I got obsessed with the Fibonacci sequence on the beach this morning and weirded out a horde of locals by drawing a giant sand spiral. Immediately afterwards, Kina ran the length of the spiral while singing “I’m a tanuki1” and instantly charmed everybody in town. We make a great team.

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The ocean was sleepy today, contented and loving. It was in a very sweet mood, though some might have found it chilly. This is how I like my ocean, and my people. Kina included.

dad

The pool is where I finally get to be Kina’s most beloved father, her preferred parent at last. If hypothermia weren’t an issue, I’d keep her there with me in the shallow end forever. It’s nice to be loved, but also slightly soggy.

dad

“River Shark” is a menacing and thrilling pool game invented by Andrew and Des. In it, the eponymous river shark gives its quarry a short head start in a race to the other side of the pool. As its prey paddles, the river shark sings its ominous head start song:

Don’t fall in! River shark!

Don’t fall in! River shark!

Don’t fall in!

Here I come!

Kina spent the first few games of River Shark in breathless terror, as I desperately swam away from Andrew on my pool float with her on my back. Then, she turned the tables, snarling and doggy-paddling her way around the pool in her floatie vest, threatening to eat everybody in the pool.

We’re up in coastal Maine for the next week, catching up on a missed year of beaches, lobster, ice cream, and family. It usually takes me five hours to get here, but we clearly weren’t the only people catching up yesterday, and Kina spent more or less the entire seven hours (save one hour-long nap) in bumper-to-bumper traffic asking us if we were in Maine yet.

The payoff, dear reader, is worth it. Expect shorter missives for the next week, but no fewer zingers and bon mots from our esteemed publisher and neighborhood lifeguard.

The Giglio Feast is one of my neighborhood’s most treasured traditions—a two-week festival surrounding the local Catholic church. The feast celebrates a Neapolitan saint who is said to have freed the children of his town from captivity at the hands of Turkish pirates—a miracle we celebrate by eating sausage and peppers, situating our children on extremely questionable carnival rides, and watching a few dozen local guys shoulder a giant flower-laden monument (the Giglio) and carry it down the street while a brass band plays the theme from Rocky.

The last time we did the Giglio thing was two years ago, which is also the last time the Giglio happened (because of the pandemic). We went with Kina’s friend Niki and his mom, and the kids fished for ducks on the midway, eventually scoring a plush donut and a plastic trumpet—which these two year old children tooted the entire walk home. This year, they did it again, officially making their own tradition inside the larger neighborhood tradition. Again, they fished for ducks. Again, they rode in circles on the carnival cars. Again, they watched the Giglio march down Havemeyer Street—this time, a smaller Giglio carried by the children of the same guys who would, a few days later, bounce the real tower around on their shoulders.

Niki and Kina don’t get to see each other so often these days, but they very clearly have the kind of friendship that can only be forged by newborns. Yesterday, we watched as they spun each other around on the teacup ride and drank lemonade together, each dressed in the official t-shirt of the Giglio Feast, ready to lift buildings on their shoulders side by side to the blaring roar of trumpets.

This is the third clown I’ve drawn in the last month. It’s mildly traumatizing.

dad

I seldom dream of moving to the suburbs, but I occasionally love to imagine that our decrepit pre-war apartment building goes co-op and I have big gobs of cash and buy like four apartments, breaking down walls and putting in floating staircases so that our house becomes a six-bedroom, four-bathroom mini-mansion with just one room that is not my bedroom in which I can put a real office chair that doesn’t slowly eat my lower back alive—all with the same scenic view of the margarita bar across the street, but from four times as many windows. Grandparents will visit! We can own bicycles! More than two people can join us for dinner! Most notably: In this palace, Laurea and I could put Kina to bed and then retire to a wing upstairs and far away, where we would have boisterous conversations and tell loud jokes and listen to Björk, all without fear of rousing Kina from her dream-filled sleep and having her scream at us to STOP! TALKING!

Until that day, Laurea and I will remain ensconced most evenings in our living room, fifteen feet from Kina’s open bedroom door, and whisper memes to each other until the kid falls asleep. This is family.

dad

I was all set with a different top headline today, but then Kina got mad at us for telling her to eat her yogurt and she lobbed this jewel right across the plate. We spent a solid ten minutes debating whether or not peeing on the street counted as pooing on the street. The house remains divided on the matter.

The masthead is Mommy’s four favorite colors. Good night.

dad

We go to the beach a lot more than we used to, both because we have a season pass for the beach at Jacob Riis now, and because Kina is more obsessed with the beach—and with swimming—than either of her parents are. So, yesterday, off to the stretch of sand east of Coney Island and west of the rest of the Rockaways, where we found an expanse of gentle waves in which to frolic.

One hour later, it was pure oceanic mayhem. Amateur swimmers being tossed in four-foot waves, the shore eroding under the force of an advancing tide, errant caps and sand toys everywhere. Just one month ago, I wrote here about losing my sunglasses in heavy waves at the very same beach. I did not detail how Laurea scolded me that day for wearing my sunglasses in the ocean, and how I ought to have thought about the possibility that one of the most powerful forces in nature might swipe my shades. My, how the tables turn.

