You would think that sledding would be an unremitting thrill for a five year old, and you would be right, in the sense that many things are thrilling, and that different sorts of thrills have differing reasonable limits. For Kina, it seems we can do about ten consecutive minutes of sledding before she melts down and we have to find another hill, where she finds a second—and then a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth—wind, sliding gleefully down the crowded slopes of East 79th Street, aimed directly at her daddy’s blueberry jacket to take. him. down. Next time it snows, I dare you to stand in her way. I dare you to the Dark Ages.

dad

p.s. Here is the story of Kina’s favorite soup, whose name is Roberto.

I am not sure if you’ve ever wondered whether it would be better to have fresh snow rubbed directly into your eyes for half an hour or be stuck in an apartment with a kindergartner for five hours, but I bet the answer would surprise you!

This is the second outline of a butterfly that Laurea painted for Kina to complete today. Kina might say that this is the first of the outlines, since Mommy accidentally embellished the wings on the first one, absolutely ruining the Parade just minutes after the work had begun. All is well, dear reader! Our newly-unadorned butterfly, with her asymmetrical harlequin wings, has found her flower. Which, of these two, is Kina? Which is Mommy?

Family nearly stuck in house for entire day, until kid realizes she can torment father in five inches of fresh snow.

dad

It was hard enough getting her to brush her teeth at night, so we figured we might as well double our stress by adding a second cleaning in the morning. Whose kindergartners are out there doing this willingly? These teeth are falling out anyhow!

dad

It wasn’t that long ago, really, that Kina was sounding out the word DOG, which I totally freaked out over. She’s come a long way, and as an avid reader, I’m still freaking out, I suppose.

I started putting the Young Reader’s Section at the bottom of the page back in May, mostly because I was tired of coming up with four headlines every day—but also because Kina had been asking me for months what I was writing about, and it felt only fair that I give her a word or three of her own to read every day.

For a long time, she would get frustrated when she couldn’t figure out how to read the word of the day, and so I really leaned into the drawings in that section, but she eventually got the hang of sounding out the syllables, and we would have a little dance party by the table in the living room whenever she figured out the day’s puzzle.

Even at my best, I am still no ice princess.

dad

Kina was the cleaner yesterday, but she aspires one day to be the bin thermometer. A girl can dream.

dad

I wish I had it in me to write a big long thing about eternity and the imponderables that emerge from small children’s minds, but I’m exhausted and honestly still can’t get my head around “when space came alive”, because infinity freaks me out, so you’ll have to wait for another newsletter for that one.

dad

How lucky we have all been to have Kina’s Ya-Ya and Gramma1 around for the last month, as we collectively awaited the arrival of little Otis. While the new cousin has consumed his proper share of familial attention, Kina had a wonderful time, for her part, too:

• Christmas Eve dinner at Gramma and Ya-Ya’s hotel/house

• The lights in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

• Countless games of hide and seek

• A extensive exploration of the knock-knock joke form

• Gramma’s popsicles

• Gramma’s cherries

• Gramma’s skillful manner of getting Kina to answer questions about school

• Throwing toy airplanes on the playground

• Luxury steak

• The smiles of her doting grandparents, who now have all of Kina and a new baby to absorb

Lucky them. Lucky us.

On Kina’s community board, you will find:

• Kelvin, the dry cleaner on the corner to whom Kina waves every day on her way to school. On the board, he is depicted giving her some of the leftover Halloween candy.

• Lighthouse, a local restaurant. The owner, Naama, is depicted serving Kina pasta.

• Rockin’ Locks, where Kina gets her haircut. On the board, Kina’s stylist, Christina, is depicted taking a little of the weight off.

• Lilia, another nearby restaurant. Kina is shown eating tortellini with an enormous braid.

• Tribeca Pediatrics is where Kina sees her doctor, Stephanie Desgrottes, who is seen handing Kina a lollipop for being so good during her shots.

In all of these vignettes, Kina is beloved of the proprietor and happy. In all of them, I have four strands of spiky hair. This is our community.

Ah, to be five years old, arriving home from a full day with your school friends to the smell of a delicious dinner you take for granted but cannot yet recognize.

dad

That feeling when you realize that every week, every day, every year just starts over and over and over. Good luck, small normal time traveler, and may every week begin anew.

dad

“Daddy, how do you spell soup? Wait, never mind.”

dad

As an avid consumer and creator of habit charts, including Kina’s legendary “patience chart”, I feel slightly bereft at the thought that she will not let me track her rapidly-improving habit of brushing teeth twice a day and not hitting me. But I remain steadfast! I shall keep this chart in my mind, child, and check it every day!

dad

I do not like that we are living through yet another cautious winter under the auspices of the world’s most tenacious pandemic, but I am glad we get to flex our newfound skills in keeping a small child entertained while temperatures fall into the teens—without staying in our apartment. No indoor play spaces? Parkas and playgrounds. No singalongs? Bring a bluetooth speaker to the park so the kids can dance. No movie theaters? Hop in the car and park on the Greenpoint waterfront for a drive-in screening of WALL-E (which, by the way, absolutely holds up after fourteen years). Throw some watermelon to on the roof of the car to crisp up, eat a pizza on the folded-down backseat, and gaze at the skyline as the snow begins to fall. It’s almost like things aren’t totally falling apart, which is the least we owe this kid, and occasionally ourselves.

dad

We visited Kina’s new cousin, Otis, yesterday, unsure how she might take to a family member younger than her. Short version: She did great, holding and entertaining her newborn relative as if she had known him for years.

