Kina has discovered climate change, and none too soon.

dad

Kina has always been pretty solitary and independent at playgrounds, caring little for the social machinery of the scooter set, but a year of near-constant playground attendance will inevitably build up a kid’s reputation, and Kina seems to believe she has finally arrived as the mayor of the neighborhood—the object of affections, peer and parental, from the moment she stepped out our front door. Never quite the hermit, Kina wasn’t flustered by the attention, settling into her swingset governance role with ease, calming babies, finding lost toys, and appeasing her varied fans. She gets her popularity gene from Laurea, I think—or at least her tendencies towards the gregarious; I was always more of a curious observer (which I’ve also seen in Kina, and admired) than a king of the slides, so it’s hard to know how exactly Kina will wield her power. Having known the kid for going on five years now, I’m mostly confident it will be fine; she’s a good egg.

If the playground needs an emperor, I say, let her be benevolent.

dad

I obviously wrote this morning’s top headline thinking I’d be able to write a whole think piece about parenting and current events this evening, and then I saw the news about the drowned New Yorkers and the explicit Supreme Court decision not to strike down the abortion ban in Texas and the kids getting sick in Alabama, and you know what? I just can’t.

Kina doesn’t know about any of it. I’ll let her hold onto that.

Since I do know about it, and so do you, I’m going to ask that you donate to every Texan abortion support organization that you can. That much we can do.

Once, while Laurea was working on an arduous month-long event, I spent an unusual amount of time alone with Kina during the week. As a special tradition during that month, Kina and I would stroll to the local coffee shop in the morning for a breakfast sandwich, singing “cheddar cheeeeese and baaaaacon” as she scooted down the sidewalk in her Hello Kitty helmet. We’d sit outside under an umbrella and share our sandwich as she drank her orange juice and I drank my coffee, looking at the bees and having little conversations. It is one of our favorite mutual memories, and when Kina brought it up this morning at breakfast, I thought back on that time as being so peaceful and unburdened, in the days before the pandemic, when Kina was so small.

Except it wasn’t before the pandemic. The event Laurea was working on was fully remote, and the coffee shop only had outdoor seating, and Kina was home with me because she didn’t have school. It was, in fact, only a year ago, which feels like ten years ago, which is impossible, because Kina is only four.

The weird thing about drawing this newspaper for as long as I have is that I now have a record of all the things that happen in eighteen months of a kid’s life. A very small fraction of those things, when you write them down on paper, will fill five archival boxes—far more space, you might think, than should be required for eighteen months of charming childhood recollections. My brain can’t conceive of that much life (and everything else that I have taken great pains not to write about in that same period) fitting into less than two years. It can’t conceive of how this pandemic could stretch on for so long, nor of how Kina might form, in that time, the kinds of long-term memories that you have to close your eyes to recall. It seems like it must be a long time ago, because eighteen months isn’t usually a long time in adult years. Turns out it is in kid years.

As I typed out this morning’s headline, it occurred to me that it reads as though Kina renamed her local playground, which would be completely on brand but is not the case. No, reader, this time it was the city of New York that looked at our local playground—with its exposed bolts, lumpy asphalt, and intermittent water feature—and said, “Let’s give this playground an abstract name that evokes an image of fruit!”

It seems pointless to rename a playground like this in a vacuum, so I expect some signage to go up in the next few months announcing the temporary closure of the Strawberry Playground for renovation, which would be great, except that the playground currently serves as a refuge for local multigenerational families who desperately need to get out of their apartments—regardless of how shiny the equipment is.

I’m not going to moan about a fancy playground, but I do find it curious that it’s taken so long to get one, and I wonder what prompted the city to plant a strawberry in the middle of Rodney Street today, rather than ten years ago.

See you soon, Lala! It was a good week, and Kina yelled at every plane we saw on our drive home from JFK.

dad

After a lifetime of broadcasting her every need to anybody who would listen, Kina has finally discovered the beauty and power of secrets. At first, like all of us once must have, she thought of secrets not as knowledge held in escrow, but as words quietly spoken. Walking around the house, she would move her lips in silence, giving very little voice to her own internal dialogue. Secrets, to her, were silences made visible.

The next phase to Kina’s understanding of secrets was proximity. A few weeks ago, Kina began to approach me and place her lips against my ear, silently articulating whatever was on her mind against the side of my head. In words so hushed as to be effectively inaudible, she laid out her stories and wishes for us in a pantomime of whispering. At this stage, secrets for her were simply desires that she carried closer to us so that we could better understand their value to her.