Laurea and Kina, soaked to the bone, returned from the water to our beach tent, exhausted and laughing. Kina told a thrilling story about how they had survived being clobbered by a wave, and that Mommy’s own sunglasses, a pair of deadstock 90’s goldenrod Paloma Picasso frames that she had worn into the surf—despite my explicit warning not to—had been lost to the sea. This is not a roundabout way of telling Laurea “I told you so”; I am just telling all of you not to wear sunglasses into the ocean when the tide is high, and to learn from our many optical mistakes.

I remember taking Kina to the doctor and listing off all the words she knew how to say, and being proud, at the time, that she was in command of twenty words. Now her vocabulary is so vast and strange that she can pair them all off by how they sound and make me laugh. “Tommy Salami” is a real beauty, and significantly more inventive than whatever I might have come up with, whether at four or forty. Liberal arts poetry degree, here we come! Bring on the book advances—Daddy needs a new house!

dad

I have watched my friend Genevieve’s kids grow up, each from a mewling babe to—for the the first of them—adulthood. They are great kids (even the new adult) and Kina adores them. But as with all of the objects of Kina’s affection, she ultimately put them to hard labor yesterday, when we visited their house for the first time in two years, dragging the whole family through their own house to find stuffies, pet cats, distract dogs, push her on the swing, and inflate balloons. If you’ve ever wanted to see an eleven year old boy trail a kindergartner like a personal assistant, I suggest you spend a little time with Kina. It appeared to be fun to all parties involved, which comes as no surprise, as Kina is a barrel of laughs. It can be very easy to spend all day with a kid who finds you endlessly fascinating and useful. A few days in a row might drain you, but teenagers—like four year olds—have a lot of emotional energy, and they’re seemingly content to be bossed around, as long as the boss is half their height and chuckles like a maniac at every joke you tell.

Today’s Parade is potty-themed, because Kina (as noted in today’s paper) demanded a second watching of her new favorite video—a brief history of sanitation systems—and can’t get potties out of her head. As today’s top headline might suggest, Kina did very little of the actual drawing work here, but all of the art direction. Laurea picked up the slack, while Kina contributed the green hand towels.

The aliens in question made her laugh, just a little bit.

dad

There were three pairs of heart-shaped sunglasses in the package that arrive yesterday: red frames with rose lenses, blue frames with purple lenses, and pink frames with blue lenses. After some careful deliberation, despite Kina’s preference for the color blue, it was decided that her go-to pair would be the pink ones, because then her whole world would be blue. Satisfied with her decision, she strolled the azure rooms of her house in pajamas and shades, a little grin on her face, too chic for words.

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I went to the office yesterday. It was a huge change in my weekday proximity to Kina. I still drew the newspaper. I didn’t embarrass my family. Turns out we can have it all.

dad

I was stern with Kina yesterday. She’s been, for lack of a better term, bratty to the people who love her—in person and on the phone—and I just got fed up with it. “This is not acceptable,” I told her. “When you act this way, you make other people feel bad. The next time you behave like this, you will need to spend some time in your room.” As I said it, I realized instantly what would follow: Kina glared at me for eight long seconds, dropped her head slowly, and finally dissolved in sobs.

In situations like this, it is often the case that I make the ultimatum, and Laurea comes in to offer comfort, but we had agreed that Kina needed to really contemplate what it meant for her to be cruel to those who care about her. I’m not a fan of the “good cop / bad cop” concept—mostly because I’m not a fan of introducing cops into parenting—but I can’t really say that we’ve actually gained much from the (to pick a different analogy) “honey / vinegar” approach to child development. Even as Laurea sat by impassively, Kina clung to her, looking for absolution, and we calmly reiterated that this was not the kind of behavior that our family could demonstrate to others. Dejected and weeping, she marched into her room and plopped down on her bed.

This has happened a lot lately, and it’s been frustrating for all parties involved—not least for Kina herself. I don’t want these moments for her any more than I want them for myself, and so I went in to offer a “let’s start over” (Laurea’s brilliant phrase), once she was calmer. I walked into Kina’s bedroom and got down at eye level with her, dipping my head just below hers. “I feel like you’ve been extra sad and frustrated with me lately,” I told her, “and I want you to tell me why that is.” She blinked a bit, then grabbed one of her blankets and draped it over our heads, as if to create our own little confessional. She looked me in the eye and said, “When you talk like that, you don’t tell me ‘I love you,’ and it makes me sad.”

The Story Bird is probably the most stressful role in my life, because he must each night invent a new story, and I feel that I have set myself up to eventually disappoint Kina by lowering the standard of tension in the tales that the bird carries in every evening by (long story) helicopter. Kina’s requests, in turn, become more and more arcane and existential. “Tell me a medium story”1 is hard enough, but “tell me a medium story that will impress me” is literally the kind of creative prompt that Scheherazade had to live with for almost three years. Writing programs are the worst.

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Laurea is very excited to go to space. She has been tracking the efforts of various billionaire egomaniacs for at least fifteen years, mentally scheduling her inevitable first visit to the stars for whatever birthday seems most likely to coincide with commercial availability. No earthly destination can compete with the sunny climes of fifty-five miles above sea level; it has been impressed upon me that our one true luxury investment must be the achievement of low-earth orbit.

