No real moral to this story besides “having a four year old when your body is forty-six is a real endeavor.” Motrin and snuggles, I’ll get through.

dad

There is a fine line between not enough choices and too many choices, and we trip over that line on a daily basis, usually in the snack category. We’re doing our best, kid! You can eat seaweed and grapes!

dad

Last July, I wrote about how the City had not yet turned on the sprinklers at our local playground—the tiny and bedraggled Rodney Park on the shores of the BQE, where the water feature (when it works) is four spray towers. By contrast, our Big Local Playground at McCarren Park is a majestic kid wonderland, with a host of stone turtles and frogs—a hallmark of former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe—that spit a steady stream clean water at neighborhood kids. Usually, the animals come alive at Memorial Day, but the City must be in a good mood, because The Turtles Were On in full force yesterday.

Aside from the sneak preview of summer water season, the big change yesterday was, really, all the kids. Kina has managed to accumulate a robust little cohort of small children, and they are all on a first name basis. Former classmates, birthday party kids, play date kids, kids from the same birthday month in the local parent Slack, friends of friends, children of parent friends—all gathered to celebrate the power of evaporative cooling. Last year, May was a cautious time; the playgrounds were still closed, and kids were tucked away like winter coats. This year, we trust in playgrounds as a space where these kids can let loose. The turtles are on because they know we need them. The turtles and the kids are all making up for lost time.

They—by which I mean “the kids”—are also collecting water balloons. This is a source of real drama on the local parent message board, because water balloons are legitimately a pain in the ass, and also kids will not ever stop whining until they get one. The way we deal with this is never, ever, to get Kina water balloons. Instead, she roams playgrounds in solitude, eyes pinned to the ground in front of her, looking for intact balloons that other parents and children (who are flush with balloons and obviously less bothered by the environmental impact of latex) have dropped. Yesterday, she found at least nine of them, which I dutifully filled only once Kina had agreed to share some of her winnings with the other kids whose parents didn’t believe in balloons. Like an internet book salesman, she hoarded her wealth on the bench beside me, periodically running back to me and rubbing two chubby little balloons on her face in ecstasy. She is a water balloon Scrooge McDuck.

The first time Laurea and I went to Governor’s Island was in July of 2005—the first year the island was open to the public1. At the time, very little of the island was safe and available to explore; the Coast Guard had left the island in 1996, and the buildings had since become decrepit and, in many cases, were being set alight by the fire department in trainings. Governor’s Island was overgrown with weeds, littered with burned buildings, and yet somehow the best thing we had ever seen in New York. From the parade ground at the top of the island, you could look out at Lower Manhattan and hear only the wind.

We’ve been back several times since then, as the island has undergone a slow (and brilliant) redevelopment. More or less the entire island is now available to explore, and it’s one of the city’s best places to ride a bike. Since Kina was quite small, we’ve plopped her into various pedal-driven vehicles—a bike surrey, when she was quite little, which looks more or less like a Flintstone golf cart, and whose bell she learned to ring as we passed adoring strangers; and more recently a bike seat on the back of a traditional mountain bike. She loves to stare at people sprawled out in the grass as we cruise around the border of the island, barking at me to “go faster” so that she can feel the wind in the fringes of her hair underneath her Hello Kitty bike helmet. The bike situation is exorbitant, but Kina has been looking forward to this all week, and her thrill makes the expense worth it.

Kina doesn’t punch her mother; that behavior is reserved only for me. It’s also true that Kina punches me only when nobody is looking, which makes it difficult for Laurea to understand why I’m being punched. It’s not clear that the punching is worse, in aggregate, than the sort of headbutting and scratching behavior Kina once subjected me to, but after a stretch of relative détente, this escalation of hostilities has not gone unnoticed. I’ve tried all the things—time out, prompting sympathy, ignorance. At this point, I’m just going to chalk it all up to being four and cover my face whenever possible. This, too, shall pass.

dad

Back in January, loyal readers will recall, a storyline emerged about a serial retelling of the critically-acclaimed Paddington cinematic universe. This was among the most challenging and rewarding parental duties I have performed, and I took it very seriously—because I take all my bedtime stories seriously. I never tell the same story twice (though almost all my stories now are about Baby Rainbow Unicorn and her friend Niki), and I take great pains to ensure that all my stories have funny endings, even if that means I have to tack on a little womp womp to underscore the punch line.

Kina is a demanding listener, and she strives to protect the integrity of ongoing narratives, like a little continuity director watching for a misplaced hairbrush. Lately, without any new tricks to shake her, I’ve been stressed out about maintaining my streak. So, to keep things fresh, I’ve introduced a new narrator—the Story Bird, who flutters in every night from Jamaica. It is unclear if, by “Jamaica”, the Story Bird means the island nation or the Queens neighborhood, but the Story Bird (until recently) has had no particularly strong Un-daddy-like accent; the Story Bird is, by the time she lands on Kina’s chest, both exhausted and unplaceable.

In the last few days, however, Story Bird has been on vacation, and her backfill is “Joey Story Bird”, who is also from Jamaica but has a strong Brooklyn accent. So, too, do the characters of his stories—including Baby Rainbow Unicorn and Niki, who have become ten times more irascible and considerably ruder this week. In the “Joey Story Bird” regime, Baby Rainbow Unicorn and her friend Niki roam the planet looking for specific animals in various zoos and natural habitats. As they encounter their bumbling guides, Unicorn and Niki argue boisterously with each other and their hosts, declaring that lions are both “freakin’ great!” and “gonna bite my head off, are you crazy!?” Usually, by the end of the story, our loud protagonists have so annoyed the subject of their debate that they are both summarily devoured. This is usually when I make the womp womp sound and Kina—with eyes half closed—chuckles quietly. Funny ending.