It wasn’t until about a week and a half ago, when I caught her looking out of the corner of her eye at me while telling a secret to Laurea, that I saw her understand something deeper and more mystical about secrets—their secrecy.

It is true that Laurea and I have been accused in the past of growing obsessed about topics about which we can never shut up, and no topic in this house has been as constant a focus for us as vaccines. I suspect we are not alone in this, but our persistence is notable, because it’s clearly become a talking point for our own four-year-old daughter. Lately, we’ve all (including Kina) been fixated on her first vaccine, which hovers somewhere out of reach near the middle of winter. Maybe talking about it is a sort of prayer for us as school grows near. Given the state of things out there, talking non-stop about vaccines may be the most rational thing we can do.

dad

Today’s edition was produced and edited by Lala. Many of the top headlines seem to be song fragments from “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” but at least half the edition is about dinner at Lighthouse, which all present—including the owners’ dog— apparently enjoyed.

dad

First time in over a year of sending these newsletters that I actually forgot to send on the proper night, so you, lucky reader, get two today—the first of which explores Kina’s fascinating diatribes about poopin’. Wish I had something more highbrow for you. More later!

dad

Slow news day here, as Kina galavants about privately with her Lala. Carousels, as it turns out, are not a public utility and sometimes stop spinning. Give me a little credit for my sweet Ned Flanders drawing. Okily dokily.

dad

Domino Park, the local fancy strip of green built by our local waterfront megadevelopers to satisfy the public space regulations put in place by New York City,1 includes a clever little installation of hoses and nozzles that, in summertime, emit water vapor and engulf a section of the waterfront in fog. When it’s hot outside, it’s arguably even better than fountains. Kina and her Lala floated through the ersatz clouds yesterday, tossing coins onto the decaying pilings in the well where the fog is born. They made wishes and stayed cool. Lala was indefatigable, despite having just flown through her own puffy clouds on a red-eye from California, and chased Kina through the park as if she were a teenager (which, in some ways, she still is). Later that evening, they both faded away, dewy and toasted out.

d

“When will Lala come here in an airplane?” Today, thanks to the god of weather and the aviation industry.

dad

I do actually get Laurea’s style, but I am continually astonished when strange new parcels arrive, bearing shiny silver boots or boxy frocks. For years, I was the guy who monochromatically color-matched all his pants and shirts, so the riot of color and angle that Laurea has brought to my life is a real side-benefit of this relationship we share. Kina, who has inherited Laurea’s style DNA, comes by this naturally, which means that the two of them can look down their noses at me whenever I don’t understand the subtle impact of some shoe or another.

I like being the baffled outsider sometimes—no expectations to meet, and it gives my daughter a meaningful skill to lord over me, which she would likely do anyway, but this way I can contain it to dresses.

What kind of New York-ass kid plays a game where you need to see a specialist for your imagined ailments on the street in front of an Italian restaurant? True heads know this child.

dad

For over a year, she’s been lip syncing to her favorite Disney musical numbers. It took a bluetooth microphone to unlock her voice, which now reverberates through every corner of our home. She takes after her parents, god help us.

dad

Kina, like all people under the age of 30, maintains a list in her head of all the people who matter to her, which makes her uncommonly well-prepared to accept an Academy Award or schedule a birthday party. She had me add at least three names to the cloud of people that surround her head in today’s newspaper. She is nothing if not thorough.

I am just happy to be nominated.

dad

Some days feel divorced, entirely, from the days that preceded them—where tomorrow and yesterday diverge so sharply that life loses its continuity: births, deaths, tragedies, fortune, arrayed like orthogonal planes in time. You never see those fractures coming, but you know in an instant that they have arrived, because you feel the gap that has opened up behind you, and you know that it can’t be crossed. For me, at least, these days have included: September 11th (on which the our role in the unfolding chaos in Afghanistan was built), the day of Trump’s election, Kina’s birth (not long after), and the lockdowns that shortly preceded the first edition of this newspaper. I’ve acclimated to all of these things, for better and for worse, but they’ve all left their subtle marks.