Despite learning (relatively recently) that civilian astronauts are likely only to flirt with the edge of space for fifteen buoyant minutes, Laurea believes in her heart of hearts that the six-figure cost of a trip to the universe is well worth being able to lord it over everybody else. It is a frequent topic of conversation in our household. So, then, has Kina begun to ask us when she will be permitted to visit space—a locale she knows only through cartoons, which means she is likely imagining a vast expanse full of lasers, sword-wielding heroines, and chic jumpsuits.1

In the car yesterday, Laurea was beginning to doubt (for the first time) the value of a fifteen-minute jaunt to weightlessness, even as she outlined the amenities space tourists could expect: seventeen large windows, an array of high-definition video cameras filming one’s every twirl, jumpsuits. Kina’s first question, in response, was whether we would be permitted to hold hands in space, which warmed my “wasn’t really planning to go to space, really” heart and seeded in my mind an image of the three of us floating around in the cabin of a billionaire’s rocket ship, resplendent in matching jumpsuits2, gazing down upon the earth and holding hands the entire time. I can feel Kina’s warm little palm in my own even now, which will help to ameliorate the sense of nausea that I’m sure weightlessness will induce in me.3

There’s something at the intersection of today’s top headline, “Producer Strikes Movie Deal”, and the “UNFAIR!” headline that perfectly describes this weekend with Kina. Kina has been both very particular and very crafty about how she spends her time lately, demanding very specific conditions for her existence and structuring elaborate deals with us to ensure those conditions come to pass. We did this, of course, to ourselves; we’ve been striking bargains with Kina since before she could understand the options, and now she’s developed an acumen for negotiation on par with that of a high-end divorce lawyer.

Here’s roughly how yesterday’s bargaining looked:

Kina: Daddy, can we watch a movie when we go home?

Me: Not sure; you’ve been watching a lot of TV, and we should probably just play.

Kina: I wanna watch a movie. Can we make a deal?

Me: Hit me. What are you offering?

Kina: If IIIIIIII watch a movie, yooooouuuuu can take a nap.

Me: …

Kina: And I won’t bother you.

Me: …

Kina: And you can sleep on the couch OR on the bed, and I will give you a soft, soft blanket.

Me: So, I let you watch a movie, you will let me take a nap anywhere I want, on a soft, soft blanket.

Kina: Deal?

Me: Deal.

Clearly, Kina inherited Laurea’s extrovert gene. What a great time to have a chatty kid in New York City, as the city comes alive. The city is lucky.

dad

It was almost exactly a year ago that I sent the first edition of the newsletter version of this imaginary newspaper that I illustrate every morning for our daughter1, with the top headline of “Kid Bids Hyped Farewell to Teachers”. This exercise started just as school ended, and now it is ending again. Having already written the long, maudlin thing a few days back, I will not go into sepia-toned detail about what the year meant to us, and to her, but I did want to note at least one difference between last year’s (mid-pandemic) news and today’s:

This time, she got a graduation.

Kina strutted around the corner yesterday morning to her actual schoolyard (which has been here all along, as it turns out) to celebrate her commencement—from a year of school that technically predates her formal education. With her, in real life actual person, were seven or so of her twelve classmates, most of whom had never actually seen each other’s feet. These kids, who’d spent the entire school year together, hovered around each other with vaguely awkward-first-date vibes, dancing the same dances and singing the same songs in perfect synchrony and contentment (though all at a distance of six feet). In another version of this last year, they’d have formed noisy clusters, but here they orbited each other like timid little stars in the firmament of the playground. It was all very tentative, but still sweetly charming.

Had a little daddy-daughter time with Kina yesterday, and the weather was nice, so we ate outside at the popular restaurant across the street—where Kina can always get a table without a reservation. She was dressed in an Elsa costume (natch) and carrying one of her many makeshift magic wands, which is a good way to keep her occupied while we wait for food. As our pasta was being prepared, we toasted each other with orange juice (her) and wine (me), and she cast spells on the people walking by: tough Dominican dudes, stylish Israeli women, small dogs, kids on scooters. One by one, all were transformed into chatty princesses and happy subjects, twirling and grinning. Once she had them in her thrall, Kina would talk to her new friends about their scooters, the ladybug on our table, or their chic (her word) pink-handled shopping bags. She learned about how to buy presents for long-lost friends1, who was gonna wash all the clothes at the dry cleaner2, why one lady’s body was “very small”3, and all the names of another person’s many birds4. Kina was the embodiment of summer in a shouty little package, casting rays of light across the mismatched crowd of Brooklyn residents, all recently escaped from their caves.

Witches are good! We should all be so transformed! Kina is taking appointments.

dad

Somebody find this kid’s heart sweatshirt, for god’s sake!

dad

What I remember most, strangely, is having to buy my four-year-old child her own computer. All the other kids had gone to school weeks before, which had resulted in a run on cheap Chromebooks—not just the Wirecutter recommendation, but the runner-up, the runner-runner-up, and every competing recommendation on every site that recommended cheap Chromebooks for students. Every student in America was learning remotely, and they all immediately needed screens. I found a refurbished third-runner-up Chromebook at a local electronics concern and paid too much for it.1 Kina was ready for her first day of school.

