Like viruses, the insults of a young child evolve more rapidly under pressure. Weaker variants—”Daddy, you are not good at talking!”—are bested by the rational defenses of a parent’s adult mind and fall by the wayside. Inevitably, though, a random mutation will yield a more potent strain—one, perhaps, that pokes at Daddy’s advanced age. That mutant will in turn evolve, growing more and more annoying as the child gains purchase on the parent’s deepest neuroses. This is what we traditionally refer to as “pushing buttons,” which makes it sound like Kina has some sort of conscious control over me. Quite the opposite—she literally cannot help herself; she is evolving to become more capable of casually destroying me.

All weekend, as Kina has spun on her heels and called me “old man”, I’ve struggled to find the proper response. She seems moderately annoyed to be called a “baby”, but it’s barely effective. Worse still, it is embarrassing to be caught trading insults with a person who still can’t tie her shoes; there is too much to lay into, which really makes you question, generally, the morality of insults. Sometimes I tell her that it’s hurtful to call somebody “old”, even as I recognize that’s the point of the insult, but I want her to understand what she’s poking at.

What is she poking at? I’m not that old. I’m certainly older than I once liked to be, and older than I was when she was born—when I felt slightly too old to be having a kid in the first place. I do not go jogging with my child as younger parents appear to. I will never be mistaken for Kina’s older brother. I can’t spin her around like a carnival ride and skip off like I have a fully functional inner ear. Still, I am young enough to carry her around on my shoulders for long stretches. I am old enough to be able to reflect on her inner demons and fears, and to have the patience to negotiate with them. I am young enough to chase her around the running track (for a bit). I am old enough to feel capable of balancing my career and my parenthood.

Kina has not really understood Valentine’s Day before. When prompted to reflect on past Valentine’s Days, she offered that those were the days on which her nanny Hannah gave her two of her favorite stuffed animals—both of which are holding puffy little hearts. She doesn’t have a particularly sophisticated outlook on love, has never had a crush on anybody, and hasn’t really experienced the strange ritual of in-school card exchanges. There has traditionally been nothing to grasp onto, and so the day is principally about stuffies.

She has a slightly more focused perception this year of what the day is meant to be, in that she now realizes that Valentine’s Day is about chocolate (true) and nice flowers (sometimes) and drawing nice pictures for your friends (optimally). Unfortunately, this is all unfolding in a year in which friends are literally few and far between. She got a little heart-shaped pen and a card from her friend Sloane, and Hannah gave her a bag of snacks (which was extremely well-received), but school is still on Zoom and our celebrations of love are largely confined to quarters. We talk sometimes about the kinds of treats that her friends might like, and whether they might appreciate a little drawing of themselves—which we then produce, writing their names in chaotic jumbles with the little heart-shaped pen. We will convey these cards to their intended recipients, but it will not be as huggy as a four-year-old Valentine’s Day should be. We do our best to sustain.

Kina’s notion of love is broad and permissive. It does not take much for a child this young to express her love. That expression has a very low cost and an extremely high return, people are generally very nice to kids, and children hold fewer grudges and biases. I sometimes think about how the scope of your friendships changes as you grow—as your love for those who are close to you intensifies as your fondness for those who are more distant diminishes. In my twenties, I could be friends with almost anyone. Today, the bar is high. What happened to me? I want to be as expansive with my love as Kina is, but my trust in the world is just more fragile than hers. I can’t remember the last time I sent a Valentine to anybody other than Laurea, but I have a bunch of unicorn-themed cards that Kina will be scrawling her name in. I could steal a few; maybe it would feel good.

As a child, I learned that there were rules that came with the celebration of Lunar New Year: eat noodles, no haircuts, kids get money, forgive transgressions, everybody be nice. I’ve tried to convey these rules to Kina in the last couple of New Year cycles, but some are landing better than others. Let’s just say she’s good on the noodles.