Otis’s parents were weathering the first two weeks of their first child’s life with about as much grace as I can recall myself having at a similar moment in Kina’s life—a veiled sense of lingering shock and displacement from their own home hung in the air as we ate lunch; I vibrated in remembered sympathy.

Compared to Kina, Otis barely weighs anything at all, but as I laid him in Kina’s arms, I felt her muscles firm up underneath him to keep him safe. She knelt on the couch and looked down at him, then began to sing him lullabies, which I like to think is the one thing she remembers about being two weeks old.

The mullet of kindergarten fashion choices. Party in the front, business in back.

dad

Kina and I play Wordle now every morning, working out the relative positions of letters and ruminating on the absence of certain vowels. She enjoys the suspense of getting progressively closer to an answer each day, but it’s clearly bothering her that there is no larger game to win, other than the glory of everybody posting their scores on Twitter.

I tried to explain the concept of Twitter glory to her, but she didn’t get it, which is likely less of a comment about her than it is about Twitter, generally.

dad

Brushing teeth remains by far the most controversial personal care task in this household, and twenty minutes of unbridled screaming is all it takes to win your case in this house (as in most workplaces).

dad

Alternate hed: Child forced to sport mismatched gloves to class as missing mitten cavorts with condiments.

dad

In the year of our lord 2022, we have decided that we cannot impose sartorial purity on this kindergartner, and we formally apologize to the public education system for embarking on that slippery slope. It is the only release valve we have left, and we hope the rainbow unicorns make life in the classroom even slightly more frivolous.

dad

For her first time on ice, Kina proved a real natural at the sport. She’s no Daddy, of course, with his devil-may-care gliding style, but she is definitely catching up to Mommy, who really made use of the plastic skating aid to get her ice legs on. By the end of an hour on the rink, I was holding just one of Kina’s hands as we skated side by side. A good showing all around!

dad

With a quick visit to her doctor yesterday—twenty minutes and a lollipop—Kina finally managed to get in the second of her two shots for Covid-19, just days after dodging her own second dance with the coronavirus of the century. In two weeks, she’ll be considered fully vaccinated (for now, and for her age group, at least), but she celebrated her jab by strutting out onto Flatbush Avenue and screaming “I’M FULLY VACCINATED!!!” which was, to be honest, the best news of the day for everybody within earshot.

It’s bonkers that I’ve been drawing this newspaper since vaccines were at best a pipe dream (“Eighteen months” is what Fauci once said when asked what he hoped the turnaround time for a widely-available and effective vaccine would be.) Now my own daughter has antibodies in her blood that target the very reason this publication exists.

The world is unbearable but still sometimes astonishing if you step back far enough.

A little snow day action in the parking lot across the street to lighten the mood this year.

dad

The email says negative, which means that what I now have is likely also the common cold. Life goes on.

dad

Our editorial board sends their love to Des and Andrew, parents of Kina’s cousin Otis, new to the world and to this publication. It is very refreshing, in the midst of everything happening, to be able to draw a little swaddled baby next to my favorite big kid—who has, as noted, tested negative with respect to her little cough. It happens.

dad

Still negative! For now! This year sucks!

dad

Meow meow bedtime meow stories meow meow routine. Meow meow Kina meow cats meow meow pretend. Meow meow meow two birds meow one stone meow meow kinda fun meow meow. Meow Kina meow happy meow sleepy. Meow Daddy meow meow something meow different. Meow meow happily ever meow.

dad

Kina’s beloved Uncle Ken is off to China to work at the Olympics for the next two months(!) but Kina still thinks he is a competitor and hopes he wins all the medals and has a nice time. She gave him her hardest stuffie for good luck, which I am sure will help.

dad

In August, we took Kina to the planetarium, which shocked and amazed her for reasons of cosmic awareness and planetarium seating. What I thought was that Kina was awed by the scale of the universe, but what she thought was: “Cool light show”.

So yesterday, upon walking through the gates of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden1 for a “light show”, Kina was extremely prepared to hear the reassuring tones of Lupita Nyong’o narrating the birth of the universe, and not—as was actually the case—to see a bunch of LED-lit trees. With that now in mind, I understand why she strolled casually past the laser light show over the pond at the Japanese Garden and dismissed the fancy glowing fountains by the conservatory building. On she trudged past fields of dancing pixels and giant glowing peonies, thoroughly unimpressed.

At one point, she spotted an Instagram-famous arch of white lights in the distance and began to run towards it, thinking it was the gate to the inevitable planetarium, but was disappointed ultimately to find that it was just a well-photographed arch.