We had thought a lot about where to send Kina for pre-kindergarten—toured the grounds, talked pedagogy, considered her friends from threes. At the end, we decided to send her to the school around the corner from us, which happens to be the kind of public school that parents from other neighborhoods attempt to bribe to get their kids into: an enormous gym, spacious classrooms, devoted teachers, and gardens. How lucky, we thought, to be able to walk Kina two blocks to the front door of a school in such high demand. How much easier my commute will be, said I! I should have been more careful with my wishes.

Instead, my commute was to the bedroom, hers to the couch. We tried to get Kina to sit in a chair, but the whole affair was strange enough, and so Kina attended school this entire year surrounded by cushions and plied with snacks. The rules, otherwise, were clear: You gotta get dressed, and you gotta pay attention. Class was fifteen minutes each morning, with interest supplements throughout the day (stuffie club, science club, movement club). Laurea and I studiously avoided the couch during those times, and we tried not to look Kina in the eye, lest—like a feral cat—she would stalk us. It took a few tries, but I set up her laptop so that she could launch Zoom on her own, and she quickly took to it. Starting Zoom isn’t the kind of thing you expect to say that your four year old does very naturally, but here we are.

We have been expanding our musical horizons lately, and none too soon. As Moana gave way to Elsa, so has Elsa given way to arbitrary Broadway tunes sung by the performers who brought you Elsa (think: Wicked, which I had never heard before, and is quite good). So, in turn, does Wicked give way to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”, a huge boost to my driving mood ever since Kina learned about it.

A recent emphasis on playlist turn-taking while on trips around the city has given our esteemed publisher better access to the musical tastes of her parents, which includes not just the aforementioned Cyndi Lauper catalog, but also one of Daddy’s favorite musical artists, Prince—or, as Kina calls him, “King”. I had to wade in carefully with Prince, because some of his best early tunes are not Kina-friendly, but “Let’s Go Crazy” seemed like a good place to start, and Kina seems to appreciate the tonal arc of the song (including the dramatic intro). It’s still unclear whether Kina is interested in the rest of Prince’s substantial catalog, but there’s plenty of time to find out, since I get every third song we play in the car. I can sit through just about all of Frozen, one song at a time, if I get to play her “Purple Rain”—a tune that Kina once said was “very, very long”.

This is why Daddy always sings it at karaoke; this family loves the limelight. Kid comes by it honestly.

Rare are the situations in which Kina actually prefers my company to Laurea’s, and so I’m always on the lookout for my edge. As fate would have it, being in the ocean is among those situations—a theory in development since earlier this month, now considered valid among Kinologists and other interested observers. When given the option to leap over the waves with one or the other of her parents, Kina demands me, which is a huge boost to my ego (especially in the weekend adjacent to Father’s Day). Unfortunately, this attention also means that I have very little solo floating time and am required to throw Kina in the air at least once every minute1. Still, with all the effort and my half-drownings as I hold her high above the crashing waves, I am grateful to have found a pocket of preference with her. Neither Laurea nor I understands why the ocean is my domain, or what evolutionary quirk has led to my parental advantage in the briny deep; Laurea seems only mildly troubled, though, so we’ve run with it2. I knew there was a reason I bought the beach pass this year—with unlimited parking, I’d really invest heavily in the ocean-bobbing—absent the minor hypothermia issue. The things we do for our children’s love.

Yesterday, when Laurea and I went out on a date, we stopped at Casey Rubber Stamps to buy some absurd new pieces for Kina’s growing collection of ink stamps, ultimately settling on a lobster and a cat playing a tuba. Keen-eyed observers will spot both in today’s issue of Parade, along with some fiddly little flowers and their pollinating bees. Kina drew a golden heart for me at the top left for Father’s Day. Everything else is a beehive. Kina resisted the addition of the lobster, claiming (as you will see in today’s headlines) that crustaceans cut the stems of flowers and get them soggy; accordingly, I have placed today’s shellfish out of harm’s way—a reminder to tend our gardens carefully, lest the lobster come.

Kina has been through several phases with eggs, vacillating back and forth over the last four years between loving eggs and loathing them. Laurea and I, in the meantime, have developed real expertise in the art of the cheesy scrambled egg, and I can guarantee that you would love them, but I cannot make the same promise for Kina, who currently favors the egg, but only if it is “burning hot”—the kind of temperature that requires you keep your mouth open while you chew. Heat like that is a limited engagement, of course, and so the rare egg breakfast we share is extremely quiet and urgent. When the eggs are no longer scalding hot, Kina stands down, regardless of how much egg remains. Yesterday, she made it all the wat through, extremely proud and mildly burned—but in precisely the fashion she signed up for. You should join her sometime, but leave your mouth open. The eggs are hot.

dad

And the good questions continue.

dad

It has been ZERO days since Kina kicked me in the face. I keep telling her not to whack me with the bony part of her heel, and while this is obviously because I do not want her to break my nose, it is also because I want her as an adult to remember that, in a pinch, she can use the bony part of her heel to break somebody’s nose. Build the skill, regulate the behavior. Parenting!

dad

I could probably do a whole week of good questions, which—if you ask Kina—all require a response of, “That’s a good question!” This is a quirk in my rhetoric that she’s picked up on, and now I am forced to use it all the time. They are good questions, though. What is on top of space? Oh boy.

dad

p.s. The young reader is making real inroads on simple words lately, though she complained this evening about my “tracey line” pictures. So noted.