In the United States last year, we didn’t lose our Lunar New Year the way China did. This is, accordingly, the first official Chinese New Year of the American pandemic, and so it carries with it a little bit of extra grief, requires a lot more forgiveness. A lot. The burden that we’ve felt, and that Kina is feeling, as The Long Year drags out is hard to shake in the way we need to. Add to that a four-year-old who hasn’t napped, and you can see how so we are all rubbed a bit thin and exhausted. Sure, Kina is not always at her best—to herself or others—even on Chinese New Year. Who among us, et cetera.

A new year is supposed to mean something, to reset the board. It’s a fallacy, of course, but we hope that if we all believe it, we can trade against that sense of jubilee, like fiat currency. The only reasonable way to succeed at the psychological game of New Years is to admit that nothing has changed, and that you are simply making a choice—to eat noodles, to give gifts, to be nice. As a Chinese-American, you get two of those chances in under two months to make a choice. Have I made good use of those choices? Perhaps not. Can you blame me?

When I was a little kid, about Kina’s age, I had an imaginary friend. I think his name was Norman. I don’t remember being able to see him, but we went bowling together in the living room of our house and we would play together in the sandbox. He was a perfectly nice imaginary friend and a great comfort to me, but I imagine it would be slightly creepy to have been aware of him at the time. Kina also has friends, but they are monsters, and they live in the shadows behind us when we tuck her in at night. She whispers to them so that they don’t eat us. I’m sure they’re perfectly nice and good company to her as she falls asleep, but I wish she would wait to speak with them until after we leave her room. Maybe she could take them bowling.

dad

The kid now knows she has bones, at least two, likely more. Not sure what she’d do if she knew how many there actually are. I’m in my mid-forties and still don’t know them all. Bones are exhausting.

No moral of the story. Take the night off, folks.

dad

Last night was epic. Vexed by her inability to go to sleep in a reasonable amount of time, Kina fell into the dangerous middle space between overtired and enraged. At ten o’clock, we found ourselves on the floor of her bedroom, holding her gently while she whipped her body around in exhausted fury. In between sobs, she would issue sharp, quiet gasps—a tic that she’s had since she was a few months old (and which freaked me out intensely when it first happened). As she wept, she screamed repeatedly, “I want to take a break! I want to take a break! I’m tired of this roooooom!”

This landed as a mild insult, because we have spent the last year and a half really decking out her room to be perfect. It is far nicer than the room Laurea and I sleep in, and we often muse about what it would be like to switch rooms. It bears noting that we have slept in the same room for an extremely long time. If our relationship to our bedroom were a person, it could vote in an election for Best Room—and it would likely vote for Kina’s awesome room.

I have never slept in a bedroom for this long. When I was growing up, my family moved around all the time, and it wasn’t until I moved into this very apartment that I finally stayed in one bedroom for as long as Kina has had hers. Novelty, for me, is tedium. On nights when I cannot sleep, I sometimes try to find something in the room that I’ve never seen before—a particular shadow or shaft of reflected light that will pull me out of whatever spiral of thought is keeping me awake. Sometimes I just stare at the curtain rod on one of our windows, which is mounted just perfectly to project a diffuse pinhole movie of the outside world, smeared across the ceiling. The shifting of the light makes for a new room. I wished, last night, that I could convey that to Kina.

Mornings are when we share our dreams. Our entire family has been dreaming more frequently in the last few months than any time in recent memory, and some portion of our breakfast time lately is spent updating each other about the dreams we dreamt ourselves the night before. Kina seems to read this as competitive storytelling, which leads to some outrageously detailed dream logs—but it is impossible for me to assert that she did not in fact dream that her ice cream was stolen and that I was eating a huge plate of eggs as quickly as possible. That seems plausible, in a genre largely composed of the implausible. What is the difference between a dream she invents for me and one she (unwittingly) invents for herself?

By that measure, I have no way of knowing what it would mean for a four-year-old to dream, but we suspect she’s doing what we think of as “dreaming”. She started talking and moaning in her sleep when she was much younger—a spooky reminder of the mysteries of child development, but a good sign that we have a normal little dreamer. At the time, I wondered what she might be dreaming of, if she knew what dreaming was, how a kid that small might distinguish waking life from dreams, and what it means when the spectrum of your lived experience includes events that your brain makes up from plain cloth.

