The first issue of The Daily Kina cost twenty-five cents. The second cost forty-seven cents. For a long time it was three dollars “because I’m three”. As early as April 9th of last year, the price was “$ANY YOU PICK”. On April 26th, it' was “$100 CUZ I SAID A HUNDRED”. It seems like the Sunday Kina last Mother’s Day had no price, but that was likely an accident. The “meow meow” edition cost exactly “$🐾”. June 19th inexplicably cost 3%—of what, I have no idea. From there, the prices bounce around chaotically in the set of all rational numbers. Near the end of July, the prices enter gasoline tax territory, with prices like $22.22²², eventually reaching eighteen decimal points, but still generating roughly thirty dollars at a pop. Then, suddenly, in August, it’s “$22 except you eat eggs w/ur butt” or “$22 or a sippy cup or it seems like I’m not dealing with you”. Heroes start to show up soon, with various exceptions to the retail price for She-Ra and Tunip from Octonauts. Further carve-outs appear soon, like “$22 except if sad or sick”. Variations on the price of twenty-two dollars seemingly stretch on for months, interrupted by a single “$I’M CUTTING” in late October. The Sunday Kina on October 25th cost exactly one dollar, but the next day was $22.21, and on October 28th, the price shoots up to $1,000,000,200,000,000,000,000,000. On November 18th, the price is “$NOT TELLING YOU”, and the very next day we see a note under the price of $22.21: “Just one more time don’t worry.” The next five days see an interesting pattern: $1, $2, $3, “$MOM”, $5. Following that, three straight variations on no price at all: “$FREE”, “$I DON’T WANT A PRICE”, and $0. After that, we begin to see the now-familiar conceptual prices: “$ONE BEAD”, “$STOP TALKING TO ME”, “$🥛”, and “$🍓”. We are charged “$DADDY PRICE”, “$PEN PRICE”, and “$SANTA PRICE”. Nicole Kidman makes a showing as a price in late December, after she watches Paddington. Kina’s teacher, Ms. Olenick, is a price twice in one week in early January. I am the price for several issues in late winter, and then we begin to see her interest tapering off. I imagine I’ll continue to extract pricing from her for a while, but our publisher has grown tired of charging for The Daily Kina. Don’t be surprised if this publication eventually costs nothing at all, but we hope you remain a subscriber nonetheless. Even at $1,000,000,200,000,000,000,000,000, this paper has always been a tremendous value.

dad

I had honestly forgotten that Kina had all of last week off until she leaned back in her chair at dinner last night and let loose this extremely validating headline over her baked pasta. I did not, to be clear, have all of last week off, and so I took her comment to mean that we had all done a reasonably good job at our respective workplaces and schoolplaces—and I mostly agreed. In hindsight, though, Kina had an outstanding week. She spent many hours barely supervised with her friend, splashed around in puddles while we ate brunch, celebrated her father’s vaccine shot, marked the first anniversary of her own newspaper, and ate a chocolate bunny. It did not hurt that her Easter Sunday was largely spent discovering “dozens” of plastic eggs (really just one dozen eggs, continually re-hidden as we marched down the West Side), though it did slightly hurt that she pet a cactus (and thank god for Laurea’s long fingernails and their ability to pluck nearly microscopic barbs from Kina’s hands). All told, not a bad week. Mommy didn’t work overnight even a single time, and we all got a fair amount of sleep. Sometimes, when your coach tells you “good game”, you just gotta take it.

dad

As we close out the anniversary weekend here at The Daily Kina, I’m going to file a shorty. We spent all day outside with the chimera of superheroes we call a daughter, gathering and re-hiding eggs so that she could experience a long rollercoaster of joy and surprise. People were charmed, Kina was pleased, jellybeans were eaten; it was a great day, and we are all now quite tired.

Yesterday was also a great day, because Kina scored a free cape and mask at a random kid’s birthday party and spent the whole day pretending she was Owlette from PJ Masks (another show I would never have chosen to watch, absent our small child, but now know quite well). She used that impressive costume to marshal a little army of small followers, waving a stick around to rally them to her cause; we ultimately had to convince her drop the stick, to prevent her from poking out the eyes of the various infants and toddlers in her entourage. Owlette was irritated, but we believe she understood the potential PR catastrophe.

The week ahead is exciting for her. Kina’s grandparents are coming, she has a one-on-one with her teachers, and there’s a musical theater class in the local park. The fun never sets on the empire of Kina. All hail.

Since I decided to write the big emotional piece yesterday, I figured I would use today’s newsletter as a collection of my—and your—favorite headlines in The Daily Kina this year. I took a moment to look back through all three hundred and sixty-five issues, watching the potty training unfold, seeing how we learned to work with Kina’s curly hair, appreciating the massive variation in pricing strategies (from random numbers to heroes to statements of refusal). I can’t possibly explain it all, and so, instead, I’ll just put a bunch of headlines here (linked, when there was a newsletter to accompany the headline), and follow it with a full documentation of the legendary Oakwul storyline. Enjoy.

My favorite thirty headlines of the last year

• “I Will Love Everybody Who Needs a Hug”

• “We Are Fake Adults”

• “Everything Is Useless For Everyone!”; Nihilist Makes Her Morning Rounds

• Toddler Plays Doctor; You Allergic to Veggie Sauce, Use Epi-Pen

• Toddler Demands Novelty

• It Is Going On a Napkin; You Say You Break a Egg

• Toe Stubbed; “Daddy Can You Buy a Fluffy Door?”

• Daddy Bakes a Different Cake

• “Ow, You Bingled My Eye”

• “Sometimes You Have a Problem and Sometimes You Don’t”

• Panda Deposed As Editor Following Nepotism Scandal

• Meow: Meow Meow Meow

• She Did It! Kid Poops in Potty Unbidden, Collects Treat [ed: this was the first major pivot point of The Daily Kina, obviously]

• Kid, Angry, Throws Stuff; With a Terrifying, Silent Vigor

• Naked Kid Leads Black Lives Matter Cheer From Window

• “Do You Have a Booboo, a Sickness, or a Sadness?”

• Witchy Vibes Intensify

• “What Do You Do During the Day and Night?” “During the day, with the sun, and during the night, with the moon?”

• On a Hot Day, a Story of Two Parks; How inequitable sprinkler access ruins summer

• “I Have a Frickin’ Booboo”; Trouble on the knee-knee; Daddy shouldn’t clean it

• “I Do Impressive Things To Scare People”

• “You Really Chunkin On That Mozzarella, Hot Stuff”

• Child Settles For Pudding

• Tough Ballerina Menaces Local Family; Pink tutu, black denim; she is real bad news

• The Opposite of Me Is You; Little Hegel over here

• “Mommy, Are You Doing a Happy Cry?” Her child will see a woman in the White House

• “If We Make Steak the Smoke Will Set Off the Smoke Detector and It Will Go Out and Fill Up the Neighborhood and We're Gonna Get In Trouble and We Will Have To Move Somewhere Else Where There's No Steak”; So let's not have steak I guess

• Kid Learns That The Daily Kina Has Readers; Publisher shocked to hear about subscribers, thought it was just for her

• “Okay I’m Done With All This Talking. Let’s Get This Over With.” Cut the chit-chat; kid is all business

• Simone Returns; Prodigal owl resurfaces after “long vacation”; she is surprisingly clean

Anniversaries mark time, but they are really about the intersection of two years—a celebration of the year you just finished, and a commitment to the next one. I had been thinking about how to write tomorrow’s anniversary post, but I realized this morning that this edition, which precedes the anniversary edition, is actually and officially the three hundred and sixty-fifth issue of The Daily Kina. In other words, today is the accomplishment, and tomorrow is the promise.