Kina has been seeming extra big lately, and Laurea and I have been trying to imagine ways in which we could keep her small forever—a “smallening potion”, constant squeezing, the reversal of time—all of which are, just to get it out there, not particularly fair to Kina as a distinct and sovereign human being, but it’s what we want, and you subscribed to this newsletter, so I don’t know what else you expected.

I ascribe Kina’s sudden hugeness to our having met—for the very first time—my friend Jason’s new daughter, who was born at the dawn of the pandemic and yet somehow can already walk and appreciate balloons. This little girl has it all: the chubby cheeks, the sassy waddle, the uncritical view of her own parents. She was so cute, I wanted to eat her right up1, or at least draw her a newspaper. Kina was very kind and gentle with this child, which reminded me of all the sweet four year olds who once doted on my tiny fifteen month old, sassy waddle and all.

Anyhow, when you see just how small a cool baby can be, it turns out you want to make your slightly older baby as small as that baby. The conventional wisdom says that you want to turn back the clock and recover that time and youth—their newly born youth, your less exhausted youth, whatever. Part of me thinks it’s actually that the kid is just more compact and easier to snuggle (or eat). In fact, though, I think there’s something beautiful about being needed; it feels good to know that somebody depends on you so totally, and that you’ve evolved to understand (mostly) how to meet their needs. In the moment, with your first kid, that’s wildly difficult; in hindsight, it’s easy peasy. “Imagine,” I told Laurea the other night after Kina had gone to bed, “if we could raise Kina as a baby again. We would have all the answers! It would be simple!”

Every once in a while, your brain gets a little wingly, and that’s why you get super whiney at lunch with your dad’s good friends in Philly, foiling any potential observation on their part of your extremely sophisticated demeanor. Later, as you ride home, your wingly brain will ask you why, after such a long drive, you are still not yet in Brooklyn. Your wingly brain will insist that you join it in asking your father—who is navigating bumper-to-bumper traffic—that question, and you will concede. Once home, you will nibble briefly on a dumpling and claim that you are full. When your parents ask you why you are not eating, you will blame your wingly brain. Your mother and father will carry you to bed and tuck you in, all of you exhausted from a long trip away, and you will sleep like the baby you still are, to wake the next day with a refreshed brain and a ravenous hunger. Your parents will not hold your wingly brain against you, because they have spent many days of their lives with similar brains, and they hope their parents don’t hold it against them. We make space for each other’s wingly brains, because it is the human condition. Someday, you will make space for somebody else to be wingly, and you will quietly tell them that we are all so, so close to Brooklyn.

dad

I bet Ben Franklin didn’t care that his sundial couldn’t tell the time at night. “Early to bed”, etc. Who needs to know that it’s 3 A.M. anyhow? No good ever came from that. I wonder what he would have said to Kina if she’d asked him? I have no idea why I picked Ben Franklin for this imaginary conversation. I think I was going for the Philly angle.

We’re back now. The traffic was atrocious, but the trip was great, great fun. Thanks to Laurea for arranging it, and for our little Center City apartment for the marble table.

It’s probably a good sign that I don’t have time to write about being on a birthday trip to Philly at the moment. It is unspeakably good to see friends here, and Kina is having a total blast. Even taught her to say “wooder ice”, like the local I’m not.

dad

I caught Kina just after her nap yesterday, before I left to have dinner with Laurea and my siblings. Kina had left me a little construction paper birthday card and wandered into my bedroom, still rubbing her eyes, to show it to me. Afterwards, she gave me a long hug, and then another. I went to fetch a glass of water, and she gave me another hug. I passed by the living room, and she hugged me again. As I walked into my bedroom to get my wallet, she asked, “Do you want another hug?” I walked over to her, sat down on the floor as I always do after her nap, and waited for her to crawl onto my lap. She laid her head on my chest and nibbled on a Nilla wafer as I squeezed her shoulders. She stood up, turned to me, smiled, and went to finish her cookie snack. Nice birthday present from the small person. Highly recommend.

dad

It is my birthday, and the publisher has given me the day off work. This was generous of her, but she now has to reckon with the consequences of not staffing a more resilient newsroom. See you tomorrow!

dad

If you know us, you know that Laurea and I did not plan for Kina to become the Pink Girl. For over a year, we defended the borders of Kina’s wardrobe and consciousness from the color pink, favoring a wider variety of hues and on-trend earth tones. Occasionally, somebody would offer us a pink gift, and we’d accept it, but it would be relegated to the back of a drawer, in hopes that Kina would quickly outgrow it.

Eventually, though, like water, pink found a way. Sometime early in 2020, Kina found herself drawn to pink clothing, a pink tutu, her pink cape, pink shoes, pink television characters. Kina has rubbed through every pink crayon in her collection and consumed every sheet of pink construction paper in the house. When I settled on a color for the masthead of The Daily Kina, I asked her what color I should use, and she pointed to a red marker and said “pink”, which was when I first realized that Kina thinks of the color red as just a very dark pink.