I’m not saying Kina’s a creature of habit, but every time I have to negotiate a night without jitterbug1, it really throws things off.

dad

Kina’s been taking these dance classes with her little friend Sloane for the last several weeks. She wears a little leotard and ballet slippers and a sleek ponytail, then hops around and twirls in the ways you might expect a four year old to hop and twirl. Sometimes she comes home and sings little songs whose lyrics I end up having to look up online so that she can dance to them at home. One of them goes:

This is a special song

You hafta put your ears on

Listen for the magic word

S! T! O! P!

Says what you can do

It’s something that you may have heard

It’s a real earworm, lemme tell ya.

When Kina said this about me, it was with a sense of real resignation, that I might never be taught to think otherwise about whatever it is that my brain contemplates so habitually. On one hand, it seems unlikely that a four year old could understand the inner workings of her daddy’s brain. On the other, I may not be as complex a puzzle as I might like to believe. Maybe we’re all just open books, gears on display like neurotic automatons. In any case, Kina’s got your number, you better believe it.

dad

p.s. Super proud of today’s turbine illo, featuring our little goddess of the wind. Blow, child! Blow!

Of course they hatched while we were gone. The miracle of nature is once again concealed from city dwellers, despite our best intentions. The chief butterfly1 in this house, having returned from Long Island with her gauzy wings, remains unperturbed by the nastiness of birth and will make do with bug videos from YouTube.

dad

We drove out to Long Island yesterday to meet up with one of Kina’s oldest friends, Nikola. Kina has known Niki since she was only a few weeks old; I have photos of the two newborns—a tiny Kina nestled next to the relatively enormous Niki, each on their back, staring in fascination at the ceiling of his mother Melica’s apartment. Laurea has known Mel a little bit for a long time, an acquaintance who’s popped up nonchalantly in various corners of our lives over the years. It was only natural, then, that when Laurea and I told our friends at my birthday party in 2016 that Laurea was pregnant, Mel was there. And it was not terribly surprising to find that she was also expecting, a month before Laurea. They have since become really good friends, and their relationship both mirrors and explains Kina and Niki’s friendship.

The kids grew up together going to the local street fair, swinging in the bucket swings, blowing bubbles, visiting each others’ houses, celebrating each others’ birthdays in the same lumberjacky Brooklyn bar, and even spending their first year of school in the same classroom. But it was in the midst of that first year, unfortunately, that a pandemic blew into town, and Mel—who had the opportunity to move into the house of a family friend in the Hamptons—made the tough call to pack up her apartment and her kid and left town. We’ve kept in touch since, talked on the phone, seen them briefly when they stopped back in Brooklyn to pick up things, but the kids hadn’t really had the chance to cut loose for over a year. It was like a spigot had suddenly been shut, the most dramatic separation any of us really experienced last year.

With all the adults vaccinated, though, we decided it was time to reopen the tap. We rented a hotel room, piled Kina into the car, and drove out yesterday morning. Mel had kept the specifics of our visit a secret, and Niki was stunned at our arrival. As their parents tentatively unwound with each other, Kina and Niki just caught up. For the subsequent twenty-four hours, the two kids reclaimed every lost play date and every missing word. It was the most life-affirming and joyous encounter I’ve seen in a very long time, and it was a thrill to watch (from our chairs in the backyard as we drank wine).

Last night, we were urging Kina to pick a book as she dawdled in the corner of the living room, trying to prolong the bedtime ritual. Laurea and I were really double-teaming her, and I guess we didn’t think about the impact of two extremely intense adults trying to get a kid to do something simple like pick a book, as if it were some momentous decision. Eventually, Kina cracked and slouched over to the sofa, clasping her knees in her hands in resignation. This posture is a relatively recent development, and it’s been slightly humbling to observe; I don’t like to make Kina sad, and she’s becoming more familiar with trivial sadnesses, in very visible ways. And so, as she sat on the couch, Laurea and I both backed off suddenly, realizing that we’d overstepped Kina’s boundaries. When Laurea asked her what was wrong, Kina turned to her and said:

“If you be mean to me, I’m gonna go out of the family, and I’m not going to be anyone’s girl.”

Oof. She has never threatened, even idly, to abandon her family before, and the notion that she would choose a life of solitude over her badgering parents was a real punch to the gut. I have very little in life that I treasure, but Kina’s unflinching companionship is one of the greatest gifts I have. I think I’ve assumed that the ways in which I’m raising her, even when I’m stern, feel necessary and inclusive of her. Maybe I shouldn’t make so many assumptions.

A holdover from the sleepless months of last year, “Are you standing in the kitchen” is a reminder of the slow retreat from Kina’s bedside, conducted over nine days, in which I agreed to stand first in Kina’s doorway, then by the refrigerator, then by the stove, and finally “in the kitchen”—shorthand for “in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room”. In recent weeks, Kina has started to ask again if I am standing in the kitchen while she falls asleep, and I’ve started to take serious liberties with my position when I answer “yes”, because I am not going to stand sentry in a doorway over my child’s unconsciousness for the rest of her childhood. I mean, Kina must know that I am actually sitting on the couch when I tell her that I am standing in the kitchen, because it is considerably farther from her room, and my voice is muffled by the snuggly cushion. I find that I have to basically scream “yes!!!” in order for her to hear me clearly, and still she does not emerge from her bed to confirm that I am hovering by the stove. Kina and I have agreed to maintain this shared delusion in order to lull her to sleep every night. Nobody is kidding themselves, but the comfort is real.