I didn’t set out to do this—I really was just trying to distract Kina on a Friday morning, because neither of us had anywhere to go. I drew the first edition of The Daily Kina on a piece of folded-up pink construction paper, using the same crayons I’d used to draw a fourteen-day quarantine calendar two weeks earlier. TDK was the first thing I’d drawn since I was allowed to leave my house, having recovered from a scary viral infection we didn’t know much about, with the stores still all locked up tight, knowing we’d all be holed up together for a while. We needed something to do.

I’ve talked before about hugs and their unique value to Kina in the midst of this pandemic, and I don’t have a whole lot to add here today. As we have reduced the frequency of bedtime and overnight hugs, Kina has begun to track hug equity overall, demanding compensation when she feels like Mommy and Daddy are being too affectionate. This has led to surreptitious hugs in the kitchen while Kina is getting dressed, extended post-bedtime hugs as Kina drifts off to sleep, and passing half-hugs to stay reasonably hug-hydrated. The way we mostly deal with hugs while Kina is watching is to call a “family hug”, which involves my picking Kina up and squishing her between the two of us. Saves time, maintains equity. This is all ridiculous and I can’t believe I’m writing it.

Mostly, what I want you to take away from today’s issue is how good I am now at drawing Hello Kitty, as well as the two “meow” puns at bottom right. Still got it!

dad

A few weeks ago, at our last parent-teacher conference, Kina’s beloved teacher—Ms. Olenick—told us that we should be very happy with Kina’s development, and that as long as she was able to, say, dress herself in the morning, she was basically on track. At this point, we nodded thoughtfully, noting silently that we had continued to dress Kina every morning since she was a baby, assuming somehow that the matter of dressing oneself would be brought to our attention by a pediatrician or other expert. Apparently, kids dress themselves!

It is not entirely true that Kina didn’t know how to dress herself already. I’ve watched from around corners as she very fluidly donned her own shoes and jacket on her way out the door with her nanny, Hannah. I told Hannah once that we were still putting Kina’s jacket on before we left the house, and that Kina seemed not to know how to do it; Hannah raised her eyebrows, which I always take as a sign that I have somehow failed to hit my mark as a parent. What we believed to be an inability to understand shoes was, as it turns out, actually a penchant for having her parents place shoes on her feet. The inability is contextual, and the context is us.

So, having learned about Kina’s extremely typical development, I took the matter directly to her. “Ms. Olenick says you gotta dress yourself,” I said, “like a big girl. It’s big girl time.” Knowing, as I said, that she was fully capable of this, I acted as though I was an Olympic judge for self-dressing, taking copious notes on an invisible notepad (all to be processed, presumably, by Ms. Olenick) about the particular nuances of how Kina puts on leggings. With an arched eyebrow, I’d mutter to myself as she reluctantly pulled on her shirt: “Ms… Olenick… Kina… can’t put on… her own… sleeves.” Kina would promptly slide her arm into her left sleeve. “Kina… can’t put on… the other… sleeve.” Kina shoved her right arm into its sleeve. In this fashion, continually taking and correcting notes on Kina’s clothes-wearing skills, I would watch her reveal this talent that she had hidden, apparently, only from her parents. Every day in the last few weeks has been like this, until today.

At breakfast this morning, Kina really seemed into last night’s dream—a vision clearly drawn both from the stories her mother told her about space yesterday and from the tulips for which Kina traded some of her art. As noted in our last edition, and in on older issue, we have no way of really knowing if this dream really happened, but it seems fanciful enough that I want to believe it did, and I can only pray that I one day dream about pink space flowers. It would be a lot more enjoyable than the chaotic abandoned water park dream I actually had last night. You had to be there, but you’re glad you weren’t.

Here’s hoping you all get galactic tulips and highly efficacious vaccines in the coming days. I got one of those two things this afternoon and I’m already mildly beat, so a short one today. Enjoy the Bert portrait!

dad

For a long time, I wondered what it might be like for Kina to realize that her thoughts are her own, and only hers. It’s a weird notion, really, that everything we believe and understand can only truly be experienced by each of us, alone. There is no streaming button behind our mind’s eye that will allow another person to know exactly what we know, to reckon with our confusion, to help us make sense of it all. It’s just us, and that must have taken some getting used to, if you think about it.

We have spent so much of Kina’s life learning to watch for her nonverbal signals that it probably seems to her as though we might be able to read her mind, but reality suggests that we fall short. Case in point: One of Kina’s signature tantrums in the last year has been the enraged pantomime, in which she becomes angrier and angrier that we cannot know exactly what it is that she secretly wants (a particular snack, say, or a specific hug). Even though we built up all those skills, when she was small, to discern between hungry Kina and sleepy Kina, we still somehow end up playing this absurd game of angry charades for long stretches at dinner. “We cannot read your mind, Kina,” I’ll tell her. “You simply have to tell us what you are thinking.”

Easy enough for me to say.

This publication has borne witness to several key developments in Kina’s life of the last year: potty training, writing her own name, being sensitive to other people’s emotions—the list is impressive, given the stasis of the world outside her door. And so, as we approach the one-year anniversary of The Daily Kina, it feels fitting to add “true playground independence”. Even before the pandemic, our visits to the playground were most often about family; other kids were of at best secondary interest, and Kina expressed no interest in their games. This meant that I spent a lot of time actually playing with, rather than observing, my three-year-old daughter on the playset. This was, to be super clear with you, very entertaining and mildly good exercise, and I was very flattered by her attention, but I have long wondered when she’d run off on her own.

As it turns out, that time is now. Yesterday, Kina spent hours exploring the Brooklyn waterfront with her good friend Futura, hopping around on the various architectural flourishes of our local parks, gossiping about smaller children, collecting rocks to throw in the water, collecting sticks to throw in the water, and throwing rocks and sticks into the water. From time to time, one or the other of them would run over to where the four parents were sitting and complain about some petty injustice, then—having filed her grievance—return to the play task at hand. After pizza lunch, ice cream snack, and five hours in the sunshine, we said goodbye and skipped off. The girls had all the play and exploration they could possibly have wanted, the parents talked about punk culture and vacations and obscure accents, and nobody really seemed to recall the moment, just eight months prior, when the kids were principally invested in the attentions of their parents.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I am conflicted about this, and I won’t rehash past newsletters in which I dread her looming disinterest. In fact, I think it’s worth noting that I did not find yesterday’s experience unpleasant at all; it is the culmination of a wish Laurea and I had over four years ago, as we whispered to each other in bed, fearful of waking the newborn. In various permutations, that whispering asked, when will we ever be the same again? I’ve spent much of those four years—and even a good chunk of this last year identifying as an appendage of my own child. I literally live to serve. To what extent this is actually Stockholm Syndrome seems up for debate, but I have been very clear-eyed about my investment in Kina’s life. It is not an accident, and not even really a sacrifice.