Yesterday was a notable shift for her, though. We were talking about everybody’s favorite colors, and Kina volunteered that her new favorite color was light blue, and that, while she used to love pink, she “changes color every year”, which feels about right. She does actually favor blue now, in the characters she loves (Elsa) and her choice of t-shirts. The tutu is still a favored costume, and the cape gets a lot of play, but she adores them less for their rose color than for their general sparkliness—another signature Kina look. While I worry about having to stock up on blue outfits, I do look forward to learning more about Kina’s blue period, and her further explorations of the rainbow1. Starting to miss the pink, though. Didn’t see that coming.

I remember when I first came to understand what the teachers’ lounge was. I remember the smell of coffee, the edge of a cork board, and a rickety, low table; it felt forbidden. It had not, before that moment, occurred to me that teachers had jobs. I do not remember what I thought it was that teachers did, or how they came to be teachers, or why they persisted in teaching. They felt forceful and eternal, like the laws of physics and my parents. A teacher was a teacher, and she must always have been a teacher, the classroom her inviolable domain. Most notably, they were—like snow leopards and cobras—solitary creatures. My devoted fourth grade teacher, who tutored me in math, may have had a clear sight line to my beloved third grade teacher, who debunked fortune tellers, but they were at best planets passing in orbit.

The teachers’ lounge was evidence that teachers were in fact more like lions than cobras, members (when not in their domain) of a powerful society of authority figures who shared a love of burnt coffee. Still, even with that glimpse into their community, I still assumed they were somehow physically bound to the campus, demons trapped in the cycle of attendance and lunch. It did not occur to me to ask why teachers existed, why the specific teachers shared that specific lounge, or if they were there by choice at all. All I knew, at that point, was that they were a group of powerful people who (perhaps begrudgingly) communed with each other. The language arts teachers in my middle school clearly had a shared agenda and an implied hierarchy. You could tell who among them were the leaders and the outsiders, the cliques and their enemies. The detention teacher, who coached football, shared little with the gauzy drama teacher in the adjacent room, but they drank from the same brew.

I did, of course, eventually figure out that teaching was a job, but I don’t think it really sank in until high school, when my French teacher quit and went to work in a call center.1 It was only then that it hit me, thirteen years older than Kina is today, having arrived at the same realization, that teachers had coworkers, and that the work they do is a choice they’ve made, and that they put up with their colleagues and (frequently) their students for the same variety of reasons that most working adults do: to pay the rent, to make a difference, to find community.

Kina had a very exciting day yesterday, and without going into too much detail, it’s safe to say that it included long-awaited family hangouts with two key kid friends. The first, with Sloane, involved countless water balloons; nobody from either family left the premises dry, and we all got to see these two kids—who’ve known each other since they were nine months old—engage in complex and mischievous play. The other, with Futura, involved too-hot bowls of arroz caldo at a table just the right size for kid friends. Daddy stood by officiously and announced an appetizer of chicken skin. Futura asked for eggs on the side. The kitchen allowed it. Everybody had popsicles.

Kina slept like a log.

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No sensible person would swim in the cold ocean water off the coast of New York at the beginning of June, but Kina is no sensible person. She is, however, endowed with the sort of metabolism that inures children to extreme temperatures, and with an abiding love of the sea. This is fine, and I am very happy for her, however, Kina cannot swim, which means that I must also be in the cold ocean water, and I, dear reader, am a sensible person.

We didn’t originally plan to go to the beach yesterday morning, but an early hitch in our plans for the day meant that Laurea and I were suddenly able to make up for our rainy Memorial Day weekend and catch some rays. We threw everything but our beach tent in the trunk, hit the BQE, realized that we hadn’t thrown the beach tent in the trunk, stopped to buy a beach umbrella, cursed the traffic, played several Broadway tunes at Kina’s request, and, finally, found a parking spot at Jacob Riis.

The first thing Kina wanted to do was jump in the water, but the waves were high and the water was cold. She was relentless, and we ended up carrying her past the shore break and into the icy chest-deep ocean. Every inch of my body hurt; she was thrilled. Over the course of the day, we performed that peculiar early June dance of walking back and forth between the shore to the sole-scalding beach six times. From the waves, Kina heckled the timid adults at the edge of the surf and squealed in glee as her teeth chattered. I held her aloft as the waves broke over my head and dragged my sunglasses into the murky depths. Kina pressed her cheek tightly to mine and squeezed my neck as we were carried up over the swells. I could only persuade her to leave the water by telling her that I would freeze to death. She complied.

A couple years back, I laid some wall-to-wall carpet in Kina’s room, covering the ugly linoleum that serves as flooring throughout our house. It has, since then, been my favorite floor to lie on, and we periodically go in there just to experience the joy of being on a carpet and talking. It is the homiest room in our home.

It is also, as of this week, the smelliest room in our home. Kina, as I last noted in February, is no longer enrobed in the floral scent of new humanity. She trods about the house, barefoot and pungent, marking her territory. Laurea and I, who are both sensitive about the smells that surround us, combat this to the best of our abilities1, but the battle is futile. Yesterday, after hosting a playdate with another little friend, her bedroom smelled—and I’m sorry to have to tell you this—like pickles.

