose.

We thought it was one day of snacks. A sprint, not this chomps marathon. We survived.

dad

A little over a year ago, Kina had her last annual sleep regression, lasting somewhere around a month and consisting largely of repeated demands for hugs. This, in the shadow of a nearly six-month-long regression in late 2019 whose resolution just barely predates the founding of this publication. Throughout, Kina has been training her mother to return at least once to the bedroom after my bedtime story for “one last hug”—a concession we allowed in exchange for predictable sleep.

Today’s edition is a reminder that Kina will never, for as long as she lives, let that go.

dad

It’s not, like, bitterly cold, but it is stubbornly cold and we are all just tired of jackets.

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I also do not approve of Mommy going on a spacewalk, and both Kina and I think she has not fully considered the risks.

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In the moments after Lala left for California, as Laurea processed her absence, Kina took some pens and drew this note for her, reading: “I NO YOU MIS YOR MOM THIS IS FOR YOU”

It was a very special note, and helped a lot.

dad

If they sold memberships to Governor’s Island, I’d buy three (and one for Lala), but it is entirely free to visit and therefore the best place ever.

Also, Kina really came with the best headline in today’s edition when I tested her before her return to school. Never would have called a test strip “that juicy thing”, but I’ll call it that for the rest of my natural life.

dad

Thank you, Lala, for having such a wonderful day with Kina as Laurea and I bided our time uptown looking at old masters and smelling perfume and eating teppanyaki. We are glad that our tiny Brooklyn sherpa was here to escort you home from the playground. Sorry that she sometimes stands in front of the bathroom in pitch darkness to surprise you; she means well.

Love you!

Lots of wows in today’s exclusive Lala edition, printed while Kina’s parents were still blissfully asleep in a hotel by Central Park. Many thanks to our interim executive editor, who is clearly stunned and thrilled by her granddaughter.

dad

Oh, the horror, says Mommy.

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Kina has reached the age at which she knows enough to have forgotten how she’s learned all of it. When did she learn about love, or the sun, or Mommy, or how legs work? It’s all a jumble, but she imagines that she must have known something when she was born—the alternative is inconceivable.

When we visited Kina’s cousin Otis for the second time, back in February, he was lolling around on his stomach, staring at various high-contrast cards that his parents had laid out around him, transfixed. His eyes worked fine, I explained to Kina, but he couldn’t make sense of anything other than patterns. He was still so young that faces were mostly meaningless abstractions.

As Kina asks this question of us, it occurs to me that I assume we know nothing at all when we’re born, but I suppose we are familiar with something at the moment when we come out—the concept of safety, and its sudden absence. We know heartbeats, probably. We know what it feels like to be held.

There are few people alive who can meet Kina at her spring break wackiest, and it just so happens that one of them is staying down the block from us and making her wackier by the day.

dad

“HELLO!”

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The night before a grandparental arrival is always a bit like Christmas.

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I hid six eggs last night, each filled with jellybeans and situated in locations designed to be obscure enough for a clever and observant five-year-old to uncover with diligent effort. Kina is a Highlights “hidden items” expert, after all.

1. An orange egg placed in the sink of her toy kitchen, serving as a note that the game was afoot.

2. A purple egg in the fruit bowl, concealed among the bananas.

3. A blue egg in a frosted glass vase, visible through its ridged walls underneath a plastic cherry blossom she brought home a month ago.

4. A green egg in the space behind the couch cushion, because I was afraid she wouldn’t find the others.

5. A yellow egg in the sturdy Chinese dim sum teacup from the legendary Kowloon Restaurant on Route 1 Saugus that I purloined from a totally unrelated dim sum parlor in Manhattan eight years ago.

6. An orange egg in her underwear drawer, which I knew would be impossible for Kina to find but inevitably discoverable, as long as she agreed to get dressed for the day.

She found all of them but the last (as predicted) within three minutes of starting—which is fully two minutes longer than it took her in 2020, when we first did this. She did eventually get dressed and find the orange one, and now all the jellybeans are gone.

The key to a good baked bread and egg casserole is proper squooshing, as every line cook knows.

dad

Spring has sprung!

dad

Sometimes Kina is wacky. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes Mommy picks her up at Sloane’s house after school. Sometimes she stays up late. Sometimes she is hungry, sometimes not. Sometimes the sun is shining and the air is uncommonly warm. Sometimes it feels like spring. Sometimes Kina sits on her own bench at drop off, and she’s fine with that. Sometimes we go to Chinese restaurants with Grandma and Yeh-Yeh when they come into town for the weekend. Sometimes Kina wears a unicorn horn to school. Sometimes she has eggs for breakfast. Sometimes she takes the subway. Sometimes it rains and Kina and Daddy run down 59th until they get to the escalator. Sometimes Kina hops into bed with her parents at 6:30 and pulls their arms around her and makes little snuffly noises. Sometimes garlic tastes a little spicy and we eat pizza instead.

Today is a sometimes day.

dad

I highly recommend watching videos about how ink is made if you are trying to have a calm start to your day. Add a game of Wordle to get your brain moving. Cuddle your child because that’s the best. That is your morning ritual, and Kina’s.

dad

She said this so nonchalantly, looking absently into the middle distance, that I very nearly forgot just how much of every single day is consumed by Kina telling me exactly what to do.

dad

I suppose we are also the most sensible and loving parents she has had, if that is any consolation.

dad

On a couple of recent occasions, when Kina has been quite tired or just really wound up, she has marveled that she can’t really get her brain around… her brain. It’s not unrelated, I think, to situations when she’s gotten frustrated with us for talking while she’s thinking—her mind just gets away from her.