For the most part, I’m lucky to live the kind of life where my memories of yesterday can mostly inform my plans for tomorrow. Kina is also that sort of lucky, even if she gets her yesterdays and her tomorrows all mixed up. Wednesday is today and yesterday is Tuesday and tomorrow is Thursday, and so on and so on. I don’t know what it must be like to live in the kind of place in which you cannot assume that Thursday will come, let alone know if it will be bear any similarity to Wednesday. I sometimes close my eyes tight and hope, with real desperation, that Kina never has to feel that way. I sometimes feel complicit in how others do feel that way—this week, in particular.

What are we going to do yesterday? What could we have done differently? Would it have changed anything at all?

Somehow we forgot to tell Kina that there are buildings in which you can watch movies where the screen is as big as our whole apartment. Someday we’ll visit one with her, and it will blow her freaking mind.

dad

Thanks to our friend Jess, who reminded us that the pool at FDR State Park was very recently renovated, we spent a full day in its fountain-bedecked shallows, roving from feature to wacky feature to experience a rich spectrum of soggies. As Kina rode around majestically on Laurea’s back (to emulate Frozen 2’s mystical “water horse” scenes), I decamped to the lap swim corner of the pool to “get a little exercise”, which looked in practice like me slowly front-crawling across the pool, panting for three minutes, and then trying to backstroke to the other side, giving up halfway, floating on my back and dragging myself along by the lane lines for half a length. It was impressive!

I later joined Laurea and Kina for a romp in what I call the “tippy buckets” in today’s top headline. The water feature works like this: Four conical buckets, some nine feet up, slowly fill from constantly-running spigots, until they become top-heavy and tip their contents out into the pool—and preferably on top of Kina’s head. The game looked like this: She and I moved from bucket to bucket, stationing ourselves directly under the intermittent deluge, as I looked her straight in the eye and said, “You’re safe. It’s okay, we’re safe.” Seconds later, the water would fall directly on her noggin as she sputtered in glee. It’s really dark, but she insisted on repeating the whole scenario dozens of times; I’ll leave the interpretation to some future therapist. (She can use this newsletter as documentation of my twisted sense of humor.)

Anyhow, it’s worth noting that I have not set foot in a public pool in the state of New York in possibly ever? I don’t want to suggest that all pools are as good as the pool at FDR State Park, but if they were, hooboy! Hot dogs, empty swim lanes, tippy buckets, crowds of fifty-something public school teachers arguing about the COVID vaccine, and at least one four-year-old girl screaming “TAXI!!” from underneath a torrential rain shower. A true melting pot, and properly chlorinated. Five stars; bring sandals, but no outside food.

It was also a humid summer day the last time we took Kina to the American Museum of Natural History, but things weren’t so hot that time around. It was almost exactly three years ago, Kina wasn’t yet two years old, and she was taking—for the most part—reliable and regular naps. That day, though, after visiting an amazing museum in which she exhibited no interest at all, she skipped her nap, and we spent two profusely sweaty hours walking through the Ramble in Central Park trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get her to sleep. It is no accident that we have not since returned to the Natural History Museum—the memory of screeching children and low-level panic is hard to put out of mind.

Still, as we muscled through the humid heat of this weekend, it became apparent that we had reached our emotional limits, and we masked up to visit a museum that, before Kina came, had been our very favorite to visit as a couple. And we were well compensated, this time, for our troubles. From the very second we walked through the doors, Kina dashed off to gaze at the massive slabs of igneous rock, with their layers folded in upon themselves, next to nubbly spires of sulfurous stone formed in undersea calderas. She gasped in amazement when the planetarium went dark, pointing out the planets as they soared into view overhead. She ran from diorama to diorama, asking questions about dead zebras and revealing her extensive knowledge of various bacteria and marine life.

When we first walked into the building, I told Kina, “This museum is so big that it will always surprise you. We’ll have to come back a lot to see it all.” She nodded, and when we ultimately did walk out the doors, Laurea and I were surprised by dioramas we’d never seen before, and we were enchanted by our own child, whose breathless curiosity had grown by an order of magnitude more than her own brain in the years since we last swore we’d never go back.