I will always stand in the kitchen for you, my little one, no matter where I actually am. Good night, sleep tight.

dad

Kina is, in the way four year olds are, not very good at misdirection. She takes great pleasure in misbehaving while my back is turned, but only if she knows that I know that she is misbehaving. In general, that mischief is benign: throwing her dirty socks at my head, say, or hiding a rock underneath my pillow. I dutifully turn to face the window, waiting for her to scream “look!” before I spin around. Her pajamas are draped over my computer; she cackles wildly.

I realized as I drew the paper this morning that Kina isn’t even as crafty as the illustration here would suggest. She wouldn’t think to distract me with a pigeon or a balloon. She just says “look at something else”—really, anything other than her nonsense. “Something else,” meaning “away”. “Something else,” meaning “not what’s right in front of you”. “Something else,” meaning “not Kina”.

It’s always “something else”, because I don’t want to turn away from her. These days, it’s just hard for me not to look at Kina, which makes it hard for her to engage in surprising nonsense. But I do, because it makes her happy. I stare at the lamp on my dresser, and I know that Kina is somewhere else, doing something I probably don’t want her to do, even though I know she’s amused. And I think about all the time she’s going to spend doing exactly that in school and as a teenager and as an adult, while I just quietly tell myself that it’ll all work out. And then she screams “look!” and I turn around to see that, poof, she’s there again, a little kid wearing her pajama bottoms on her head, just pleased to have fooled me. And she’s always laughing.

In the continuing tradition of spending some part of our morning together watching “bug videos”—which has come to be a sort of shorthand for “science videos of all sorts”—Kina and I enjoyed a little jaunt yesterday through the “spiders” section of The Kid Should See This, and if you’re curious,

I think I had hoped to watch a video of a spider spinning a web or, I don’t know, living peacefully in the eaves of a barn like Charlotte the erudite spider. Kina, however, usually goes for the first video in the list, and that video was about how spiders fly. Because I have not read Charlotte’s Web in many years1, I had forgotten that spiders “balloon” by spinning out strands of silk. What I realized I had never known was that spiders use electrical fields to fly—which was an intriguing fact to add to my encyclopedic knowledge of spiders—and that they do so, often, by the thousands. This last bit is something I probably didn’t need to know.

Kina has clearly internalized all the important tenets of pandemic dining. Well-ventilated outdoor seating, check. Shelter from the rain, check. Advance reservation, check. Can’t say that I’d shoot for five p.m. as a brunch resy, but she’s the boss. Breakfast for dinner, etc. Wear your mask!

dad

Yesterday, at a playground in Washington Heights, where we had driven for an obscure Mother’s Day lunch, I looked up to find my daughter walking towards me. Kina was holding hands with a little girl she could only have met two minutes earlier, and she wanted to introduce us. Kina and Zoe discovered their shared interest in running while chasing each other around the playset, and they had become very dear friends, rolling down the hill and playing hide and seek as if they had known each other for days. In light of the seriousness of their friendship, it seemed only right for Kina to introduce Zoe to her parents, and I approved of the match.

Laurea and I have noticed how much more readily Kina befriends strange kids on playgrounds in the last month. For a long time, she was the most solitary kid in a crowd, content to amuse herself by pretending to be three Octonauts at the same time and leaping from the ends of slides. As a long-time solitary kid in a crowd, I didn’t find this troubling, but I have often wondered what might activate the social genes that she inherited from her mother. Lately, we’ve watched that evolution at work, as Kina hunts out willing playmates on strange playgrounds. As she develops her sense of tribe, she seems drawn to three archetypes: The Tall Boy, The Adoring Two-Year-Old, and The Girl Who Looks Like Her.

Zoe is a Girl Who Looks Like Her, though she is technically five. They wear similar clothes and share a gentle demeanor that belies mischievous intent. I watched as they ensnared an Adoring Two-Year-Old while running around the perimeter of the playground, both tending to the toddler carefully after she fell. They both shared space and tolerated distance well. Her mom was pretty chill, and if we lived anywhere near Washington Heights, we would have done the thing where you ask another kid’s parents for their email address, triggering a series of playdates and birthday parties and plans to send the kids to the same school. Alas, we do not live near Washington Heights, and after twenty minutes, Zoe and her mom said goodbye before leaving to have lunch. Kina gave her a hug and got slightly glum as they closed the gate. The flame that burns twice as bright lasts half as long. It was a tight match; Kina knows how to pick ‘em.

Many have argued about whether it’s the parents or the single people who have had it worst during this most recent pandemic, but I think it’s very hard to argue that mothers have had it particularly good as the world has fallen apart, and so it merits a little holiday for them, in particular, and this second Mother’s Day of COVID-19 feels both more relaxed than last year and just well-deserved overall. Kudos to moms.

As a small sample of motherhood, let me highlight the work of Laurea de Ocampo, the mother of our esteemed publisher. She has owned most of the direct relationship with Kina’s school in this, the weirdest year of school. She has managed post-school mornings with Kina, sketching butterfly wings and making colorful potions as a demonstration of fluid dynamics. She has made lunch. She has wiped butts. She has managed to scramble together more work than any live event strategist probably could have expected to, and she then executed on it with admirable grace and skill—in one case, for thirty-five straight days. She has, throughout, remained patient and determined, and in reward for that determination, she has just enjoyed a full week with Lala and Kina. She has kept me (mostly) centered and patient, too, and I am certain that if I had been one of those aforementioned single people, I would not have done well at all this year.

She is a force of nature, Kina’s mother.