Kina has spent much of the last year pretending to be a cat. On most mornings, she will wake me up by crawling into our bed and meowing plaintively. Her bedtime rituals are played out by her feline alter-ego, Baby Rainbow Cat. On the playground, when arguing with her friend Futura, the two of them will meow furiously back and forth. She briefly became obsessed with licking my arm, because we once mentioned that her former cat friend Gertie used to do it. Sometimes, Cat Kina crawls under the table in our living room and makes a little nest—it seems like a very cozy thing to do, and Gertie did, in fact, used to do it; to see Kina in there reminds me of when I was more compact, and would build forts that only my stuffies and I could occupy. At that age, I used to imagine what it would be like to be a cat, to have the freedom to do whatever I wanted, to sleep all day, to be worshipped by ancient Egyptians.1 A love of cats, and of cat identity, runs in the family. Gertie used to sneak up on me from her hiding places to bite my toes, which was super uncool of her, and I’ve told Kina about that once or twice. Gertie never, ever bit Kina, but she has nonetheless internalized this idea that a cat sometimes plays by nibbling at you. So it is, then, that Kina occasionally, when possessed by her cat spirit, will bite me on my leg—usually while ensconced in her nest under the table. It’s weirder than it is annoying, and more annoying than it is painful. Gertie, at least, never apologized for biting me, so this is a measurable improvement in being bitten by cats (real or feigned); as long as I don’t have to pick cat hair off myself all the time, I’m fine dealing with it. I just ask that I not be called by the school principal next year to answer for my surly cat child, that she remain snuggly in her less bitey moments, and that she finish her oatmeal before tucking into her fort. Good kitty.

dad

Honestly, after the last two weeks, I think we all deserve a special reword.

dad

On April 19th of last year, the sixteenth issue of The Daily Kina came out, with the top headline, “Toddler Demands Novelty”. Technically the second issue of The Sunday Kina, this issue was scribbled off in the minutes before tootling off in what Kina called “The Rice Car”, a white Ford Fusion that we rented during four early pandemic months—a doorway to new, safe, open spaces. This was, New Yorkers will recall, during the great playground outage of 2020, and we’d spent the prior weekend hiking around the abandoned grounds of the Cloisters; I remember looking out at the Palisades across the Hudson, my mask off, ignorant for just a moment of the grief at the bottom of the hill. Kina jumped from boulder to boulder, and we took a moment to be thankful for our own recovery. By the next weekend, Kina had come to believe that the various ramps and stoops around our house were provincial and trite, and so we drove her off to Greenwood Cemetery. There, as we peered into mausoleums and looked for walking sticks, we could hear sirens from all around the graveyard. We ate a little picnic and were quiet. We were lucky.

Throughout the last year, there were various moments in which Kina craved novelty. This publication ran an issue about how she wanted a new room early this February (which, in hindsight, was one of the first signs that her sleep was going sideways); in that night’s newsletter, I talked about how much I wished I could teach Kina how to find novelty in stillness. For a long time, I struggled to find new rituals for us as a family, and for Kina. Trips to weekend playgrounds and distant parks couldn’t make up for the distance of her friends and family, couldn’t give her four new walls. You can’t drive to the other side of this thing.

But the last couple of weeks have felt better, as Kina’s grandparents have gotten vaccinated, and the routines we’ve built—books at night, hugs after weekday naps, performances by Elsa, and the morning paper—have begun to feel comforting and familiar, things we might be sad to outgrow. I think today’s top headline recalls Kina’s response to my suggestion that we make a new tradition out of closing her door at night, rather than propping it open with the kitchen light on full blast. That old tradition, which had been in place for much of the year (since her last major sleep regression), feels good to her now—it’s all she really knows. I wonder if she realizes that all of this is passing, and the life she knows as normal will be replaced, in time, with some semblance of the normal life her parents thought they had before.

A non-comprehensive list of things Kina has said to compel us to return to her bedroom after putting her to bed:

• “I need a giant hug!”

• “The Play-Doh is backwards!”

• “Take this stuffie out of my bed!”

• “I want a big, big hug!”

• “What’s the stuffie with the orange foot?”

• “I can see a shadow!”

• “I’m sweaty!”

• “Turn the elephant around!”

• “The noise is too loud!”

• “The light is not bright enough!”

• “The watering can is broken!”

• “I want a large hug!”

• “I don’t want the pink unicorn!”

• “Can you move the tissues?”

• “I need another story!”

• “My puppy blanket isn’t on right!”

• “The door isn’t all the way open!”

• “I heard a noise!”

• “I don’t hear any noises!”

• “I didn’t get enough kisses!”

Tonight, she slept without calling us back to the room. I just blew her a kiss.

Every morning, as Kina gets ready for the day, I write down potential headlines for that day’s issue of The Daily Kina. Sometimes, I have notes from the day before, and putting together four stories is pretty straightforward; on other mornings, I have to listen carefully for ridiculous quotes and trenchant reflections. Once I’ve got between four and six headlines and sub-headlines (“you mean heds and deks”, says the editor who works at a grownup newspaper), I figure out what the right stories will be and where they will go on the page. I always put the most obvious illustration in the third position, on the right column. Weirdest headline usually goes in the bottom left, in the fourth position. Second headline, top of the left column, should always either complement the top headline or follow up on a storyline from earlier in the week.

The top headline itself, though—that’s always the hard choice. Should it be the most ridiculous thing Kina has said in the last twenty-four hours? An easily-illustrated hot news item? Since last June, I’ve usually made the top headline something that can serve as the foundation for that evening’s essay. This means that many of our top headlines for the last eight months have been extra poignant notions that help me explain something about parenting in the midst of a pandemic, which is very charming, but it means that we haven’t been able to spotlight such gems as:

• “Daddy Bakes a Different Cake”—May 6, 2020

• “Freaky Friday”—May 1, 2020

• “Toe Stubbed”—April 24, 2020

• “It Is Going On a Napkin”—April 22, 20201

It was just a little more than a year ago that the Canadian sleeping-kid-whisperer we lovingly call “Doctor Pam” told us to stop wandering into Kina’s room every time she whined at night, because it was keeping us all awake. Within a week, a five-month-long reign of sleep terror had ended. Why did it take five months for us to get somebody to tell us to do the obvious thing? Not sure! Why have I been writing headlines about sleep issues for a month and a half? Long story short: After a night of nearly infinite hugs, resulting in a general nervous breakdown, we played our Doctor Pam card yesterday and got the advice we knew was coming all along—stop going in and hugging her in the middle of the night, like she told us a year ago.

What’s old is new again. Kina’s rapid mental development keeps her up at night, it scares us both, we comfort her, nobody sleeps, Doctor Pam tells us to cut it out, and then things are better for a year. It all makes sense, but who would not want to spend the entire night hugging this child? Granted, it’s not great for going to work and being able to pay attention, but the snuggles are nice when you’re not weeping because you’re so exhausted.

The other thing that happened a year ago: We got COVID-19. I realized the other day that we were coming up on the first anniversary of The Main Event of Early 2020, when I woke up unable to smell anything after a night of violent chills and fever. On one hand, glad we got that out of the way, but hooboy was I terrified. All three daily caregivers of this publication’s esteemed publisher were simultaneously bedridden and confined to quarters for two weeks. Nobody would offer us a test, and our doctors all told us to just rest and drink fluids. I took my temperature and checked my blood oxygen every thirty minutes and spent the intervening eighteen hundred seconds reading Twitter. It was unenjoyable and boring. Twelve days later, I felt better, and I drew a newspaper for Kina.

It is strange to feel as though I am disappointing somebody who has spent all night keeping us awake and has barged into our bedroom at first light. To be fair, she has been waiting “weeks and weeks” for us to get out of bed. Someday, the tables will turn, but for now, we are all humungous lazy babies. Too exhausted to elaborate. Enjoy the headlines!

Today’s Parade was originally conceived as “a heart underneath a rainbow”, but by the time Kina finished, there was a lot more under the rainbow: Lala’s house, an “M” for “Mommy”, a world, and the aforementioned heart. There is also a letter “T”, but it’s lying down. Like me.