The last year has done strange things to my dreams. I’ve come to cherish the classic David dreams: staying in a massive and dimly-lit hotel, but not knowing where my room is; taking elevators that go sideways; jumping great distances with little effort. More recently, those dreams have been complemented and amended by the pandemic: working in a crowded office with people singing karaoke; taking the wrong train; having long conversations in restaurants. I’m not sure whether to interpret these new dreams as nightmares or not—they’re not entirely unenjoyable. I wonder what my toddler mind is working out. My waking pandemic existence and my dreamy post-pandemic existence run together in a continuum of mundane neurosis and absurd complacency; after I leave the mess of this world behind, I get a little time to take the mask off, eat lunch with friends, and leap over shopping malls.

We did not watch the Super Bowl™ last night. During your average playing of America’s football championship, Laurea and I escape for a dinner on the town with nobody around, marveling at how many people really love sports. Kina, who knows what sports are because her seven-year-old friend Julian plays all of them, finds them mildly amusing but also annoying, in that they prevent her from playing with her best friend—and Julian’s sister—Sloane, who has to tag along with her brother. The end result is that Kina is aware of sports and their effect on her life, but tries as much as possible to avoid them; this is also how her parents feel.

So, this morning, when we explained why Kina’s friend (and fully-grown Tampa resident) Des was so excited by the Super Bowl®, we also had to explain what the event was, why cities were involved, and that the whole thing was about football. Kina was stunned. Why would adults, with so many other options for what to do with their time, play sports? “That’s so silly!” said our perfect and intelligent daughter.

Will I sign her up for kids sports, in a wave of neurosis regarding her gross motor skills, one year from now? Probably. Will it make me enjoy football, hockey, or baseball any more than I do now? No, unless she is dressed in an enormous padded suit and staring idly at the sky while her opponents run straight past her—just like her parents learned to do when they were small.

I want to tell you about two of Kina’s friends.

The first friend is Panda—a stuffie given to her two years ago by our downstairs neighbor Arcangel. Panda is a panda, with all the trappings of a panda, but he has emerald green eyes that have been scuffed up in the dryer from all the banging around, giving him a lived-in look that fits with his general scruffiness. Panda has been among Kina’s favorite stuffies since she first met him, despite his humble origins at the local dollar toy store. She’s loved him literally to pieces—he recently burst a seam between his head and torso, leaving a hole that grew larger as time went on, because Kina would soothe herself, somewhat disturbingly, by hooking her finger into it. Until very recently, we had been thinking that his days were numbered.

The second friend is Kelvin—the owner of the dry cleaning concern on the corner of our block. About a year ago, when Kina got really into careening down ramps on her scooter, she would end her outdoor routine with a stop at the front door of Kelvin Cleaners, where she would wave briskly before shoving off down their access ramp. After only a few weeks, the crew of guys who work there (who are not generally friendly people) started rushing from the back of the shop anytime Kina showed up, so they could wave back at her before she sped into the distance. Over time, Kina took to waving both on her way out of the building and on her way back home, which has made Kelvin and his staff her very best neighborhood friends. The other day, I took her winter coat down to Kelvin for a cleaning, and he grilled me for a full two minutes on the quality of her backup jacket. In twenty years, I have never gotten an overnight turnaround from Kelvin, but Kina did.

Kina’s bedroom door opens onto the kitchen. It’s covered in paintings she’s made, and it doesn’t close easily, because the floor of the kitchen is warped in places from leakage that predates my arrival here. When the door is properly closed, you have to really budge at it, and so when we close it, we leave it cracked open just a couple inches.