Among the many science videos that Kina and I have been watching in the morning have been a few storm chaser videos, which has given me the opportunity to talk to Kina about two things: tornadoes and “the country”. As somebody who spent a few years among the tornadoes and sort of in “the country”, I know a fair bit about them, and I’m quite happy to spend the rest of my life away from both. If you’ve had to hide in a closet during a proper tornado in Oklahoma, you’d likely agree.

There was something so matter-of-fact about the way that Kina asked if a tornado would take our house away, as thought it were not the kind of thing that would really ruin your day. Can I have the house back, Mr. Tornado? Drat. Really liked that house. I wonder when kids develop the sense of connection to their homes that gives us all the willies when we contemplate natural disaster. If you’ve always had the same home, do you only experience that anxiety when it’s taken from you?

There have been times when Kina has expressed her dissatisfaction with our current home, but she’s never proposed an alternative. Philly? Kingston? Oakland? She wants to move because her friend Sloane moved, but Sloane moved ten blocks north of her old house, and so maybe that’s what Kina thinks moving is. A country house might as well be a fairy tree, in her worldview; who’d live in the middle of a field? At some point, we’ll likely uproot from our current apartment, and I’d venture the destination is likely to look more like the ten blocks situation than the ten acres situation. Leave the tornadoes alone, I say, and let the greatest threat to my house be late-stage capitalism, just like everybody else.

Bonus late edition: I clicked “Publish” on this last night but didn’t click the second time, and so now you get this nice note about Lala a day late. Enjoy it!

Lala should be boarding a plane right about now, on her way back to California after a week spent in total adoration of our esteemed publisher. Yesterday, Laurea took her and Hannah out for an early Mother’s Day brunch, and Kina roamed the tables, offering wine and tea to everybody there, including the staff. This sophisticated behavior—and all of Kina’s rich four-year-oldness—made a deep impression on her Lala, and elicited numerous Instagram posts and breathless encomia in our living room later that evening. It has been like this every day for the last week, and I have relished it.

It’s been incredibly difficult for Laurea to be so far from her mother for the last sixteen months, and there was a moment in February when this week didn’t seem possible, and the distance began to feel like grief. We did a lot of coping and planning to give Laurea some sense of what it might mean to be with her mother again, hoping that the idea of her might create a space in which the real mother might slowly materialize. A few weeks later, Lala got her first shot. I want to be able to send a postcard from today to February Laurea, to show her the headlines from this last week and all the videos and ultra-cropped photos of Kina that her grandmother is posting, to celebrate the joyous normalcy of her first visit after the pandemic. I hope it would lighten her heart.

You should all know that I did sleep ten hours last night, which makes up for the prior night’s insomniac debacle. I put this accomplishment largely on Kina, who is the world’s best nap nurse. Still too tired to write a long newsletter, but the weather is gorgeous and you probably want to get outside anyhow. Stay tuned for breaking news on caterpillars.

dad

It is hard to find another human being more energetic than Kina, but her Lala fits the bill. The two of them, together, make a cacophonous pairing. But this morning, after I suffered through a long sleepless night, Kina was at her very kindest, urging Lala to just take it easy as I rested in the bedroom, giving me a gentle kiss on the forehead before sliding out to some sweet grandparent time. They were very quiet, as promised. I’m doing better. The sugar helped.

dad

I feel extra old today, just like a real adult.

dad

I still don’t know what Kina had us all looking for yesterday on the Red Hook waterfront. Things there were plenty of: sticks, wet dogs, moist sand, Brooklynites. Things that seemed to be missing: shady trees, other fun children, mystery treasure. Six adults fanned out across the park, hunting for nothing in particular, while Kina stood at the fence overlooking the harbor and stared at the Statue of Liberty. Sometimes she just likes to keep us busy and out of her hair. It’s hard being the boss.

dad

A very small part of me believed that Kina might have made up today’s song, which she sang to me dozens of times in bed this morning as she woke me up:

I’ve got

a rilly good friend

and he likes

playin’ pretend

and we have

happy feelings

The meter was just too catchy, too well-structured to be hers, though, and she admitted to me later that it was from an episode of Clifford The Big Red Dog that she had watched while I writhed my way through an early-morning nightmare in which one of her caterpillars had escaped and was turning into an enormous chrysalis in front of my bedroom door. Happy feelings!

With the arrival of her maternal grandmother, Kina has ticked off another square in the bingo board of post-vaccinated family reunions. This morning, we leaned out the window and watched for her to arrive from her hotel. Kina spotted her at the corner at 9 am and hasn’t stopped playing with her ever since. It’s a joy to watch, and I can tell you that the maternal line of this extended family are extremely content today. The Daily Kina welcomes Lala to its newsroom.

dad

Kina likes to steal my headphones and pretend that she is working on a very important project with a bunch of people who just don’t understand how hard she is working. Sometimes, she lectures her invisible coworkers on the chocolate she sees them eating on her imaginary video call. At other times, she urges them to eat lunch at the proper time of day. Mostly, she insists that whatever they’re working on can’t be launched as planned and needs to launch tomorrow or whenever she’s not watching her baby. All of these vignettes draw on her intimate familiarity with her parents’ work lives, played out from behind a hollow-core door as she wakes up from her afternoon nap.

It is very strange to see yourself portrayed in brutal detail by a four-year-old. Her exasperation is impressive to behold, all squinty-eyed and head-cocked. Sometimes, she puts her chin in her hands, to signal that she is listening extra closely, and I see every career tic I’ve ever developed. She is a careful listener. She offers direct feedback.