I don’t know enough about juvenile metabolisms to understand how it is that Kina can come home after a full day in the sun, with a dew point of like 212 degrees, and still jump around the house like she’s had four espressos. It is as if she sweats rubbing alcohol and feeds off the wilting adult souls pooled at her feet. She doesn’t even recognize how good she has it—youth wasted on the young, et cetera.

dad

This is the first newsletter I’ve ever sent in which I haven’t copied the morning headline exactly, for fear of triggering spam filters. Kina’s knowledge of human anatomy leaves something to be desired in its nuance and accuracy, and she has selected, from among all possible options—and despite our best efforts to dissuade and educate her—the single grossest word to describe any non-facial orifice. Cows, and their udders, apparently don’t fare any better.

dad

Kina loves nothing more than the white-hot sun of summer and her precious floaties. Also, she asked me to point out to all of you that she used three colors for the “A” in “Kina” this morning, and suggested that doing so was a pretty big deal.

dad

When you are four, an old joke is a joke you told two weeks ago. The standard for novelty is high in this family.

The Mommy joke is that she likes seafood towers so much that she wants to climb up a giant seafood tower to eat the enormous clams. The Daddy joke is that I spend all day typing.

That these decrepit jokes are hilarious to her is all that matters. The audience is just along for the ride.

Niki unexpectedly blew through town, and our intrepid friends since birth spent an hour making silly jokes, squeezing each other tight, and being sneaky. A nice Monday surprise.

dad

Laurea and I sometimes talk about the sort of Peter Pan effect that comes with growing up and growing older in New York City. The city is designed to keep you feeling as if you’re roughly twenty-six years old for as long as you need to be, offering a more or less constant stream of activities and communities to serenade you with an endless song of your own youth. Drink! Eat! Dance! Run! Travel! Rent! Gossip! Wake up late! Work at startups! Play difficult video games!

I’m not saying that having a kid ends that, per se, but it does make the illusion more difficult to maintain. Early morning wake-ups put a damper on late-night karaoke. The fear of distant college tuition payments makes one’s career decisions more conservative. Air travel is 50% more expensive with a kid, and mild cases of dysentery that one might write off as an adult induce more dread when one contemplates caring for a kid with travel-related illnesses. Don’t even get me started on the gossip.

It’s all fine and well to reminisce, of course. Laurea and I did have all that, and those experiences are fixed in our memories forever—they got us to where we are, and Kina is a direct result of our having lived them. We’ve largely gotten over the loss of our dear Peter Pan, and so we don’t talk about it much, but we started explaining to Kina last night how her Mommy and Daddy had lives before she came along—how they used to fly all over the world and go out all night with friends (friends who now also have kids and bring them to the beach so we can take turns watching them while the others take naps on the sand). I don’t know what we expected Kina to say, but she sort of glazed over a bit, took a bite of her breakfast, and delivered a fatal zinger.

“Toasted out” is the kind of tired you get from a day at the beach getting twirled around by your dad. It is when you’re exhausted because you forgot to take a nap in the car while you were singing Stevie Nicks tunes at the top of your lungs. You are toasted out when you get to do gymnastics and singalong on the same day. If you have ever spent a whole summer day outside with friends eating snacks and laughing, you probably felt pretty toasted out when you got home. If you have a hilarious four year old who drags you around the beach, calling you “bruh”, and then rolls around on the sand commenting on everybody’s bathing suits, you probably spend most weekend evenings toasted out. It’s a good feeling, being toasted out, collapsed on your bed while your parents read you stories, distracted by the memories you keep replaying for yourself, half asleep and hoping your dreams will match your day. A nice thing to strive for, if you can get it.

On our little walk through Manhattan yesterday after the beach, we stopped at Casey Rubber Stamps and let Kina choose her own stamp for the road. After considering several cat options, she settled on a 2x2 heart and said “thank you” to John Casey. This morning, she and Laurea went to town with every stamp and stamp pad we own on this sheet of my newly-restocked favorite white construction paper1, a perfect Parade.

Life is ideal inside Kina’s skull, which makes her the perfect self-help guru. I had an unusually rosy outlook on life today after writing this morning’s paper, despite the many obvious causes for pessimism. Before she launches into a full-fledged guru practice, though, I’d probably get her to walk back her advocacy for using tap water as sunscreen, and she probably needs to clarify her little schtick on freedom. Live your life, says Kina, but get your vaccine!

The Earth is great.

dad

I wonder where she picked that line up from?

dad

On one hand, I am deeply offended by the insinuation that my stir fry is too saucy. On the other, my child eats broccoli.

dad

At my college, it was widely understood that students would encounter their own doppelgängers on campus at some point during Senior year, and that only one of these doubles would survive to matriculate. Clearly, I survived the battle, but Kina is onto me.

dad

Masthead: hey do you have a second

News Desk: Yes, what’s up?