Kina learned about mistakes from Waffles and Mochi today, in the context of a felt yeti puppet accidentally dropping a satchel full of corn-based meals from a rudimentary airplane. In that episode, Michelle Obama—an unlikely but extremely charming host—gives Waffles the Yeti permission to extend herself some grace, with the understanding that mistakes are part of the process of being alive. This was a useful thing for Kina to hear, because we are not great about mistakes here at The Daily Kina HQ. We may not cry over spilled milk, but we don’t exactly let the spillage pass without comment. I’m not quite the ultra-chill dad I hoped I would be, which I think reflects a certain denial of my comfy relationship with shame and self-flagellation. I don’t extend myself a lot of grace for my mistakes, but I really try to be understanding when somebody whose body has grown two inches longer in the last four months accidentally kicks some juice off the coffee table. It happens; feet are weird.

Kina, for her part, both atones for her mistakes and holds others accountable for their own. There have been nights when Kina stomps around behind me after I’ve dropped some eggs in the kitchen or shattered a glass, barking, “You made a mistake, Daddy! Say! You’re! Sorry!” To be scolded so persistently by somebody one tenth your age is deeply humiliating, but she’s just giving voice to my internal monologue; it’s like being seen singing karaoke in your underwear through an open bedroom window—you did it, it’s normal, now everybody knows, move on. Waffles the Yeti didn’t have to tell Michelle Obama that she dropped all the corn from the airplane, but in doing so, she gives herself the kind of closure she needs to go on and make some bangin’ cornbread with Rashida Jones (as it happens).

Maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad about the eggs, or the glass, or misplacing Kina’s socks, or all the other things. Michelle Obama and Kina are now in firm agreement that mistakes are okay, and I probably should get on board with that. The recognition of a mistake can come from anywhere, and we beat ourselves up about them, obsess over them, when that recognition comes from within—but a mistake is just a gap between what we are taught to believe is correct and necessary and what we accomplish, despite that knowledge.

Kina finally stood up for her right to speak freely today, ending a months-long campaign of suppression on the part of her tyrannical family. Repeated efforts by her father to silence her litany of poop comments at the breakfast table, demands for more frozen mango during school Zooms, and observations regarding butts finally reached an end as this local hero put her foot down, insisting on her right to free expression. Muttered under her breath, this cry for open debate ultimately went unheeded, as her inconsiderate audience went about their chatty business, seemingly insensitive to the brilliant emerging voice living right under their noses. “You don’t ever give me time to talk!” complained Kina, citing several instances in which her parents discussed matters as trivial as their dreams from the night before—featuring, in many cases, extremely boring passages about college, subways, worm-filled oceans, mystery roommates, sideways elevators, forgotten locker combinations, children lost in crowds, muddy boots, childhood homes, elbow handshakes, dropped masks, ice cream eaten while naked, and empty office towers. “I am just trying to tell you about She-Ra! Sssssh!!!!!” she noted, bristling at the censorship of a topic near and dear to her own heart. When contacted for comment on both the matter of She-Ra, Princess of Power, and the broader environment of forbidden speech in their household, Kina’s parents offered no response, which is pretty funny when you think about it, because they absolutely never shut up.

dad

The thing about having a four-year-old kid in the house is that we always have a really effervescent coach around. Laurea and I watched Ted Lasso earlier this year; it is the kind of show we would never have watched, absent a global pandemic—a cavalcade of feel-good moments marching down a road paved with encouragement. At the end of the show, we cried it out and went about our business for the next few days, buoyed by Coach Lasso’s player-first leadership style. After a while, though, the halo dissipated, and while we didn’t have an inspirational television trainer to carry us through, we did have Kina.

There are many things that make Kina upset, but very few of them are true catastrophes. In the moments that are true catastrophes, however, Kina truly shines as an inspirational figure. Got COVID? Kina’s there to pull you through with a silly dance. Stressed out at work? All good—Kina’s shirtless and wearing a bow tie. Struggling to face the state of the world? It happens; Kina can tell you about how the Octonauts saved a herd of sea pigs. They worked together and made it happen. The Octonauts, like our family, are the perfect team. There’s nothing that a little cooperation and dancing can’t help.

We were a little worried at the start of the pandemic about letting Kina watch TV. Like most of the idealistic perspectives we had on parenting, television was just a domino waiting to fall. But the shows she’s chosen have helped to shape her worldview—collaborative, loving, silly—and I don’t think we’d choose to do it differently, if we had to (and god I hope we don’t have to). We all crave a little feel-good show right now, I think, and we’re lucky to have a full-time, all-singing, all-dancing little Ted Lasso living in the room next door. If you know some sea pigs that need saving, I can point them in the right direction.

One of Kina’s pet peeves is when we eat too fast. This applies to both real and pretend eating. Sometimes, I like to freak her out when we’re playing “tea party” or “ice cream” by bringing the dish very close to my mouth and pretending to shovel the food in—like Garfield eating lasagna. Invariably, she gets a very stern look on her face and grabs my hand, telling me that I will “choke” or “get a tummyache”, and to take it slow.1 The sad truth is that Laurea and I also eat our real food quickly, because we are very hungry after work, and that also annoys Kina. Sometimes we have a more leisurely dinner, and Kina will finish first, after which she shouts that she “won the food game”. This is also how I treated dinner when I was a kid, and it took me years to realize that dinner didn’t have to be competitive. I don’t particularly like to think of Kina living with that view of dining as a race, and so I simply eat faster, so that she never wins.

Still, we should take our time. The closer we get to a sense of things being somehow “better”, the faster I want this time to run. Laurea and I want to just fast-forward through the weeks between now and when Kina’s grandparents visit, in a blur of vaccinations, playgrounds, and absurdly rushed meals. But there is so much happening that is amazing right now—which this newspaper will, of course, cover in great detail—that lives in the interstices between the rushing, and I want to give space to that goodness. So does Kina. Can you savor the dinner and still crave the dessert? We’re all trying—even our little fork cop, who religiously takes her time at the table, as long as you don’t remind her of the treats to come.

I always said I wanted raise a little girl who felt comfortable taking risks, but this soup thing is a bridge too far. Find joy in the small thrills, kid—you have your whole life ahead of you!

dad

Ad: Try the Crispy Prosciutto Wrap at Kina’s house! It’s got hammy deliciousness and a crispy cracker! With a recipe drawn from an ancient Italian cookbook that Kina made up in her head, the Crispy Prosciutto Wrap is the bite you need today!

Kina’s approach to playgrounds has changed dramatically in just the last week. Once a mere dabbler in playground society, she has suddenly become the loudest kid on the playset, running headlong into battle with a guttural scream that seems never to let up. We hit up two “weekend playgrounds” during our time off this week, and Kina terrorized them both.

“Weekend playground” is a term coined by Kina last summer, when we first got our car. As we tried to find more outdoor places to escape to, Kina quickly learned that weekends meant “new playgrounds” in other neighborhoods. Before the car, all playgrounds were the same, and there were only four of them—all located within walking distance of our home. Now we see barely any of our old-fashioned weekday playgrounds as a family, which has put a huge dent in our advocacy for the Rodney Playground.

Kina and I both like weekends, but for different reasons. I get to spend some time away from the dresser and kitchen chair that I call my desk, and Kina gets to eat special treats, run around on “weekend playgrounds”, and hang out with her amazing parents. In the middle of this Venn diagram is Time Spent Together, which we all enjoy.

I learned the term “Sunday Scaries” during the pandemic, which made them extra scary; the anticipation of a week of Covid-tinged remote work put an emotional damper on my Sundays, cheating me of a psychological free day. Kina, by contrast, is thrilled by the mere idea of a Sunday—a second weekend, she figures, like a bonus Saturday. I imagine it takes a few years before the novelty wears off and the reality (albeit fairly recent, in the history of civilization) of the two-day weekend sets in. In the meantime, it’s fun to see somebody who gets 48 full hours of joy from their days away from preschool.