I know the feeling, I think. I remember being in my parents’ bed after an exhausting day when I was still really young, staring at the closet and being unsure how to explain to my family that everything was both so very big and so very small. In this way, being a child is like being on acid all the time, and there’s a moment when you become really self-aware all of a sudden, and you can express to others the miracle of consciousness.

They generally don’t get it.

Sometimes, there is good news.

dad

Today, as I was leaving the venue, I showed the conference organizer my video of The Joke from yesterday and explained how Kina was stunned I had told her joke onstage, and the organizer was like, “Oh, I actually thought that was your joke and I didn’t want to comment on how bad it was.”

My brand is strong.

dad

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Con.

The acting editor in chief has already taken a strange left turn.

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The tooth fairy is unsure whether or not the physical tooth must be present for reimbursement or not. She contemplates the possibility that Kina might mint an NFT of her first lost tooth, which would be far more valuable, potentially, depending on the continued implosion of late-stage capitalism. Teeth! Teeth! Teeth!

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None of the adults involved in this vignette have any idea what the many boring secrets actually are, which is a new and weird development in the area of kid secrets.

dad

When Kina helped me draw the very first Daily Kina, she was barely three years old, and now she is barely five—or almost five and a half, which is how five-year-olds work. One year ago, I wrote a long newsletter about what this paper meant to me at the moment of its first anniversary. I will admit that it felt like a little victory lap, since all of us were getting our vaccines and certainly the pandemic would be over soon; I remember telling Laurea that I’d either stop when Kina started kindergarten or when the pandemic was over, and while the first of those two deadlines has long passed, the second seems likely (as I suspected last year) never to come—which means I’ll be writing this newspaper for the rest of my natural, fully-boosted life. The uncertainty never quits here at The Daily Kina.

The pandemic played a slightly less prominent role in the last year of The Daily Kina than it had in 2020, which the exception of the aforementioned vaccines (including Kina’s own prompt vaccination amidst the very peak of Omicron. So, what took its place? Simple things happened. Kina started kindergarten. She turned five. Her cousin Otis turned zero. A land war broke out in Europe. Mostly, Kina grew up. Her toddler malapropisms gave way to sophisticated and often baffling interrogations about the inner workings of her big-girl mind and the universe.

Maybe the best thing about the last year (for the purposes of this publication) is that Kina learned to read. I introduced a “Young Reader’s Section” on May 28th, for two reasons: first, because I wanted Kina to spend more time reading; and second, because I was tired of coming up with four headlines every weekday (bet you didn’t notice that cost-saving measure). Every day I draw and write a newspaper entirely about Kina, and while that is in part selfish work, it is still fundamentally for her, and so it makes me happy that she can now directly consume the work that I do for her (or at least a little of it). For a long time, Kina could not be pestered to read the word of the day without my drawing a picture of it, but she eventually came around and started sounding things out—and now she is just shouting out the word of the day as she runs to the bathroom. Hooray for Ms. Chelsea and her reading lessons.

Kina swears up and down that the only reason she hissed “Go! Go!” at me yesterday morning, as I was doing a little Dad boogie on the sidewalk in front of her and her friends, was because she didn’t want me to take the tittering of her fellow kindergartners too personally. She underestimates my tolerance for ridicule. I almost certainly overestimate her tolerance for others’ ridicule of me.

I will get my dances in while I can, child.

dad

The child, as always, has it all figured out.

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You don’t gotta go home but you can’t stay here.

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It had never, in my many years of life, occurred to me that kindergarten was just a school that teaches you how to go to school, and that school is just teaching you how to go to work, and honestly now I’m slightly mad about kindergarten—but Kina really is a good listener, and that makes me really proud, because listening can be a subversive (and supportive) act in all the ways she will someday need to be subversive (and supportive).

dad

Five. The answer is five, if we assume that Laurea and my cousin Erica really do leave the swings after drinking all that beer.

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It is also the wisest question she has ever asked, which is what I thought she said until she very sternly corrected me.

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Upon inspection of today’s top headline, Kina pointed out that I had misrepresented the visual artifacts in the field of darkness inside her eyes, drew a giant purple “L” on the illustration, looked at it pensively, and declared the paper “okay”. She also painted the wiggly tooth bright pink.

Today’s Parade is a garden, as usual, of colors under a setting sun. It might seem coincidental that the palette is so similar to her eyelid landscape—but this is Kina’s brain, of course, so it’s all of a piece.

HOW COULD THIS POSSIBLY BE HAPPENING ALREADY?

dad

There are few things that casually frustrate me more than having a thought in my head and watching it evaporate as somebody utters even a single word. My brain requires silence to operate at full capacity!

Kina has clearly inherited this from me—or maybe it’s something that happens to literally everybody, not sure. In any case, she is on a very special planet of distraction where slurping is the loudest noise of all.

dad

It is surprising how little I know about this topic—why we grow and then stop growing, what it feels like, how it all works. Even Ted Ed doesn’t have a five minute explainer on this.

I should have paid better attention in biology.

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