I unleashed a full box of baking soda at the problem and vacuumed the place up while Kina was getting ready for bed, so I’m now satisfied that the room smells like room, and that the carpet is suitable once again to recline on. Tonight, Kina was wearing her rainbow unicorn slipper boots, which means the rug will live to fight another day. In the meantime, you should all invest in baking soda futures and invest in a home with hardwood floors.

I contemplated for a long while whether or not I should write out the word “purée” in today’s top headline the way Kina actually said it, which was poo-ray—a substantially much funnier pronunciation—but because it took me two minutes to figure out what she meant when she said this last night, I decided ultimately to go with the traditional spelling.

Kina eats what we eat these days, which is easy when nobody commutes, and we all sit down to identical plates at six o’clock. These days, Kina’s food has actual texture, but she appears to understand that she once ate nothing but smooth pastes. In those days, before Kina had teeth, Laurea and I would cook up sweet potatoes or avocado and blend it into an undifferentiated mush, which Kina would spread with great care all over her face and the walls. I can’t recall when we stopped feeding her purées, though mushy foods were a component of her menus well into her toothy period.

In 2019, Laurea and I would both come home from work at seven, and Kina’s nanny would already have gotten her ready for bed; our job, then, was to sit and read to her, shower her with affection, and put her to bed. I didn’t really appreciate the benefit of the shared dinners we weren’t having, because I didn’t appreciate the cost of staying late at work—it felt like the appropriate thing to do. I valued Hannah’s work in taking care of Kina in the evenings, but I didn’t understand what two hundred and sixty extra dinner hours a year with my kid might feel like. Now I do.

Laurea and I both realize that Kina’s snuggling is a non-renewable resource, and so whenever she is distracted by her favorite witch show, Little Witch Academia, we sidle up next to her and lean in for a little squeeze. With Kina’s defenses down, she is more readily receptive to patting us on the head and feeling our heads on her little shoulder. Laurea has an easier time of this than I do, and can get what I call the full reverse lap snuggle, placing her head on Kina’s lap while Kina strokes her hair. This is the ultimate snuggle. I never get this snuggle.

Yesterday, as she watched a particularly riveting episode of Little Witch Academia, in which our heroine Akko Kagari is cast into her friend Sucy’s medicated mushroom dreamscape, where she finds all of Sucy’s alter egos and memories wandering aimlessly through a field of amanita, Kina was so distracted that I was able to pull off the full reverse lap snuggle myself for nearly five minutes. It wasn’t until she spotted her mother standing in the kitchen doorway that I got the boot. Kina scolded me, but I am unrepentant.

To be fair to Kina, she has been a little more snuggly with me in the last week, because of my janky back (which, dear reader, is feeling much better), and I have really been milking it. Ever since Kina has been aware of the value of snuggles, she has been incredibly stingy in their distribution, and yet she appears to be dishing them out more frequently lately. Is it because she knows that she’ll only be small for a little while longer? Are they rewards for the ice pops Laurea and I have been giving her as after-work snacks? Is it all an elaborate scheme? Whatever it is, I’ll take all the snuggles she wants to offer, and then some. It’s worth all the ice pops and witch shows we have.

Sent last night’s edition super late, because I went out to actually meet up with a human being for drinks and then came home and went to bed, before awakening with a start and dashing off a quick note to all of you. It was a stark reminder of how much this nightly newsletter has benefitted from our collective solitude, and I honestly don’t know what will happen to it once we all agree to spend time together again. I’m trying not to think about it, and I am at the very least committed to doing this newsletter thing for a solid year—which is sometime this month. How much of The Daily Kina is about Kina, and how much is it about the pandemic? Let’s find out! Sooner or later!

In any case, today’s edition: Laurea woke up this morning to find Kina in her room, staring down with concern at her fan. Upon closer observation, Laurea then noted that Kina’s fan had ceased to function. Further investigation showed that the fan had consumed one of Kina’s cheap little capes1 and had hopelessly entangled it into its own motor, burning itself out.2 I found this surprising, because the fan was kind of expensive, and you would imagine that a company that celebrates its well-made fans might at least test them to ensure they could outmatch a cheap polyester cape.

I digress.

Kina doesn’t understand prestige dramas, but maybe crime thrillers would be better with more animals.

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I remember some of the dreams I had when I was very young, and how realistic their absurdity was; when you’re still a kid, everything new feels ridiculous. At that age, when we hold the novelty of real life up against the random murmurings of our unconscious brain stems, it’s hard to say which is which. Kina’s dreams, which I’ve written about here before, are a mishmash of anthropomorphized stuffies and her parents, set frequently in playgrounds. It’s always recess in Kina’s dreams, an unusual time in a familiar space.

