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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.