Kid unexpectedly takes responsibility for empty pizza boxes, agrees to carry them to garbage cans 3 stories down as long as Daddy says “I love you” from window
In the actual newspaper version of this headline, the story would continue on to say that Kina later went downstairs to fetch a package of toothbrushes from the package table in the lobby. Laurea and I have never been prouder, and Kina didn’t even get attacked by rats!
So, in the days leading up to the election, I got really distracted and sloppy about sending the daily edition(s), and I had it all planned out that I would send them twice a day until election day, when things would be great and exciting and I would be so happy and also responsible. Neither of those things panned out, so! Here’s three wonderfully sweet editions of The Daily Kina from before this extremely [waves maniacally everywhere] week.
Kina Eviscerates Yet Another Croissant, Squeezing Its Delicate, Flaky Innards Into a Dense Orb That She Gnaws on Like a Demented Weasel
It is charming in a way, but it generates a lot of crumbs
To be fair, it’s for solving a math problem, but at least we have one.
The strategy was about figuring out how many shelves are in a mystery bookcase, and if Kina is half as good at strategizing against the decline of democracy as she is about division, I would say we’re gonna be fine.
I don’t know what else to do. The last time this happened was a month before she was born, and we were so afraid. I think this time we are ready, maybe more familiar, but no less afraid. I’m showing up for her.
I’m working through all this. A lot of you are, too. Be liberal with the hugs.
Blissful if perhaps less oblivious than the last time we did this
I’m skipping a few backlogs here that I will catch up on in the next couple of days, because I am right now in a cab home from my news job making sure that people can see election results, and I am anxious. I know that these moments have meaning and movement and surprises, but I do not need the surprises any more than the rest of you do. I am frankly a bit tired of surprises. Mostly what keeps me tethered is the day to day of life with my family and being in touch with friends and standing around in playgrounds and the certainty that is my neighborhood, which has moved in slow and plodding and mostly nourishing ways over the twenty-two years that I have lived there. The changes that last, I think, change slowly. The stuff that matters takes time. It grows, like a child, and the only thing you can do is pay attention to it and nudge it gradually in the right direction. The surprises, when they are sad, do not matter. The person matters, and the person takes time.
Wherever we land, remember that your country is the people you love, who love you, who won’t stop bouncing on the bed and asking about Nevada.
By her logic, they know her already and must have forgotten
She visited my office one time, but she figures that people were impressed enough that they must have forgotten to reach out to see if she wanted to participate.
Opinion editor looks at available options, makes controversial call against fascist
Vote Harris—early, if you can—on the Working Families party line. It is the thing we can do right now to make space for arguments we need to have. Any alternative closes off any room for debate—and not in ways that serve the people we care for the most. For Kina.
Rumor of former classmate’s return from Copenhagen for one week, summarily dismissed by parents, proves to be true
Apparently you can come back to your elementary school for a little while after moving to another country, which I did not know. You can also go to the Apple store for field trips. Man breath.
How Lucy’s parents weren’t exactly chimps, and how Kina is her own special being
I don’t know why it was surprising to me that a third grader hadn’t been introduced to the theory of evolution, but I enjoyed the opportunity to think it through with Kina, who was really hung up on the idea that Lucy–an australopithecine ancestor of modern humans (with whom Laurea and Kina are both obsessed)—had parents who might have been chimps.
When did we stop being chimps and start being humans? Was one generation chimp-ly and the next human-ly? What was so different about Lucy?
I told Kina that we don’t stop being one thing and start being another. I am a little chimpier, maybe, than she is. She is closer to the future of who we are than I am.