For the first two and a half years of Kina’s life, that’s how we’d leave it at night. We’d say “good night”, give her a kiss, and pull the door closed. Early on, she had no concept of what darkness portended, and so she had no objection to it; an open door and a closed door don’t signify much when doors are meaningless. By the time she was two years old, we’d have to call out to her through the gap in the door to make sure the light was okay—which it nearly always was. She liked to see a sliver of light from the kitchen to remind her that we were outside. Doors meant separation, but the gap in hers could let the idea of her parents through. If I’m being honest, I liked it open when she was little, so I could look in on her and make sure she was okay on a night when she was sick, just to make sure she hadn’t tangled herself in the blankets. I was a nervous father (am I still?) and the open door gave me access to her.

Still, after a while, we all got used to the closed door. It wasn’t until late 2019, before she turned three, that she wanted it kept open. She fell into a horrible multi-month sleep regression (an episode I alluded to briefly on December 11th) that started in a vacation rental, as she wept in the shadows of an unfamiliar room; she’d suddenly grown afraid of a darkness she now better understood. By the time she got home, she refused to let us close her door at night, insisting it be kept wide open with the kitchen lights as bright as they could shine. We’ve since gotten her back to a normal sleep schedule and bedtime ritual, but the door cannot—under any circumstances—be closed.

Kina is eating a lot of snacks lately, because she is a Big Girl, and she is very particular about her choice of snacks, by which I mean: she demands that she be able to put her hand in a crate full of snacks to physically grasp one. This crate-of-snacks thing is not how I thought things might play out—like many idealistic urban parents, I imagined we would be the carrot stick house. As it turns out, we are the house with a snack crate in the pantry. This crate holds a few snacks—some crackers, rolled fruit, Bunny Grahams. I will sometimes walk into the kitchen and see her standing in front of the open pantry door, staring at the crate of snacks and waiting for one of her two parents to bring it closer to her.

“What do you want?” I ask her.

She grunts and points at the crate.

Kina is pretty heavy now, which means that playing the “Oof I’m Pregnant” game with my four-year-old kid is an ordeal. My sense of things is that the way I felt after carrying a thirty-pound child around the apartment for three minutes—nestled in my stretchy waffle knit shirt with her Baby Rainbow Cat stuffie—is equivalent to roughly a day of walking around with a seven-pound baby inside your actual abdomen. Kudos to the pregnant people.

It was not always this hard to carry the kid around. When she was small, I used to toss her into the carrier and spend a whole day in the city; she’d sleep, I’d eat, we’d go to museums. It was like being a paranoid tourist, except instead of a Jansport backpack hanging off my chest, it was my progeny. Until very recently, I could carry Kina on my shoulders for an hour at a time, but I’ve started to feel like I’m boring myself into the earth as we make our way around. I feel sad about this! Now she walks everywhere and is generally less whiny, which is everything I wanted when she was dependent and whiny.

This morning, when she demanded that I stuff her into my shirt and carry her around like a baby, I felt my back giving out, but I also felt the warmth of her head on my torso and the weight of her body in my arms as I waddled around. It reminded me of the week she was born, when she was still smaller than a person ought to be, her cheek resting on my chest. She, who had spent her entire existence surrounded by a body, found comfort in that moment in being pressed up against mine. I don’t know what it was that gave me comfort—the same lingering memory of parental contact or the sense of purpose in sharing my own warmth with Kina.

It must be strange to be a child, having everything you need provided for, and yet somehow always being obsessed with the various freedoms you don’t have. I want sometimes to tell her about getting older, and the moment when you realize that the comforts people take away are not replaced with more satisfying forms of freedom. In the category of obvious things that seem curious to parents: It’s interesting to observe that the craving for independence is so deep seated in us, that the instinct to go your own way is human nature—and that we encounter it at such a young age. On one hand, I find myself asking why we have evolved to need independence so badly all the time; on the other, I am troubled by the notion of “an obedient child”, and what that archetype suggests. Kina is a good kid, to be sure, but I’m comforted by her fierce annoyance at the (very reasonable) constraints we put on her life and behavior. We need her to be strong, and we want her to yearn for more—even though we do provide for everything, and I could honestly use a little complacency some days.