It was a good weekend, overall. We ate well, ran around in the sunshine, visited a weekend playground (in Nolita), and took zero naps. As a result, on this traditionally fraught first day of Daylight Saving Time, Kina is fast asleep at 7:30 and I am pooh-poohing the ol’ Sunday Scaries for a change. It is, after all, still the weekend.

We have not spoken extensively here about the vaccines, because we have not been trying to jinx things, and it seems that our superstition has paid off, as four of Kina’s grandparents are at least partially vaccinated against COVID-19—and two of them now fully protected (or at least twice-jabbed). This has really added a hopeful note to the texts and video chats around these parts, as those grandparents begin to plan for their reunion with a Kina who is substantially larger, chattier, and more sophisticated. The United States dispensed 4.5 million shots yesterday, which means that lots of grandparents out there have a healthy dose of hope in their upper arms. Good luck to all of them, and to the other Kinas of the world, who are all about to be showered with love and gifts. It’s a very different March 13th from last year; if you’re reading this, I’m happy you’ve made it this far, and I hope you get to see the ones you love so soon.

dad

Almost forgot to send this! I owe you all an essay about how small children’s anger is adorable. Until next time, then.

dad

A year ago today, I stopped going into work and set up shop in my bedroom, with my laptop propped up on two cookbooks in front of a window. The other day, I tried to find a single unfamiliar detail in the landscape I can see from that window, and I gave up after ten minutes; I have literally seen it all.

At the same time, Kina has been attending school remotely, and I’ve taken an unusually visible role in her day; we play games, tell stories, and exchange jokes as I pass through the living room—our day has a rhythm. Sometimes, that rhythm feels to both of us more like a routine, in ways that remind us both that we’ve been at this for a while. The other night, Kina asked to play a game, and I offered up one of her old favorites—“Burlingame Wakes Up Baby Rainbow Cat”. No, she said. I offered to play “Elsa Flies Around”. No. I suggested “Daddy Gets a Checkup”. Kina stared at me pathetically and asked if I had any new ideas, and I just… didn’t.

It’s not that I don’t have the capacity to deliver a new game, or to imagine a novel story, but it really is a slog these days. It’s easier for me in a way to walk the path we’ve been walking all year, because it helps me ignore how much work it’s taken to beat that path through the brush. I don’t want to have new ideas right now; I just want to walk through this last bit of the tunnel and go outside. Kina, at the same time, is having the opposite experience. She is simultaneously less exhausted by this whole affair and more tortured with the boredom. Somehow, we have to meet in the middle. I am sure that Baby Rainbow Unicorn has another exciting story ahead of her, but I’ll need to think about it. I have to think about it.

Give a girl one day of false spring and she’ll spend every ounce of energy she’s saved for the last three months. Hope springs eternal. Child hopes for spring.

Good night, adventurers.

dad

In September, I wrote about Kina’s pink tutu, a mid-pandemic acquisition that was originally meant to be worn for a dance recital last June. I didn’t have a lot of visibility into those dance classes; Kina’s nanny, Hannah, would take her to the sessions on afternoons after school. From time to time, Kina would demonstrate to us the ways in which she and her classmates were learning to position their feet and leap around, and we understood that the kids would eventually learn enough about dance to perform in a recital. I had all sorts of visions in my head of how that recital would play out—kids picking their noses, Kina making terrifying faces, children running into each other, parents all holding their phones high in the air to film this masterpiece of juvenile choreography. As it turned out, what we got was a tutu wrapped in plastic and a kid who desperately wants to go to dance class.

For most of the pandemic, I’ve wondered why Kina’s interpretive dance performances seem so often to involve a strange sort of jump-running. She didn’t do that until lockdown, and so I’ve assumed this was just her way of working out her excess energy, but it’s totally conceivable to me now that this is the last thing she learned in dance class, and that one of Kina’s final collective experiences in 2020 was leaping up and down as she and her classmates bounced around a dance studio to a jaunty little tune. Every dance she’s done in the last year has recalled that moment, and while she’s developed a whole spectrum of highly dramatic dance moves since then, that dance class will forever be etched in her memory, and in her performance practice.

She wore her tutu for two straight weeks in September, but it hadn’t really played much of a role in Kina’s varied costume life until last week, when I woke to find her bedazzled in pink sequins and demanding to hear “Let It Go”. I don’t know if her latent memories of that dance class prompted her to bust out the tutu, or if the tutu reminded her of her truncated ballet instruction, but the class is clearly on her mind. When she asked me yesterday, over dinner, whether she could go to dance class if she wore her mask, it kind of broke my heart. I have no idea how classes like that will work in the coming months; they won’t be testing vaccines on children Kina’s age before late fall, at least, and while I feel somewhat confident that she’ll be back in a classroom by September, I don’t know how we’ll reflect on an enclosed studio full of jumping children—or if the studio will even still be there for her to jump in.

Laurea and I have been talking about middle school lately, and the varied injustices that children between the ages of eleven and fourteen mete out to each other in service of their own developing egos. Most of those conversations are about our own experiences navigating our early teens—about how I would run from class to class to avoid being noticed by the bullies, and about how Laurea herself ventured in and out of mean girl territory. As we reminisce, though, we are both peering off into the distance at Kina’s future experience of adolescent cruelty.

We tend to see the future in the exchanges Kina has with other kids on the playground, reading between the lines as they play games, cut in front of one another on the slide, and variously accept and rebuff each others’ advances. I probably read too much into the benign emotional tools that four-year-old children are learning to use, but it’s because I know how tools can be misused once we’ve mastered them. I tell myself that I can see the teenagers in this kids: the introverts and extroverts, the jocks, the cool girls, the quiet schemers, the tough defenders. None of this, of course, holds any water at all, because these children have the prefrontal cortices of puppies. There is no destiny encoded in the kid who won’t share her soccer ball; that is how kids and soccer balls work.

Yesterday, Kina encountered a mean little kid on the playground. Kina was dressed as Elsa (surprise), and this small child told her, “I hate your dress.” The two of them were playing with a mutual friend underneath a tree, and Kina stood there quietly. Laurea, who was standing nearby and heard this exchange, walked over and told the little girl that it was unkind to say things like that, but the kid barely registered the scolding. Kina seemed not to care, and the code of the playground is to refrain from lecturing others’ children in the absence of imminent physical harm, and so that was that. Later on, that exact same kid walked up to Kina while she was eating her popcorn and stuck her hand in the bag to take a fistful of her own. Kina scowled at her, told her she needed to ask, and pulled the bag away. The parents of this child, who were standing three feet away, offered their kid a snack but said nothing else. Reader, I had thoughts.

In 1972, a psychologist at Stanford University conducted an experiment now widely known as “The Marshmallow Test”. In that experiment, children were left alone in a room with a marshmallow; they were told that they could eat the marshmallow, but that they would receive a second marshmallow if they simply waited for the experiment proctor to return in fifteen minutes. The results of this test suggested that children who resisted the siren call of the marshmallow would later see better SAT scores, educational achievement, and physical health. The lesson: children who can control themselves when faced with special treats are better off as adults.

As you all know, Kina is a big fan of Special Treats. We invented “Special Treats” back when Kina was potty training, in the early days of this newspaper. At the time, Special Treats were M+Ms that we doled out as rewards for using the toilet. As she grew tired of M+Ms, though, we experimented with different snacks, slowly amassing a crate of snacks in our pantry that Kina has since come to believe are hers for the taking whenever the fancy strikes. Mostly, she fancies little bags of fruit snacks, which she can barely resist.