Masthead: the top hed today about the whistling. does she actually know how to whistle

When Kina first met Ari the Singalong Guy, she could not yet walk. All the other kids were moshing (like Kina’s mother) in the middle of the literal Williamsburg bar that Ari played at on Thursdays, but Kina bounced contentedly (like her father) in the back of the room. When her friend Sloane turned one, Ari played the birthday party to a crowd of largely unaware infants, but Sloane’s older brother, Julian, who was the same age then as Kina is today, hyped up the crowd and sang all the hits as Ari strummed along.

Eventually, of course, a pandemic happened, which meant that Kina had no meaningful Ari interactions. He valiantly moved to Instagram, but it wasn’t the same. Kina, like all of us, put singalongs on the back burner while the chaos moved through town. Then, all of a sudden, Ari reappeared in McCarren Park. His arrival was unexpected and thrilling—this musical icon in his yellow headband walking through the playground as if he was a dream made manifest, as if nothing had ever changed. Kina watched him, rapt, and promised to return whenever she could.

The weird thing is, everything has in fact changed. Kina still knows all the songs, still loses it to “Everybody Jump”, still navigates Ari’s trademark tripartite Twinkle Twinkle / Baa Baa Black Sheep / ABC medley—but now Kina is the big kid among the toddlers, teaching them to bounce and jump at all the right moments, pointing out that little cats say “meow” and not “woof”, and chiding Ari for being too sweaty and not drinking enough water. Seeing the crowd of little waddling children was a reminder of just how much Kina has grown, and how close she is to outgrowing all the rituals that have gotten her through her babyhood.

I don’t remember going to many carnivals as a child, but I do remember riding on Dumbo. We went to Disney World when I was three, and all I really wanted to do was ride the Dumbo ride—a bog standard, slow twirling ride on one of a herd of Dumbos that you could raise or lower at your whim. My Dad stood in line for the Dumbo ride for hours in the hot Florida sun, as I presumably drank some juice in the shade and slowly decided I didn’t need to ride Dumbo. I remember riding in an elephant, though, so I was, at the end, convinced. I remember other rides pretty vaguely—tea cups, haunted roller coasters, small worlds—but that visit to Disney World stands out as one of the most carnivalesque days of my entire life. I’m not sure I ever rode as many rides as I did that day until I became an adult. I think I now know why.

There are two things I did not fully understand about being a parent at a carnival until yesterday:

1. It is tremendously fun to watch your kid have fun on a ride.

2. It is incredibly draining to stand in the direct summer sun while your child enjoys several carnival rides.

Sometimes, I just like to memorialize the subjects of her dreams.

dad

Kina came home yesterday and told me that she met some new friends at Rodney Playground, and that they had played together, and that she told them that she was the nicest girl in the world. This came as a surprise to me, since I don’t necessarily think of Kina as the nicest girl in the world, though it could be that, to the rest of the world, she is the nicest girl. It is comforting, nonetheless, to know that this is Kina’s personal brand, even as her private life suggests a slightly more brutish inner voice. I hear a lot about this Nice Kina when I meet the parents of kids she plays with—how polite Kina is, or how gentle. I even see it at the playground when she’s off on her own; she’s made a promise to be nice, and she lives by that promise.

I remember making a similar promise to myself in seventh grade. I’m not sure what prompted the thought, but I recall thinking to myself, “I choose to be a nice person”—a random and ambitious thought to have in music class at 9:30 in the morning, but it seems to have stuck. Whether or not I’ve lived up to that promise (and I have failed spectacularly at times), “I choose to be a nice person” has been my own private personal brand for most of my life.

I wonder if that’s really how it feels to Kina, like a choice, or if it’s what she sees reflected to her. I want her to feel nice and to understand that it can be powerful to be that way. I want her to understand that she doesn’t always have to be nice, if it isn’t reflective of how she feels inside. Mostly, I think it’s wonderful that this has value for her, and that she’s willing to celebrate it with others. Kina is much nicer, as a four year old, than many adults—even when I take her occasional foul moods into account; I hope she holds onto it, and that the people around her are the nicest people in the world, too.