We don’t really know what Kina’s job is. She’s definitely a member of the class Professional, genus Manager. Could be that she’s a consultant expert, like her mother, or supervisory, like her father, but it’s clear that her “job” is talking. It’s weird to have a kid whose only non-superhero career model is White Collar Yammer Drone. When I was her age, did I want to be a firefighter? I remember wanting to drive a bus. I never thought I’d be doing the job I’m currently doing; I wouldn’t have even known the job existed.1 I worry sometimes that society is collapsing in on itself, carving off the steady, organized labor in construction and manufacturing with robots and gig work, while touting a narrow class of keyboard jobs for college graduates. Not much room to role-play as a factory robot when you’re a kid. All that’s left is the headphones.

The time that Laurea and I have together every night is limited. We put Kina to bed at roughly eight o’clock every night, are summoned to her chambers multiple times and forced to reply to periodic voice checks, spend about thirty minutes on the couch as I write this newsletter, and can maybe get one good episode of Sex Education in before we toddle off to bed at 9:30.

Kina must think that we spend many hours together playing Legos or something, because she kindly gave us license last night to spend our time in the service of fitness as we while away the night without her. Why waste time relaxing when we can better ourselves as the child sleeps? Every minute of my day in this house is in some way governed by this kid.

She’s right that I should probably exercise, though. Maybe I’ll make this short tonight and do some jumping jacks instead.

Kina is a genuine ruffian, but mostly with me. I have been stomped upon, scratched across the eyeballs, kicked with heels, dragged through the house, punched in delicate places, and strangled—all in the name of playtime. Meanwhile, she gives her mother a ponytail and delicately pats her head while making “hush hush” sounds. It did not occur to me that I would be the kind of father who inspires roughhousing, given my general neurosis about child safety1, and yet I find myself being tackled on a regular basis by a person half my height—she could put an eye out!

Most of our roughhousing occurs at two times of day: in the morning, when she is waking me up and wants to hop on my abdomen with her feet, and in the evening before her bath, when we perform a complicated dance routine to “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” that involves her both running at me full-speed from across the bed and hanging her entire body weight from ny neck. I could, if I wanted to, choose to guide her to calmer forms of entertainment at the edges of her day, but I think I probably enjoy being clobbered by my own child. I have no idea why this is, but I assume this is what it means to be a dad; it is our job to toss children in the air and to be kicked by them, in turn.

Here is the part of the newsletter where I muse wistfully about the day when Kina will no longer bite my shirt and attempt to drag me off the couch with her mouth. Here is where I worry that, if I stop roughhousing with the kid, she will grow up and lose interest in interacting with me at all. Here is the part where I decide to enjoy being beaten up, in a peculiar form of masochistic contentment, because isn’t it all about living in the moment?

I know very few people who enjoy talking about death and dying, but I would like to believe I am in the 99th percentile of people who dislike the topic and do everything they can to avoid it. I spent a considerable portion of my early teen years living with a deep sense of dread regarding oblivion and the hereafter, and I can manage even today to play out the smallest physical ailment to its most terminal cause, triggering a wave of panic that crashes on the shore of “your life is a pinprick in an endless fabric of nothingness”. I should probably get a therapist.

In any case, I knew that this phase of early childhood development was coming. My friends with kids had told me about it, and “Why Do 4-Year-Olds Love Talking About Death” was one of the NYT Parenting newsletters I read most avidly when it showed up in my inbox. In that newsletter, my Parenting cofounder Jess Grose writes about the four concepts that we all come to associate with death: your body doesn’t work, everybody dies, they don’t come back, and you can’t avoid it. If you ask me, these subconcepts get progressively more disturbing as the list unfolds. If you ask Kina, Hello Kitty is dead and she can’t come to the picnic.

It’s fine that Hello Kitty can’t come to the picnic if she’s just temporarily dead, which I assume is Kina’s current understanding of death. But after the last year of my life, and with all the loss suffered by the people around me, and with friends currently living through the unimaginable hellscape that is COVID-19 in India, I have a really hard time dealing with the notion that Hello Kitty, the most reliably immortal being in my house, has died. Kina doesn’t know that she’s freaking me out by making me tell bedtime stories about one of her friends dying, because she has no idea what it means. She will, eventually, though, and I am really not looking forward to that part.

First: The idea that we, as individual human beings, are a kind of way is an idea to which we are slowly adapted. Second: Knowing that we are a kind of way gives rise to a more troubling notion, that we should be another kind of way. This second concept is something that many of us spend the bulk of our adult lives puzzling through. This morning alone, I wrote down at least three kinds of ways in which I should be different; it is a profoundly exhausting realization to have, that you are not the kind of way that you should be.

Kina does not have this problem, because she is four. At some point, presumably, she didn’t realize that she was any kind of way at all, but she seems to have made the leap to the first key realization, because she called me out yesterday on some suggestion I had made that she had a “growth opportunity” (in the management parlance) in some area or another—probably related to how messily she was eating or how loudly she was jumping. Her fierce insistence that I was wrong about her caught me by surprise, but it shouldn’t have; four is not so young that you cannot know yourself. Kina, unlike me, recognizes that she is a kind of way and that it is kind of the way to be.

Though I would like her to make less of a bonkers mess at breakfast, I am actually fine with Kina telling me off here. I do not want Kina’s sense of self to be at odds with her sense of some idealized other self. The way she is is how she needs to be, she says, and I would call out the verb to need here—it’s not just that she is comfortable with herself, it is that being herself is non-negotiable. What a gift to know that about yourself! I think this must come from Laurea, who has a firmer sense of her essential rightness than I do, but it may also be a Daniel Tiger thing, which, if so, speaks highly of Daniel Tiger.

I have never seen dolphins in the wild before, and despite the occasional tragic news of an errant dolphin being trapped in the Gowanus Canal, it had not really occurred to me that one might expect to spot a pod of dolphins in the water a few hundred feet from shore at a New York City beach. This was likely also true of the five other parents at Jacob Riis Beach yesterday, all of whom were transfixed by the sight of four playful dolphins as their children dug blissfully in the sand.