It’s hard to blame her for this lack of restraint, really, because we haven’t done a great job of suggesting that restraint really matters here. It is a pandemic, to be clear, and surviving a pandemic calls for Special Treats. I have had no interest or energy in training my child to see fruit snacks as a meaningful reward. I have also, frankly, been just fine with issuing those rewards as needed for a kid who is persevering through a year-long winter unlike any I ever experienced. The child, in other words, can eat the damn marshmallow.

For a few months now, Kina has taken to blurting out charming and appropriate colloquialisms at random moments, and their frequency is growing. The robustness of her small talk, which now veers troublingly towards office-speak, is slightly absurd—would she have spoken like this had we not been trapped together at home for the last year? I forget sometimes how easy it is to hear me from the living room through the hollow-core door of our bedroom; I assume some of this jargon comes from me, though a decent chunk of it is just dialogue from She-Ra. It was hard enough keeping track of my behavior in the house when I wasn’t trying to do my job, but now I have to think about the way that I talk and act at work: my tone of voice, my choice of words, my response to stress. I have become lax in the last year, and I have no way of knowing what kinds of eavesdropping this kid is doing, or what strange neurons she’s connecting. At this point, she’ll become a management consultant by the age of five. She’ll ping me once she’s started, I imagine, and we can toss some ideas around. Like a baseball, but with more capitalism.

dad

I tried to convince Kina today that love could exist wherever two people did. She offered, in response, that there wasn’t much point without three. This makes sense, because most of the love that Kina has experienced in the last year has been in the context of our immediate family. She knows the constituent parts of that love—my love for her, her love for her mother, her parents’ love of each other, and all the inversions of that love—but to her, love is the love of family. Her family is three people, and so love is three people.

It is not always true, of course, that love can be found wherever people are gathered together; I know that, because I have some experience with gatherings of people—and with love. Kina needn’t worry herself with the complexities of that, for now, but it’s probably true that I need to emphasize to her the importance of there being love wherever one person can be found. She’s doing a great job of loving herself at the moment, as we have recently discussed, but you don’t get to hold onto that for free. She will need to work at it, because three people in, say, middle school? It’s not all love, girl.

At the moment, though, she spends a lot of time in this little group of three that is her family, and we do love each other. I like to imagine her walking around Brooklyn, seeing small groups of people clustered together in line for coffee, and thinking to herself, “There is love.” A mindset like that is encouraging when you scale that up to the population of New York City, of this country, of the world. As long as we’re all traveling in trios, we’ll be fine—at least if you ask the kid.

Laurea is working on a gig that will carry her through the next week, and nights are running late. This means I get to spend the evenings with Kina and watch her role-play as a working parent. Somehow, whenever she’s playing the role of her mother, the producer, she affects a longshoreman’s accent and waves her arms around as if the overtime’s about to hit. “I’m the pra-doo-sah!” she says. “It’s time ta wuhk!”

She has never seen her mother at work, but this portrayal is both highly inaccurate and extremely accurate. When Kina does this, it triggers in me a feeling that I am somehow slacking off and need to get back to the mines. She is an excellent and effective manager.

She is also going two for two this week on cover art. I’m particularly fond of the Charlie Brown nose—that’s all her.

This morning, Kina really wanted to watch a movie, and because she knows that movies are for rainy days (specifically rainy weekend days), she asked me when I expected it to start raining. Reader, I am not a meteorologist; Laurea once took a meteorology course in fulfillment of her science requirement in college, and she would regale me by phone with stories of the various sorts of clouds1, but that makes me at best an amateur meteorologist by proxy. The closest I get to meteorology is the Weather app on my phone, which I did not have near me when my daughter demanded to know on what day and time the precipitation would begin. When I told her that I could not tell the future, and therefore could also not predict the next time she might watch a movie, she insisted that daddies’ only real talent was in telling the future, suggesting that my inability to divine storms was a massive gap in my parenting skills.

I wish I could predict the future. It’s probably my number one superpower wish, followed closely by the ability to shoot fire out of my fingers.2 I won’t lie—winning the lottery is definitely one of the things I would do with magical foresight, but I’d also make more focused changes to my lifestyle based on demonstrable risk of specific diseases and probably take more risks with my career.3 Why do we want to be able to see into the future? Fear and greed, basically. But also, I would love to look into the future and know if I could afford to buy a home on a thirty-year mortgage, so that I could feel more secure about Kina’s future. Is there no college in the future? Let me teach Kina about homestead farming, then. If I could tell the future, I could know about the world I was leaving behind for my child. What would I learn about it? What would it tell me to do, in this moment? How scared should I be?

Maybe I should be careful what I wish for. We all know about snakes and apples. I’d settle for just knowing when the rain will come, so that I could stay dry and be able to start the movie on time. And fire, from my fingers—always good to keep that skill in your back pocket.

Kina led me in an extended Warrior I pose this morning. She was wearing her She-Ra outfit, including the brilliant crown and gauntlet we had thought were lost forever. Turns out She-Ra can get a pretty deep lunge in that front leg, due to her weighing very little and having rubber bands for muscles. I, on the other hand, have become brittle and awkward in the last twelve months and took the opportunity to just separate my legs for a minute or two. This is what it’s come to.

Once upon a time—before Kina came along—I was super diligent about doing yoga. Five days a week, friendly with the person at the desk, same spot in the classroom every day. It carried me through various bouts of anxiety, the founding and closure of my own business, a stretch of burnout at two separate companies, and the birth of a child. I took my last class there on March 12th, almost a year ago. The studio closed in the middle of the pandemic (obvs), but they moved to a new space and have started conducting classes online, but I have been so constantly and thoroughly drained for the last three hundred and fifty-five days of my life that I haven’t attended any. I keep thinking I will. I feel guilty about not doing it. I also feel guilty about doing it. It’s complicated.

Kina does not need yoga in the ways that I clearly do, but it’s fun to see her being so good at it without taking it seriously at all. As a teacher, she’s hard to ignore (She-Ra outfit, mismatched socks, right next to the bed), and so I might have to sign up for her classes. Five days a week, same spot every day. It’s the practice that matters—and the snacktime after.

There haven’t been a lot of opportunities this year for Kina to find ambient approval for her many good works. She gets these moments of affirmation where she can: from us, from her nanny, from the cashiers at the local grocery store, from her teachers on Zoom. The absence of a robust and natural feedback cycle had worried me for a while, but now I think the quiet has really strengthened her sense of self in a year in which Kina has come to know Kina better than anybody else. This morning, I watched her place a little pillow in exactly the right place on her bed and mutter “Good job, me.” It seems like a little thing to be so proud of, but I am a lifetime self-critic, and so it caught me off guard. Because we only have the one kid, it’s hard to know when self-affirmation generally enters the picture for children; all I know is that Kina has begun very clearly to demonstrate the kind of appreciation for her own behaviors that I frankly still haven’t mastered. The grace she extends to herself is both encouraging and astonishing to me.

Loyal readers of The Daily Kina will recall a stretch of apology storylines last year that culminated in a story on Kina’s self-absolution. In exploring her profound acts of forgiveness, I spent some time trying to identify the ways in which we had sent subtle signals about what we thought was wrong, and yet Kina’s osmotic awareness of our values—the things we uphold—seems just as powerful as her internalization of what we forbid. She looks to us for silent cues on those values: responsibility, patience, sharing, curiosity, and the committed performance of overwrought musical numbers. As I’ve watched her absorb these things, and as I’ve seen her take joy in acts like sharing food or arranging pillows, I’ve realized that I’m watching her build her own set of intrinsic values, which she will someday hold as principles that are worthy in their own right—not as means to some profitable end.