Sorry, Buster. I wish I could tell you it gets better. You’ll get stronger. We’ll let go. Maybe.

dad

Every morning, sometime between five and six AM, I can hear Kina through the wall that separates our two bedrooms, furiously banging around as she prepares her morning tableau. I try to sleep through this, but I know that the banging is invariably followed by the sound of her running through the kitchen to our room, her entrance statutorily permitted by her wake-up clock. As the light streams through our door, she breathlessly announces that “the light is green” and that she has a beautiful surprise for her mother. Laurea, still groggy, follows her into her bedroom, where she is granted the very first look at Kina’s daily panorama. Recently, this panorama has included:

• an array of treats, including various ice creams, three kinds of cake, and four pieces of chocolate

• a picnic blanket on which various delicious foods are laid out for Mommy’s enjoyment

• Three cups full of green puffballs placed at the center of her room

• Two Lego telephones, each with a tree attached to it, for important conversations

It is not always true that we are surprised by Kina’s offerings in the morning, but the ritual she employs in their construction is impressive, and it’s good to start the day by honoring that ritual (rather than, say, by watching her go to the bathroom). It’s not like anybody else I’ve ever lived with has offered me an ice cream cone while I’m still asleep. The gesture is touching, even if I’m far too sleepy to enjoy an ice cream—and the ice cream is made of wood.

Remember snow days? I have a distinct memory from my childhood of wading chest-deep in snow, liberated from the tyranny of desks and food in trays, recognizing in the falling snow the existence of the Divine. I also remember my parents running around with me in the cold air, our footsteps muted; on a really big snow day (like today), they took the day off, too.

You know what the internet did? It stole our snow days and replaced them with the opposite of snow days—a day in which you must work and also care for your child while they work. Contemporary parents may recognize this as “the thing we have been doing since last March”. The modern snow day, in other words, is a pandemic Monday. We have replaced the best kind of day with the worst kind of day.

As the fluffy stuff piled up in great blankets outside our windows today, Laurea and I were trading Kina time—helping her through school, making her lunch, painting, watching Frozen, and attempting to take her out to play in the miraculous snowy landscape that she loved so much last December. She loved it! Remember? Today, not so much. On two occasions, Kina returned sobbing from the great outdoors, deeply concerned about the cold (for which, dear reader, she was amply clothed). No snowmen were assembled, nor angels smooshed out.

Ever since the start of the pandemic, I’ve taken great pleasure in going to the bakery. This is a sharp departure from my prior relationships with bakeries (note the generalizing plural), which could best be characterized as occasional cookie dalliances. This bakery is, in fact, a single bakery—La Bicyclette in Williamsburg—that I had overlooked for several months prior to the onset of the current pandemic, because I did not pay attention to bakeries. I have visited this bakery more than any other bakery in my life. I have purchased more numerous and varied bready products at this bakery than at any other bakery in my life. This is now my bakery.

I realize that I am not alone in my renewed interest in bread. It’s clear not only from the block-long line in front of La Bicyclette, but from similar lines (literal bread lines) in front of other bakeries, from the legendary home sourdough boom of 2020, and from wildly popular Instagram bread-delivery accounts that are semantically identical to those of drug dealers. Bread, and the bakeries that produce it, are the signature pandemic vice of the gluten-tolerant. I spend too much money on bread, but it calms me down, and you can’t judge me.

On my average trip to the bakery, I buy a couple laminated pastries, something savory, and a giant crusty loaf of bread, whose long-fermented crumb is mildly tart and perfectly tender. For several weeks during the summer, though, we would stop at La Bicyclette on our way to the beach for a giant bag of bread, which may not sound to you like the absolutely amazing idea that it actually is. You eat the croissant in the car, take a few bites of a baguette with little boulders of gruyère baked into it as you wait in traffic, and then rush down to the sand (leaving the country loaf packed tightly in a paper bag in the trunk for the morning), where you and the family can rip apart two ham sandwiches with your teeth while going back and forth from the water to your beach towels. After several hours of swimming, during which you gradually consume a handball-sized pain sportif, you will have three madeleines tucked away in the side of your beach bag for a treat on the way home. This is all so much better than oversalted chicken fingers.