When I was a kid, I briefly wanted to become a marine biologist—mostly because of the presumed access to dolphins. Who doesn’t like a dolphin? They’re more socially sophisticated than us, communicate over great distances in chirps and whistles, blow bubble rings for kicks, and seem quite content not to have jobs. Despite all of that, I had until recently really lost track of dolphin news and, presumably, where they all lived. Most of my exposure to dolphins has been through YouTube videos, where I note that they can be seen from boats (where I seldom choose to spend my time) and in confinement (which I abhor). This is not, to be sure, the kind of exposure to marine biology that eleven-year-old me signed up for. He didn’t yet know about boats, probably.

And so it was with some nostalgia that I stared out at the waves yesterday and watched the dolphins surface and submerge, in no particular rush to go anywhere, just lolling about at Jacob Riis Park Bay #9 to amuse lapsed marine biologists and other parents with laughably ill-equipped iPhone cameras. For a moment, the four families spread out over an acre of beach were shouting back and forth to each other about the miracle dolphins, running down to the shore to get a better look. I was reaching for an adjective as I wrote the paper this morning to describe what it was like for me—something at the intersection of “inspiring” and “wistful”; I went for “moved”, which is close enough, but I can tell you here that the moment did have strong “nature is healing” vibes, and it really made my day.

Saturday mornings are always a whirlwind. It’s not that our schedule is much different; we still try to get out by ten in the morning, and all the same breakfasts and showers are required. The difference, really, is that Kina knows it is the weekend, doesn’t need to do school things, and desperately wants to play all morning.

We are comfortable playing, of course, and our play strategy is fairly comprehensive. On a Saturday morning like today’s, we might play:

1. Gentle Pushover

2. Hide and Seek

3. Baby Rainbow Cat Is Talking to the Chef

4. Roll That Ball

5. Baby Rainbow Cat Is in the Cave

6. Bee Facts Quiz

7. Eat My Face, It’s Spicy

I went to the archives of The Daily Kina, which are located in a temperature-controlled vault deep in the Pacific Ocean, to look for the last time we covered bee news. Turns out it was on August 15th of last year, at the bottom left of the page, the day after Kina and I had a little Daddy-Daughter breakfast at the local coffee shop that she calls “Cheddar Cheese and Bacon”, because we always get a breakfast sandwich when we go. At that Daddy-Daughter breakfast1, we found ourselves sitting next to a big lavender plant with a couple little bees hovering around it; Kina named them Becky and Joe, and our time with them really helped Kina come to understand the essential goodness of bugs at a time when she was deathly afraid even of ants.

As the cherry trees blossom, the bees are coming back (how symbolic!), and Kina’s school has conveniently done some quality bee programming this week—which Kina largely ignored. Conveniently, though, her father has been watching YouTube videos of beekeepers to help himself go to sleep at night. This nightly obsession has dragged on now for over a week, and I have no idea where it came from; I have never watched bee videos before, I do not enjoy a rich personal relationship with bees, and I have no interest in keeping them. Still, there’s something about watching extremely calm bee people—in many cases, wearing no protective gear at all—open and examine hives, gently brushing bees away with their fingers as they locate the queen. They apply a little smoke, mutter about bee bread and queen cells, and do whatever it is they were called in to do (usually to remove a swarm or split a crowded hive).

I think what I find so appealing about these videos is the idea that you can wade into the homes of these beings that are seemingly very dangerous and chaotic and willing to give their lives in defense of that home, and by being very calm and deliberate, make the bees’ lives better and the lives of the human beings who live with them better. Maybe there’s a metaphor there, not sure.

We bought Kina one of those battery-powered flickery candles, which means her rage can now burn as long as the little watch battery that powers it. All of which is to say: You should either invest in candles or watch batteries, at least until Kina is five.

dad

Baby Rainbow Cat is one of Kina’s more responsible avatars. She can always be counted on to do the right thing, whether that’s wearing a mask or getting the first dose of her vaccine (as Kina’s mother did today). Baby Rainbow Cat wants you to know that risk reduction is additive! Wear your masks even after you have all your antibody monsters!

And now, an editor’s note:

Our publisher would like to issue a correction to today’s morning edition. Lungs are a line and two BIG circles or maybe like a lot of little circles, but those are not lungs. Also I told you yesterday that you have to draw me with a neck! Tomorrow you have to draw me with neck. Our art department regrets the error.

Hannah came to our house this morning, as she has on most weekdays since before Kina’s first birthday, and Kina gave her a card that she drew herself. “HAPPE BRTHDAY,” it read. This is not Hannah’s actual birthday, but it’s near enough to it that Kina felt a card would be warranted, along with a hearty performance of “Happy Birthday To You”. We have celebrated Hannah’s birthdays during this pandemic with the same intensity as Kina’s and Laurea’s and my own, because she’s special, and because this moment is unusual and intense, and frankly because we’ve all had to cling to each other this year in ways we didn’t expect to. A year ago, Kina couldn’t write “Happy Birthday”, even poorly, and she certainly couldn’t have counted up to the proper ages of the people who care for her—even though this year she guessed that Hannah’s proper age was eleven.