A little bird sat on a little tree by a little pond on a little cliff on the side of a big mountain high above the clouds, looking out over the horizon and feeling very special. She had everything she could ever want—her little tree, her little pond, her little cliff, and her big, big mountain, whom she loved very much. But the little bird, who spent every day gazing far away over the field of clouds, sometimes wondered why the world was so wide and so open, and yet still so small.

She could see nothing beyond the mountain but colors—from the burning orange at the edge of the clouds to the rich, blue blackness in the very crown of the sky, scattered through with a cluster of brilliant stars. The little bird knew that she was more than a color herself, and she was not a little tree, or a little pond, or a little cliff, let alone a big, big mountain high above the clouds. So what was she?

And then, as if to answer, a little leaf fell from the branch of the little tree. The wind rushing down from the top of the mountain carried the leaf and twirled it across the pond and out over the cliff, where it caught the light of the sun and then dipped into the clouds. The little bird tilted her head to one side, hopped down from her little tree, flitted across her little pond, and stood at the edge of her little cliff, looking at the place where the leaf had been, and wondered what it was like where the leaf was now. Were the colors different there? Was there another little bird staring at her own big sky, on the other top of the mountain, below those clouds? The bird grew curious.

I wish you could have heard the way Kina sighed as she leaned back on my lap this morning to role-play a sunset. Languid and revelatory, it was a perfect encapsulation of what a four-year-old thinks luxury is—laying out on the grass and staring into an auburn sky, with your very favorite beverage at its ideal temperature, not far from a spa.

Oh my god it sounds wonderful.

dad

“Puppy Blanket” is the sort of puppy blanket that is of genus blanket shaped like a puppy, not genus blanket used by a puppy. Kina has had it since before she could walk; it used to be a spacious and cozy wrap for chilly babies that would make her look like a cartoon dog, and we love it. It is impressive and touching that we still have this blanket draped over the back of the rocking chair in our living room, and Kina still uses it every night when we read her books. Because the dog-eared hood of the blanket is too small for her head now, she puts her toes where her head should be, making a cushy little foot pocket for reading time. When she’s feeling boisterous, she drapes the blanket over my head and mocks me as I sit there in silence. But only Kina can mock Daddy in his puppy blanket raiment; no others may laugh at him—not even his coworkers, whom Kina presumably expects will ignore the spectacle. Zoom culture does strange things to all of us.

dad

Kina loves carousels. Her most beloved carousel, Jane’s Carousel, is temporarily inaccessible to us, for reasons of damaged ferry piers, and so we’ve really played up the Seaglass Carousel in Battery Park—a carousel she last rode apparently just before she could form resilient long-term memories. Because she can only barely recall the idea of a carousel made of giant fish, Kina has been really angling for a visit, attempting on Saturday to displace our beach plans for a visit to the heart of New York tourism. As a compromise, we agreed on Sunday, driving into the parking desert that is downtown Manhattan and hiking through the Financial District to Battery Park.

The tourists are back! It’s wild! People are all wearing foam Statue of Liberty hats, but no masks at all! We stood in line briefly as a dozen or so huge fiberglass fish twirled their way around their motorized pavilion, each occupied by a mildly disappointed tourist staring off into space. When the ethereal music finally stopped, all the fish simultaneously plopped to the ground, and the three attendants all screamed for people to leave the pavilion through the rear door. Then we got on.

The thing about Kina and carousels is this: She loves them so much that she cannot truly enjoy them once she’s on one. She spends the entire ride overwhelmed, contemplating the fact that she is actually on a carousel, soaking in the feeling of being on a carousel, uninterested in reflecting with us on her appreciation of that carousel. Kina rode in her fish, strapped to her mother’s lap, stunned and serious and unwilling to pose for photos. We twirled together for what felt like ten minutes, and the fish plopped down. The attendants screamed. We left.

Kina, like a marauding barbarian, derives great pleasure from chaos and dismantling empires. Because she is small and commands no real army, however, this predilection for destruction finds its most fulfilling expression at the beach, where Kina enjoys watching sand castles fall apart.

Unlike most children, who appear to enjoy building sand castles and protecting them from the elements, Kina instead asks me to do the work of building up a rampart near our spot on the beach; she has me run back and forth to the shoreline, carrying buckets of water so that I can empty them into the dry sand and load the packed beach back into those same buckets, casting rugged turrets that I then lay out in well-spaced formations to defend us from toddlers and childless twenty-somethings.