Last night, for example, Kina dreamt that Laurea was babysitting Hello Kitty at McCarren Park, and she needed to call me to take over for her so that Kina and Laurea could run an urgent errand or play Baby Lucy or something. Hello Kitty was being a little troublesome, and I was running late, but it all worked out in the end. She told us breathlessly about this dream over breakfast and then immediately asked Laurea if she had been in the same dream. She had not, of course, because we are eventually raised in adulthood to believe that we have little hermit brains that cannot share in some shared consciousness. Kids, however, assume otherwise, and I’m inclined to go along with that. Kina finishes my sentences, guesses my intentions, and can communicate clearly with me in simple grunts; why would we not dream together? Why would Laurea not recall handing off Hello Kitty in the playground as she and Kina sprinted off to their ice castle? She was there, after all.

We are, to be fair to Kina, for the most part always there. The last fifteen months have been a story of nearly continuous coexistence with our esteemed publisher—and we’re grateful for it. Her life, in ways that we had not expected, is still an outcropping of our own. She still experiences the world through us, and we, in turn, have the world reframed to us in her words. We know Hello Kitty, and we know Kina’s other stuffie and human friends. We know where she’s been and what she’s learning. We know all her games. We know what she’s afraid of.1 In a sense, we know her dreams, because we are familiar with their ingredients. We may as well be in there with her; sounds like fun.

Kina has been really leaning into her life of leisure this last weekend, perhaps in celebration of summer’s impending arrival. The posture you see in the illustration for today’s top story depicts with astonishing accuracy the barefoot pose she’s struck on various couches this weekend, as she’s reminded the adults (and dogs) around her that we should all strive to exert more energy in the service of fun. Cast off the bonds of labor! Forgo worry! Live life like a four year old!

Fancy the Dog Really Likes Chompin’ on that Sock

Kina befriended two dogs in one fell swoop this weekend—Pearl the Older Dog, and Fancy the Puppy. She’s still not entirely sure what to do around dogs, since she both craves their attention and fears their tongues. Fancy gave her plenty of both, and Kina made a sincere effort to direct young Fancy’s formidable energies towards chomping on an old stuffed sock tied up with string. Eventually, they found their stride, prancing back and forth from our friend’s bedroom to her living room, two bouncy smallies connected by drool and twine.

How do you explain traditions to a kid who barely knows routines? All I know is that I ate pasta tonight with Kina for Daddy-Daughter Time, read a special book that only the two of us read, and tucked her in with a story about Baby Rainbow Unicorn and Nicola, as told by a bird. Traditions she can live with, as long as you don’t talk about ‘em.

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p.s. Working on reading skills, so we might start to see relatively inconsequential headlines in the bottom left. Use them with your pre-literate child or other small animal!

When Kina started her pre-kindergarten year, we bought her a little computer of her own that, while relatively inexpensive, has an actual touchscreen. This has made it much easier for her to navigate her way into class every morning, by actually touching the various pixels on the screen that correspond to the digital analogues of “going to school” (Zoom icon), “entering the classroom” (turning on video), “saying hi to the teacher” (unmuting), and “going home for the day” (leaving the chat). At the start of it, I was concerned that we’d have to hover over Kina all day to mute and unmute her, but she picked up pretty quickly on how to handle her own audio/video needs and has now become sufficiently expert in video chat that she knows how to put her teacher in “full screen” mode.

It is uncanny how similar Kina’s video chat concerns are to my own. She is constantly checking to make sure she’s muted when she asks me for a snack. She has intermittent video issues. She notes when other kids on screen are frozen. She asks her teacher to fix her mic. There’s something very peculiar about how much both our days have changed in the midst of this pandemic, and how central a role video chat plays in our lives. When the internet goes out, school and work both grind to a halt. With Kina’s tappable approach to navigating school, though, she’s further challenged by Zoom’s teensy buttons, and accidentally logged herself off yesterday when she smeary-fingered her way onto the “close” button (the digital equivalent of taking a bathroom break? Skipping school?) when trying to hit the “full screen” button

Close the other window, hit the icon, wait for the teacher, turn on your video, unmute, remute, full screen. Reasonable excuse, hit the wrong button.

Sometimes, Kina will walk up to me and yell “Say what I say!” and I have to pay extremely close attention and stop whatever I’m doing, because what follows is that I need to say exactly what she says at exactly the same time she’s saying it, regardless of what it is she is saying. This is hard, because she is not speaking from a script, and I am not—regrettably—linked directly to her brain (which is often a problem for other reasons, if you ask Kina).

What I have to do instead is read Kina’s lips, which I sort of know how to do, because my mother is hard of hearing, and I’ve had to think a lot over the years about how my mouth looks when I talk. The easy part is that her speech always starts with four slowly enunciated words: “SAY… WHAT… IIIIII… SAAAAY”, which gives me a few seconds to get into the right frame of mind. The next sentence almost always starts with the word “MOMMY”, and then everything from there goes wild—a barrage of phonemes and mouth shapes that I copy like a tourist in a foreign country, with every strange Kina-esque mispronunciation emerging dutifully from my mouth. Eventually, her monologue descends into chaos, pure onomatopoeic1 nonsense spilling from our lips.

All of this is very much like the Mirror Game that you learn in high school acting class, except instead of goofy stoned arm movements, it’s full-on sentences and loud noises. Also, you can’t mess up without making the mirror angry and needing to console it at the foot of your bed. Thank you, Mom, for teaching me to lip-read; it saves me a lot of consoling.