Out with the old year, in with the new. Never thought I’d feel about this New Year the same as I did the last one, but here we are. At least the kid had a dance party with her friend and we ate lentils for good fortune. May this year (the third calendar year of this august publication) be better, for all of us, than the last.

dad

Only power ballads for our queen!

dad

Little Shakespeare over here.

dad

We wouldn’t let her jump rope in the living room, so now we are training the new junior limbo queen while this variant burns out a bit.

dad

With the collection of crowns this queen has amassed, it would be inexcusable to be seen without one—in or out of her castle, which is now permanently affixed to the side of her bed.

dad

To be fair, Kina, your mother and father have been talking too much for a lot longer than ten years. You’re just catching up now, but you’ll learn to talk over us soon enough.

dad

It is always the job of the youngest member of a family to distribute gifts from under the tree to the sleepier, snackier members of that family, who are invariably seated on the couch or lying on the floor on Christmas morning. The job is a double-edged sword; you get to decide how and when the joy is doled out (both as givers and recipients of gifts), but you are cursed to know with deep intimacy the arc of the gifting—and when the gifts will run out, most notably for yourself.

So it came to pass, then, that Kina saved for herself a single gift—the last gift of a long, slow Christmas morning—under the boughs of the Christmas tree and burst into incongruous tears.

The job is a blessing and a curse, but she availed herself well of the opportunity, and she relished every gift—no matter who the recipient was. We are very proud of her, and grateful for what we have been able to share this year.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. We here at The Daily Kina hope you enjoy a macaron or blueberry pancake, as best befits your cultural practices.

dad

I don’t think there is a better word to describe the season we are living through than “bittersweet”, and Kina is working overtime trying to absorb it. Lala safe at home, but not with us. Laurea’s first in person event in two years cancelled, which means she doesn’t have to travel during Omicron but also doesn’t get to throw a party. Kina safely out of school, but unsure what it will look like to return. Daddy scores some rapid tests, but… rapid tests.

Maybe Christmas is always bittersweet, and the passage of time and onset of winter contribute to that, but this year is a little extra bitter, and Kina is seeing how that brings out the sweetness by contrast. A second Christmas here at home—a reprise of one of our favorite Christmases of all time, a pandemic paradox. It may be all the Christmas that Kina actually remembers.

Still wonderful, for her part. Slightly more bitter for her parents, but the sweetness is not lost on us, and that’s enough.

She is too proud to apologize with her voice, but just good enough at spelling to make a reasonable attempt at conveying her regrets in writing. We’ll take what we can get.

dad

Given the opportunity, I, for one, would gladly crawl under a comforter and sleep away the next three months. I hope you have found your own suitable hibernating places.

dad

I did not think we would be raising the girl who collects crowns, but here we are. Queens do require headgear, I suppose.

dad

In the first few weeks of lockdown, after a certain publisher’s family had recovered from an unpleasant bout of the Covids, the Publisher’s daddy went online and found a great deal on a pack of thirty-six cans of Play-Doh, which had been delivered overnight, along with roughly twenty very fragile plastic molding doohickeys that reminded him of the commercials for Play-Doh toys he had watched as a child.

It was unclear to him, upon unpacking the toys, whether the original versions of the toys were better constructed than the ones he received, all jumbled together in a thin plastic bag, because he was fairly certain he hadn’t had any of those toys as a child, which is why he had bought them for his daughter in the first place.

The family imagined all the ways that thirty-six cans of Play-Doh could be molded and folded and pressed into various artful arrangements—a full spectrum of creative squishiness that could keep the entire family distracted as the events outside their window played out.

What is there to say here? The kid likes foods that start with “P”. Honestly, the real headline here is that we got a shot in the kid just as this aggressive variant had started popping off, and that’s some solace. Please stay safe out there.

Today’s Parade is called “Family Portrait”, and it’s one of my favorites. Kina insisted on drawing a green beard on me, which is why it looks like I am projectile vomiting.

One down, one to go. Tune in to tomorrow’s morning edition to hear how it went, and get your boosters!

dad

Kina usually says this after conveying a snack-related secret to me or Laurea, and she means to keep us from spilling the beans. It can also be used to prevent me from brushing her hair. Sort of.

dad

The child’s obsession with teens continues apace, except it’s becoming apparent that she actually means “tweens” (see today’s headline about teens being “as tall as Daddy’s shoulder), and that she actually thinks teens are full-grown adults. Everybody’s an adult when you’re forty inches tall, I guess.

dad

When you think about it, there’s nothing that would suggest to a five year old that parents can’t read minds, in that they have mostly done exactly that for the preceding five years. Trust that the realization is disappointing for all of us.

dad

Did I mention Kina was crying more lately?

Yesterday, it was about the soup. The soup was hot. The soup was cold. The soup was soup. I had made the soup, and it’s a soup that she has always liked—a cauliflower and gruyère soup from our dear departed local sandwich counter, Saltie. It is a reliable way to get cauliflower into a child, and the soup has not, until now, been rejected.

But the soup was soup yesterday, and that meant something to Kina, and she cried.

The publisher thinks I am covering the tall-girl beat a little too thoroughly.

dad