Together, we’ve all lived through this pandemic, watched tragedy unfold and get (partially) folded back up, and seen this child grow. Hannah is uniquely responsible for much of what has kept Kina whole as that has all happened, and I hope we’ve helped to keep each other whole, too. We’re all a year older now—and Hannah would offer that she’s a little older than eleven, at least—and closer, and more protective of each other. Kina doesn’t draw cards for just anybody, and she certainly doesn’t like writing letters so much that she would fill a sheet of paper with them just to wish any normal person a specific happy birthday, but she very patiently wrote HAPPE BRTHDAY HANNAH KNIA in big green letters (Hannah’s very favorite color) on this card today, and that’s love, if you ask her.

dad

While I love to come up with nicknames for the child, I think Laurea has captured Kina’s true essence here, and I have to hand it to her.

“Tell Daddy He’s Acting Like a Real Man”

I was mansplaining ribollita to Laurea, who was planning to make ribollita for dinner. It was delicious, though I think understanding the historical context played a significant role in that.

I have really tried to restrain myself from various “nature is healing” jokes about the return to normalcy, but I did go to an actual, in-person kid’s fifth birthday party at a nearby park yesterday, and boy oh boy is nature healing. I haven’t seen so many children (ten? twelve? I lost count) in one place for the same reason in considerably more than a year. One of the last events to be cancelled before the lockdown in 2020 was another of Kina’s friends’ birthday parties, and every birthday celebration since then has been either Zoom or nonexistent. So yesterday, as I stood in the corner of the park pavilion, holding Kina’s half-eaten slice of pizza as she argued with various tall children about her age, I recognized the moment for what it was—a return to the kind of social event I have dreaded for my entire life, another one of which Kina will nonetheless demand of me just nine months from now.

It’s all coming back to me now, and the kids are growing again. All for the best, even if it’s awkward.

Just to confirm your suspicions, Kina is definitely not allergic to breath—mine or hers or anybody else’s, though she does have a tendency to sneeze lately when she stumbles into our bed in the morning, which I chalk up to seasonal allergies or an embarrassing surfeit of mystery dust in our bedroom. She has always been hyperconscious of breathy behaviors, admonishing us for “breathing too hard” or commenting on the excessive breathiness of a room upon entering it, but it’s never risen to the level of an allergic reaction. She’s just thinking a lot about breath lately, which I suppose is true of all of us.

One of the things I think I’ve forgotten in the last year is what it means to be in a room with a bunch of other mouth-breathers. Sharing breath, a behavior to which I had never really given any thought before, has become A Real Scary Thing. Over the years, I have found myself sitting in poorly-ventilated office conference rooms with air so heavy that I’ve had to slink out for a deep breath of my own, diving back in once I’d cleared my lungs of carbon dioxide. How was this ever acceptable? Like trysts and talk therapy, breathing together now feels like an intimate act to be conducted with strangers only when absolutely necessary. This thing we never noticed has become a privilege and a responsibility—the former we grant only to the ones we love, the latter we undertake under duress.

I feel incredibly vulnerable now when I take off my mask with other people; its removal signals an acceptance of our shared condition and our willingness to risk illness to have a more personal connection with one another. We cannot smile at each other, eat with each other, whisper to each other with our masks on, which makes any decision to form an emotional connection with another person visibly explicit. Outdoors, these gestures have a certain significance, but to be so vulnerable indoors requires a lot more calculation, and it’s exhausting (no pun intended). Taking off my mask at home among my family here—Laurea, Kina, and Kina’s nanny, Hannah—is a source of deep relief; I know I can be among these people, and I care about them. It’s not that I don’t think about the air they breathe; in fact, it’s that I’ve made a conscious decision to share that air with them.

It’s funny how Kina has independently landed on the truth we tend to forget about each other—the kind of revelation that used to be reserved for astronauts, in a moment called the “overview effect”. Taking the big view of our little Earth, from space, has the effect of collapsing our existence into a tiny, fragile space, in which national and social boundaries no longer make sense. Extreme childhood must feel similar, without the instant of radical realization; countries mean nothing, skin color means nothing, language means nothing. We’re all just here.

I wish it were that easy, and that we didn’t live in a society stratified by fear and insecurity. It shouldn’t be the case that we’re living through a news cycle centered around four Black and brown people—one of them just a child—either assaulted or killed by white police officers. George Floyd, Caron Nazario, Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo. The list of Black men killed and assaulted by police across the country has grown long enough for us to find strange connections among them. George Floyd’s girlfriend was Daunte Wright’s teacher. Eric Garner was Caron Nazario’s uncle. They are and were related to each other, as family and community.

At some distance of countless generations, all these people are actually related, not just to each other, but to me, and to the officers who brutalized them. That distance tells us a story, though, in race and privilege and the circumstances of our ancestral arrival in this country. We think these branches make us different, and Whiteness stacks that difference up against us, stranding us. None of us is from here. Nobody’s really at home.

It’s too detailed to explain, but nearly everybody Kina knows is invited to the pool someday this summer, where the adults will have beer and the children will have juice. Nobody will have soggy water. Only big girls are allowed to swim, so don’t bother with the swim trunks, unless you’re a princess or a kid.

dad

The funny thing, it turns out, about having your parents visit after a year in near-total isolation is that it is all much more normal feeling than you expect. This is probably because having Kina’s grandparents visit us in New York used to be normal, and the year we’ve just lived through (and continue to live through, in some ways) is the momentous part. The momentousness included weekly family Zoom calls conducted from our family’s four respective living rooms. The momentousness included three (maybe four, hard to say) of the eight people in my close family catching and surviving Covid. The momentousness included my barely seeing one of my siblings—who lives directly downstairs from me—and even more rarely seeing the other sibling—who nonetheless lives in Brooklyn. The momentousness included both of my parents getting extraordinarily effective vaccines that were initially designed within days of the sequencing of the virus that causes COVID-19, and then one sibling, and the other, and me.