While I’m on the topic of games, I would be remiss if I did not mention the multiple daily games of hide-and-seek played in our household; in fact, it is shocking that I have not yet discussed this most important form of quarantine entertainment. Kina seldom goes more than two hours without playing hide-and-seek—which, if you saw the size of our apartment, might prompt you to ask, “but how could you find enough hiding spaces to make the game fun after a full year in the same five rooms?” Reader, I ask myself that question every single day.

There are exactly ten hiding spaces in our apartment, which I will share with you as long as you promise to keep them to yourselves. They are:

1. Behind the puffy coats hanging on the door in our entryway

2. Underneath the table in the living room

3. Behind the chair in the living room

4. Behind Kina’s bedroom door

5. Behind the curtain in the corner of Kina’s room

6. Behind our bedroom door

7. At the foot of our bed

8. Hiding under the blanket in our bed

9. Standing on the stepstool in front of the mirror in our bathroom

10. In the shower

Kina and I have a game we play, in which various celebrities and household friends attempt to wake Queen Elsa from a feigned deep sleep. In most of these games, she is flying on an airplane to Italy and sleepy because she has eaten unlimited gummy bears. It is assumed that she will not be easy to wake; still, should her competitor succeed, the penalties are enormous. This game is related to, but distinct from, a game I have talked about before in these pages. In that game, the penalty for waking Baby Rainbow Cat is that the waker cannot stop farting. In this one, however, you are frozen forever by Queen Elsa in a block of ice.

It seems strange that we have a game in which the entire goal of the offensive team is designed to result in a debilitating existential penalty. The closest analogy I can think of is boxing, except the loser in this game is always predetermined (and is never Kina). My favorite part of “Queen Elsa En Route To Milan” is the part where I feed her imaginary gummy bears. My second-favorite bit is simultaneously playing the part of the antagonist and pretending to be the flight attendant who warns the antagonist to leave Queen Elsa alone, on pain of petrification. My least favorite part is pretending to be frozen while Kina walks out of the room, expecting me to be in the exact same position when she eventually returns. My second-least-favorite part is the repetition, once she does return.

It is fun, I have learned, for kids to play games in which their parents pretend to be grievously injured or frozen forever. The exercise of control and wanton abandonment of care feels like a tender bud on the thorny branch of adolescence. “She is training to leave us behind!” I fret, and yet she calls me back for the eighth time to be melted and feed her gummies as she takes her seat in business class. Maybe it’s just an elaborate revenge fantasy, punishment for whatever trivial constraint I’ve put on her in the last day. Maybe she just likes Frozen.

The reluctant puker has returned to form, having navigated a wiggly final night and one last low-grade fever. With the morning came our standard 6:24 green-light wake up call and a chipper young girl with stories to tell, of Des and Andrew playing banana basketball and Daddy going to space. She’s picked up some of the rhetorical quirks of good gossip, like saying “and here’s the funniest part” and putting her hand on your arm as she really drives it home. Would a four-year-old in actual school with actual kids be telling stories like a local neighborhood matron, leaning out of her first-floor window and smoking a Virginia Slims? I only have one four-year-old, so we’ll just have to see if kindergarten is full of neurotic little adults next year. I’m just glad she’s keeping her food down.

Child Eats Bland Foods

Speaking of which: After a day of eating plain rice, Carr’s crackers, and porridge, Kina’s just about fed up. This morning, she insisted on some frozen mango just to stir things up. We acceded to her request, bracing ourselves over the next hour for a spray of fruit. The gods smiled on us, and she’s spent the rest of the day cautiously testing the waters while sipping Pedialyte. We appear to have weathered the storm, which means that Laurea and I will also eat food with color for the first time in 48 hours tomorrow. A BRAT diet, they call it. No comment.

Be forewarned: I say the word “puke” a lot in this one.

It started with a tummyache, shortly after dinner. This is, on most nights, how Kina tells us she needs to go to the bathroom, but a visit to the potty yielded no meaningful result. After her goodnight kiss, more complaints of a bothered tummy, which probing suggested was likely constipation. We offered Kina the standard guidance on post-sleep poops, and Laurea and I made our way off to bed.