And then, silently, Kina smooshes them all. She walks the length of the castle and presses her foot into the top of each tower until it collapses into grainy clumps. Sometimes, she drags herself along the wreckage to smooth out any record of the castle that once stood in that place. Unlike Ozymandias, Kina has no intention of leaving a monument to her power; her rule is best remembered not by its architecture, but by the wake of its intentional erasure.

The wake-up time is still 6:24, and so at 6:24 every morning we wake, by which I mean Laurea and I wake, because Kina has usually already been awake for at least thirty or forty-five minutes—a part of Kina’s day about which Laurea and I, by definition, know very little. It is possible to infer a few things from the fossil record, though: She plays, because toys are out; she dresses, because clothes are out (and on her body); and she prepares, because every morning wake-up call brings with it a fully-formed plan for how she will spend her time with Laurea (often) or me (occcasionally).

Kina does not so much wake us as entertain us into consciousness, using a full arsenal of auditory and visual cues from her room. Some days, she brings her tiny flashlight. On others, she waves a long ribbon around. Today, she walked into our room with her Elsa radio, which plays exactly one song, “Into the Unknown”, from Frozen 2, at length and in snippets, both instrumental and vocal. It is also, thank god, festooned with various flashing blue lights—Elsa’s favorite color—that remind the listener to pay close attention to the small child singing along, in case they had forgotten.

Like a tiny Lloyd Dobler, Kina entered the room this morning with the radio held aloft, playing whooshing noises and showering the room with shafts of icy blue light. I can remember being her age and trying to imagine an experience (for Mother’s Day, say) that my parents might like; in hindsight, my taste was questionable, but what did I know of adulthood and sleep? Likewise, Kina had clearly put thirty minutes of deep thought into her inspired reveille, and she was fully committed to the bit.

I know I haven’t been writing long essays here for a while, but something tells me it’s not a wedgie headline that’s gonna fix that.

I love Kina’s little pool drawing at the bottom left, though. It looks almost like a oil painting, which is impressive, given the medium.

dad

Things I am proud of in today’s edition:

• The particular Pepe Le Pew-esque waftiness of Kina floating through the kitchen towards a hot wok full of fried rice, about which she sang a happy little song yesterday

• The accuracy of a tiny Mazda logo, which Kina will remember for the rest of her natural life, on the love letter from Mochi Appley The Family Car

• The gentle drape on the two layered sequined capes that Kina has conned her adults into purchasing for her (though the outfit pictured does not depict her real-life hoodie underneath—see also “This Outfit Is Sick!” from the July 18th edition)

• Kina’s vindictive pricing

Things of which I am less proud:

Little scamp demands respect, finds belly too hot to sleep, despite using pajamas as snuffly lovey.

dad

For the most part, I say “shit” when I am driving. A drunk guy on a Citibike emerges from between two random parked cars—shit. A car swerves in front of me—shit. Laurea merges into an exit lane more quickly than I expected—shit. All this, along with various stubbed toes, has given Kina some very specific insight into what you’re supposed to say when things go wrong (or nearly wrong).

So, lately, when things have gone wrong for Kina, she knows exactly how to respond. Spilled box of Legos—shit. Daddy stubs his toe—shit. Water tips over in the car—a quiet, whispered “shit”.

I don’t much care whether or why Kina curses, because “shit” isn’t really that powerful a curse, and these words are ultimately just words, but it’s notable that she’s discovered the power of this particular word, which I can tell because she never shouts it out loud, only ever uttering it sotto voce, like an incantation. “Shit” is a moment, not an event.

I nearly spent all my phone’s data plan on the effort, but we had a relatively Kina-calm drive back from Maine last night. As a result, our child is significantly better versed in the plot details of Princess Mononoke than she was last week, and I got back to the big city without pulling my hair out in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Thanks, Studio Ghibli and my unnamed but overpriced mobile carrier!

Today’s Parade depicts York, Maine’s Nubble Light, where we took nice pictures in the golden light after eating ice cream on Friday evening. Everything on land was drawn by Laurea, while our mother the sea was drawn by Kina.

One last edition from a vacation at the edge of the horizon.

dad

After a deliberate period of examination, Kina took nicely to her cousin Crew, who is nearly one year old. As a gesture of conciliation, she invited him to her favorite place in this vacation house—the creepy ping-pong basement, where even I fear to tread. She also fed him Cheerios, which was less creepy. He left safely, and Kina played ping-pong. All is well.

dad