And so, at the end of that moment, we found ourselves all sitting on a bench eating ice cream together, after a long weekend of extreme grandparental contact with Kina. The faces I’d seen on our Zoom calls were all more relaxed and happy, and Kina’s Yeh-Yeh was jogging around after her on the sidewalk—turns out he’s in better shape than I am now. We all had several opportunities to soak up some hugs and plan for summer, and it felt like a coda to the terrors. We were lucky to make it through, the eight of us, and we never said a word about it, but it was in the air.

On Saturday, we took my parents out for noodles at our favorite restaurant in Chinatown, and we covered the table with roast meats, dim sum, and soups. I watched them silently devour the first really great Chinese food they’d had in over a year (sorry, Northern Virginia), recognizing that this was a meal I’ve been meaning to order for them for a long time. We drank tea and made jokes as Kina ran off to the playground next to our outdoor table. Cars drove by and a table full of old folks next to us drained a bottle of cognac. It all felt, again, momentous in a fashion, but it mostly felt normal.

My parents are on their way home tomorrow after a beautiful long weekend. Kina punched me in the butt all morning. It all washes out in the end if we’re lucky. Good night.

dad

Two local parents were spotted sobbing yesterday in Manhattan as their child was attended to overnight by her paternal grandparents in Brooklyn. Sources claim to have seen them moving and moaning from location to location on a path through the city estimated to be nearly ten miles long. On the Hudson River bike path, the couple was said to be distraught as they rode north to a peaceful waterfront park. Having parked their bicycles, they were then seen walking south to the new Moynihan Train Hall, where they sullenly admired the architecture. Soon thereafter, the weeping parents were seen strolling through the West Village in search of both a book to read (easily obtained at Three Lives) and then a place to read it (more difficult, but ultimately at the smoky sidewalk tables at Hudson Bar and Books, where they wailed for nearly an hour). Having rested, the two of them were then seen whine-walking (again!) northeast to a fancy al fresco dinner, where they enjoyed five courses while bawling constantly. After pursuing the parents on their mournful sunset walk across town to a nice hotel suite, our sources lost track of them, but hotel workers claim that the couple were heard sniffling as they slept through the night and went to the bathroom uninterrupted. After a late checkout the next morning, the family was said to be reunited, and all were reportedly quite happy. “We will certainly never do this again,” claimed the parents, “in a month, when her other grandmother flies in. No way.”

dad

Today’s edition of The Sunday Kina was great edited and illustrated by her Yeh-Yeh, Harry Yee, who apparently spells his name “Ya-Ya”. He and Grandma spent their first full day with Kina in a year and a half yesterday, and her parents are grateful for it, and for the following newsletter.

Because we have been fully vaccinated, Grandma and I are here to see our family for the first time in forever (as Kina would say). What a pleasure to be in the same space with Kina and her assorted fam. After such a long enforced absence we appreciate this opportunity more than ever. Thank you thank you to health workers and administrators who are managing the vax effort. 

Spending time with Kina is a gas and a smile a minute. Her vocabulary is surprising when multisyllabic utterings appear from nowhere. She apparently believes my Nationals curly W jacket is a promo for Walgreens. Thus: Bring out the Walgreens prisoner!  (Your guess is as good as mine). Also “ I prefer you in luggage”.

We will never take family for granted again. Stay safe. Hug someone you love. Wear the mask. Get the shot. 

Ya Ya

It took several attempts to get Kina to change out of her nubbly blue cotton dress and into a cute little strawberry number, and I felt guilty for denying her the pleasure of simplicity on the day of her pandemic school portrait, but we only get one chance to wear strawberries in the face of existential catastrophe, and I have no regrets. Laurea and I have snuck off to a hotel while my parents are here, and we are going to make the most of this evening, so good night! Tomorrow should bring you a guest-edited The Daily Kina—our very first in over a year. Let’s all hope for the best while Laurea and I drape ourselves across these vintage couches and drink Portuguese wine.

dad

It has been a Very Long Time since my parents were here, and now they are vaccinated and are here, and Kina is showing them all her new tricks and her new school and snuggling with them on her very own couch as though there really hadn’t been this long stretch that they were kept apart by a global pandemic. It’s all very natural and normal and wonderful. Thank you, modern science, for mRNA vaccines and spike proteins.

dad

Grandparents have arrived. You can all sing the name game as a healthy escape from your nightly reading of The Daily Kina. See you tomorrow—

dad

Kina’s friend Sloane is not yet four, but she’s about to be. She is definitely taller than Kina, though, and so she finds it hard to believe that Kina can be four when she herself is three. It seems that Sloane finds these facts so dissonant, in fact, that she’s now a Kina-is-four denialist. This is really troubling for Kina, because she is definitely four, and it’s weird to have to reconcile the strongly held beliefs of your best friend that you are three with your once-serene “I am four” worldview.

When Kina came home yesterday afternoon, she made a big stink about this, because she is fundamentally certain that Sloane is still three and therefore has no standing to make a statement on the Kina’s fourness. I promised Kina that she was, in fact, four years old and that, despite Sloane being slightly taller than Kina, she is still a little teensy bit older than her friend. In order to further assuage her, I measured her against the kitchen doorframe and showed her that she was, in fact, still growing (a full inch in the last four months) and therefore could not possibly be growing smaller and younger.

Age is weird. These two girls, if they remain friends, will someday say they are exactly the same age, and yet these four months at the edge of three years are an unfathomable chasm that is actually a little scary for each of them to contemplate. How far is three-and-two-thirds from four, really? Might as well be a different generation. I am comforted—and these two kids should be as well—by the fact that their ages will soon be in full alignment for another eight months, and that everybody that matters will be four for a good long while. Until Kina is five, depending on who you ask.