How do I know what Kina’s values are? I look to see what she does when we are not looking. We never have to cajole her to clean up; tidiness is among her values. She starts each day with a story; good storytelling is among her values. When she places a single piece of rigatoni on my plate at dinner, I can see that generosity is among her values. And of course, when she demands a fourth live performance of “Show Yourself” from Frozen II, it is obvious that she has inherited our deep-seated value of the committed performance of overwrought musical numbers.

Kina identifies as four. She identifies as a New Yorker. She doesn’t know she’s Asian because she doesn’t know what Asia is, nor what it means to be Asian—in all of its many expressions. Even if she did, it’s more complicated for her; her mother is Filipina and I’m half-Chinese, which makes her three-quarters Asian? Half-Filipina? One quarter Chinese? Asian Americans are often asked where we are from, and most of us (knowing where the question is headed) answer truthfully—we are from the place where we grew up, or where we live today. The first time you have to reckon with the fact that somebody is asking What Sort of Asian You Are is profoundly othering, but you get used to it. This morning, we were talking about where we all were born—Laurea and Lala and her Lolos, in the Philippines; Yeh-yeh, in China; Grandma, in Maine; Daddy, in Florida; Kina, in New York. I found it surprisingly hard to figure out how to get to “Asian” from there; it’s a long road.

How do I explain to her what it mean to be an Asian American? I can’t even figure out, on some days, what it means to be American. Both these identities—Asian and American—encompass so many lived experiences, and so the intersection is vast. We are much more easily identified by others than by ourselves. By being lumped in with each other, we find community and shared experience. She’s just spent an entire month in school talking about the ways in which people are the same and different from each other—the dotted lines that cross over each other and connect us, in our identity, to the people who surround us. She’s learned, in the last month, about the myriad accomplishments of Black people in this country, but she hasn’t learned about the four hundred years that made those people Black. As a preschooler, she hasn’t got the frame of reference to understand struggle in the context of race—and I’m not sure I’d put that on a four-year-old (or the teachers of a four-year-old) to do that. Kina knows that we are different, but she doesn’t know what that means.

We’re lucky that she still has no lived understanding of the ways in which entire races of people are subjected to violence every day because of the color of their skin and where they come from, but I read about it at work every day. Violence against Asian Americans has been on the rise now for a year, a quiet epidemic of hate that parallels the pandemic around which that hatred has formed. The long-standing fear of Asian people—from early nativist fears of a “yellow peril”, to the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War, to American’s more contemporary abuse of Asian Americans in the era of COVID-19—comes and goes, pushing Asians in and out of the circle of American belonging that has given us a leg up as a model minority, and to which a few of us cling with virulent jingoism. Kina, again, knows none of this history, none of this fear, nothing about the circle.

I didn’t remember having written about how Kina has called me stinky in the past, but apparently I have. I should have figured—being smelly is a key component of our shared sense of humor, and not a day goes by when my daughter doesn’t accuse me of stinkin’ up the joint. Here’s the thing: It is she who is stinky. Long gone are the days when I would hold her little head up to my nose and inhale the floral baby scent—the smell of bonding! Now, she comes in from a day outside and I can tell how sweaty she is from three feet away. Worse, the rainbow unicorn furry boot slippers that she’s been wearing more or less non-stop since Christmas have grown increasingly rank (see the second headline from our February 6th edition), and she has refused to allow us to launder them. (Somehow her preternatural sense of smell has not picked up on this development, which is a pity.) It has finally reached the point where my comments about her stinky feet have no jokey aspect; the kid is funky. Still, she takes every opportunity to turn my routine accusations about her odors back upon me, claiming that various parts of me are stinky, and that my very existence is olfactorily offensive. This is what I get for the jokes. This morning, I swiped her slippers off and ran them down to the laundry for a hot bath. I let the newly-sanitized booties dry on the radiator and fluffed them up with a hair dryer. They smelled of fabric softener sheets and terrycloth. We’ve placed them next to her bed, where she likes to see them in the morning; she’ll put them on tomorrow at dawn, before she does anything else. I give that terrycloth smell about three days, but she’ll call me stinky by 6:30 in the morning.

dad

We were talking about birthdays yesterday, and Kina remembered when she turned three and ate cupcakes at school with her friends. We have a video of that day, in which you can see Kina with her hair pulled back in a perfect ponytail, sitting silently at the head of a long, low table. She, like the ten other children around the table, has a cupcake on a little plate. The other children and her three teachers sing “Happy Birthday” to her as she absorbs the spectacle. The video ends with her face in the middle of the frame, all of three years old, serious but calm. Sometimes, when we talk about birthdays, she asks to watch that video. It makes her happy.

Kina didn’t have a birthday at school this year, because she’s had nothing at school this year. Her teachers celebrated her birthday in the morning meeting when she turned four, but there were no cupcakes, and she did not have a ponytail. Yesterday, when Kina was thinking about her third birthday, she asked if most kids had school birthdays, and I said yes, many do. (As the bearer of a summer birthday, I never did, which always made me envious of the other children. Now, it means I have a birthday in the best part of the year, and I want to go back and tell little me that summer birthdays are cool.) She asked if she would have a school birthday after COVID, and I said yes, she would, for sure. Later, when we were sitting at the dinner table, we were talking about something else that we missed—I can’t remember what—and she mused quietly, with confidence, “After COVID we’ll do it.”

Even though the school stuff is hard (and the birthday stuff, and the play dates stuff, and the grandparents stuff), Kina’s probably more patient that Laurea and I are about the slow decline of this pandemic. She trusts the end is coming, because we tell her it is, and so she is just keeping a little list in her head of the things that will happen “after COVID” (even when those things seem implausible): sleepovers, visits from teachers, home lunches with her stylist, play dates with friends, trampolines, rides on airplanes, visits from grandparents. Her list is not that different from our own, and so her confidence gives us a little hope about the things that we need, too.

When she was still a baby, I remember Kina trying to pull herself up by the bottom of our living room bookshelf. I placed a fragile little vase that we had bought in Japan up on a shelf next to the television, where Kina couldn’t reach it, and I never thought about it again. Today, she casually grabbed a remote (which she, quite charmingly, calls a “remoter”) from that same shelf and turned on the television. Somehow, she’s enormous, like Alice after the cake. Will she never stop growing? We have drawers full of clothes that are now too big for her, but we haven’t brought ourselves to get rid of them, because somewhere inside this giant child is the smaller child who will still fit into that Guerilla Girls t-shirt I bought at the PS 1 Art Book Fair when she was two. Somewhere here there is a little bottle that says “Drink Me”, right? I should look inside that vase.

A personal note from the editor: I am very nearly through the busiest work month of my entire life, which is why these have recently been shorter. Maybe you like that! Still, I look forward to actually spending time on these again, and I’m glad you’re reading them. We’re just talkin’ about noses over here, so we appreciate every subscription we can get.

dad

One of Kina’s smaller friends is moving to a new house this week, which has activated the part of her brain that realizes people don’t always stay in the same apartment for their entire lives. Now that she is enlightened, she has been walking around threatening to move to a new ice castle from her old ice castle, or to leave us behind in our current two-bedroom apartment to live in a “golden house”. A solid gold house is, I imagine, too expensive to contain the entire family, and so we must stay here in our normal brick-encased family box instead. Tragic, and so embarrassing.

dad

Laurea made scrambled eggs this morning, which is technically my domain, but I’m not complaining. She got super jazzed about a recipe in NYT Cooking that promised consistently perfect eggs and whipped up half a dozen first thing (note: they were, in fact, perfect, in a way that really threatened my sense of eggy dominance in the kitchen). We ate them in perfect golden mounds on toast, which is a great way to start a Tuesday, in my opinion.

Kina has gone through several egg phases in her short life, feasting on them for weeks at a time before dismissing them for long stretches. Each love affair with our scrambly friends is characterized by a particular niche obsession. In one month, she might demand a handful of Monterey Jack cheese be tossed in seconds before the eggs fully set. In another, she might ask that her eggs be showered with microplaned Parmesan. Lately, the demand is simpler—her eggs must be served piping hot.

At the table, seconds after the eggs land, she shovels them into her open mouth, expelling air and steam as she chews, gently burning the tip of her tongue. She foofs out little puffs of breath as the eggs approach her lips, closing her eyes in reverie and pain. Then, just seconds later, she deems the entire plate “too cold” and shoves it gently in the direction of her mother. The thrill is gone.

In the course of this pandemic, Kina has latched onto three Disney movies for her musical inspiration: Moana, in the early days, and Frozen and Frozen II in more recent months. These soundtracks have become the entirety of our musical experience in every way during lockdown, infiltrating our every waking moment (and many of our dreams) and dramatically influencing what music Spotify recommends to us. I swore I would never get into Disney soundtracks, but here I am, one year later, having memorized every lyric in Moana and become obsessed with the string harmonies of “Into the Unknown”, and I think I have to just admit that it’s fine and I’m a dad.

Kina usually has two songs from these movies that she favors for “performances” that occur multiple times a day—and whenever somebody is on video chat. Lately, those two songs are the aforementioned “Into the Unknown” and “Show Yourself”, both from Frozen II (which, for the record, is musically superior to Frozen, though I have watched neither movie and cannot comment on the plots). Drawing both on her repeated studies of the respective scenes from which these songs are taken and on her extensive life experience, Kina has assembled some pretty radical choreography for her renditions of both these songs. Her facial expressions alone are worth the price of admission, but the full experience of her gestures, mimed running, and jazz hands is really impressive—and consistent, largely, from performance to performance.

The actual structure of the “performance” is complicated, and can best be understood as a form of lip-synced cabaret. Kina occasionally sings, but very quietly, and has explained to me in the past that she’d “rather hear Elsa sing it”. As a reformed opera singer and karaoke fiend, this stings a little bit, but Idina Menzel is a legend, and so I can understand her point. What Kina does take pride in is the reproduction of specific shots from the film in her choreography—a well-timed stomp on the floor that sends frost shooting through the floor, running her fingers along an invisible wall of ice, or a carefree flip of her hair. Those moments, in particular, she has taken to calling out as her “favorite part”. She will pause briefly before performing them so that we pay closer attention, and they are in fact impressive.

It’s not entirely clear to me if Kina’s observation here is that I am the Daddy genius or that I am somehow the exception that proves the rule? I feel decisively not like a genius on most days, which has me leaning towards the non-genius case, but I know a lot more trivia about the environment and music than she does, which probably gives me genius vibes.

Kina, I would offer, is the real genius of this family, but I am her dad and could be overstating things.

The story comes fast and furious—a complex hero’s journey involving every protagonist and villain from each of Kina’s favorite tales: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the Octonauts, Princess Mononoke, Frozen, and Moana. In some versions of this story, the villain from one universe will fight the hero of another, but in today’s saga, all of the villains rallied behind She-Ra to subdue an army of skeletons. I can recall few details from the melee this morning—other than everybody eating pizza at the end—but it was an exhilarating (if exhausting) start to the day. Science fiction battle scenes are now Kina’s preferred genre; the storytelling years have begun.

I tell Kina long serial bedtime stories, making up the plot as I go—which is much, much harder than I expected it to be in my early fantasies of parenthood. I try to put together a reasonably cohesive episodic arc each night, but things eventually start to go sideways, so I tack on a cliffhanger and draw to a close. When she demands more, I tell her that I have nothing left and will need to dream about the next part of the story; this normally convinces her to let me leave the room, so that I can get on with the dream. Our latest dream serial revolves around Kitty Moon Fairy and her cohort of space thieves, who explore the universe in their rocket ship, rescuing squids. In the last five days, they have:

• Flown perilously close to the sun

• Visited Andromeda for a friend’s birthday

• Journeyed to the fictional planet of Etherea, where She-Ra treats them to a feast

• Had trouble finding the moon, which, as it turns out, does not stand still

• Took a bath after flying through the stinky clouds of Venus

Last seen in the back seat of Mochi Appley, Kina’s stalwart friend Simone the Owl reappeared after a prolonged absence this week, noting only that she had been on a leisurely vacation in Florida—a theory first advanced by Kina’s parents but never confirmed. The reappearance of Simone, a plush white stuffie recently discontinued by her manufacturer, came as a shock to Kina, her closest companion and confidante, who offered a short comment: “I thought she was gone for a long long time in Florida!” Simone, an owl who can no longer be purchased on Amazon, appeared to be in excellent health, rejuvenated by months of seaside living. Her fur, once ratty, was noted by close family members to be “pristine and shiny”, and she was said to have shed her once-pungent aroma. Kina immediately notified her stuffie council of Simone’s return, triggering an unexpected shuffle in leadership that resulted in Baby Rainbow Cat’s banishment to a nearby cardboard box. Simone, who closely resembles backstock owls available from reputable smaller toy retailers, sported a fancy new tag on her left wing; experts believe that the tag—since removed—helped Simone gain access to local shipping companies in Florida, aiding her eventual return. When asked to comment on Simone’s mysterious vacation, Kina’s mother, Laurea, said, “She had a great trip. She looks great. Who am I to question where she’s been?” When contacted by this publication, Simone—of whom there are three still in stock—had no comment.

dad

Kina’s grandma—my mother—is celebrating the last of the first pandemic birthdays in our family today, ensuring that each of us has now eaten a cupcake on video chat as we celebrate the passage of a year. Kina performed “Show Yourself” from Frozen II in celebration, and we followed with an encore of “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go”—Grandma seemed to enjoy that, even though she has seen many of Kina’s performances before. Grandparents have a high tolerance for repetition, I have learned.

My mom was also the last grandparent to visit us in New York before the pandemic, during Kina’s birthday week in December of 2019. There is a video on my phone of Kina playing “ice cream” with me in the local playground as her grandmother looks on adoringly. It feels like several years ago—Kina had a different voice, demeanor, and hat size. Everything our parents have seen of her since then has been through photos, video chat, and this newspaper. She’s a different person now—like all of us, but even more so.

“Will I keep growing forever?” Kina asked us this morning at breakfast. Not forever, we replied, but for a long time you will. It’s not entirely true, of course—we do keep growing, but in different ways. I always remember the look in my mother’s eyes when she first held Kina in our living room two weeks after she was born; I’d known my mother for my entire life, but I had never known Kina’s grandmother. There was something in her then that had not been there before, a reflection of the person in her arms, who had also not been there before.

I don’t even know what to say about this one. I really just wanted it as the top headline so I could draw Kina standing on stilts while all of us wore top hats. Please take the time you might have spent reading a deeply philosophical five-paragraph essay and instead enjoy my detailed reproduction of “Jupiter 2 the stinging planet” and a drawn-and-quartered cheesy toast.

How’s your lifetime?

dad

You should have seen it—the sandwich was glorious.

dad