Three hours later, the pukes began, as they did the last time she got sick, over a month ago, but with more projectile vigor and drama. I’ve stripped both our beds in the last twenty-four hours, have cleaned the entire bathroom four times, put the kid through as many sets of pajamas, and am currently running a huge load of laundry in the basement. She will, to be clear—and this goes out especially to her grandparents—be fine.

Long day, short post. Everybody in this house loves each other, which is the good news. Kina had a great dream about a COVID test. Nicole and Paddington have gotten closer and closer to Peru with the guidance of local royalty. Kina is “slurpy full” and topped up with tree juice. All is well, in the confines of this publication.

A brief correction: In yesterday’s edition, our top story referred to a local child on her first mention as “Kina de Ocampo-Yee”. On subsequent mentions, she was called “Ms. Yee”; those mentions should have referred to “Ms. de Ocampo-Yee”, which the author should have recalled was a flash point from parental conversations in the months leading up to Ms. de Ocampo-Yee’s birth. There is a reason and an order to things. We regret the error.

dad

Long-maligned, the humble Brassica oleracea has seen a recent resurgence in interest among local children in many of its most commonly-recognized forms—kale, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Of them all, though, the Brussels sprout has remained a lowly vegetable outcast; local children have, at best, paid this squat and unassuming leaf marble no mind, and at worst, have scorned it publicly.

In a shocking turn this weekend, though, one local child discovered that the little fella holds a delicious secret, invalidating theories—in some cases, dating back years—regarding its general disgustingness. While eating a roast chicken this Sunday, four-year-old Kina de Ocampo-Yee was challenged repeatedly by her father to try just a single Brussels sprout; despite Ms. Yee’s progressively more strident denials, her father insisted that “this is exactly what Daniel Tiger was talking about” and that “Katerina Kittycat would want you to have three bites, and I am only asking for one.” Kina’s mother, fearing a total meltdown, attempted to block further research, telling her husband to “cut it out” and “let her eat fruit”. Had he done so, this publication believes, science would have been done a disservice.

Instead, seeing an opportunity, Mr. Yee offered the younger Ms. Yee a full plate of melon, to be delivered only after a single bite of Brussels sprout. Ms. Yee, a self-described “melon fiend”, reluctantly consented to one final experiment. That experiment, surprisingly, demonstrated a full flavor profile, almost no disgusting squishiness, and a chompy texture—all in contradiction to the now-invalidated literature. The research was conducted a second time, yielding the same results, and further tests were run to ensure that the sprouts remained delicious both alone and in conjunction with chicken. With no ill effects observed, Ms. Yee declared Brussels sprouts both edible and delicious, and has submitted her paper for peer review.

We took a stroll yesterday through the East Village, hoping to take a break from playgrounds for a moment, and Kina made the best of the situation by doing what she loves best—making loud noises and amusing strangers. It is nice, in the middle of all this, to be happy and to make other people happy. It is also nice to eat a plate of pierogis, which we did in anticipation of our enchanted hokey pokey tour, and which gave us a very good reason to dance around vigorously in the freezing January air. That’s what it’s all about.

Kidman + Paddington Traverse Panama Canal

You must all be wondering, “How much longer can he sustain this serial fiction retelling of the contemporary holiday classic Paddington, starring Nicole Kidman?” The honest answer: I’m not sure. At this point, our heroes (former enemies) have spent more time in a submarine than anywhere near the plot of the original movie, and I frankly did not expect them to end up in the Pacific Ocean before heading home for the long-awaited dénouement. At this point, Paddington and Nicole Kidman are in the company of Paddington’s Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pastuso, the Octonauts, a friendly cat, an octopus named Coba, and three penguins with Brooklyn accents. They’ve all made their way through the Panama Canal, to which they gained access by answering a riddle (a requirement for passage, as you know, by all ships large and small), and are once again heading south. If I had to venture a guess, we have about four more chapters, but Kina is a demanding listener. I could be at this for years.

We have found snuggles immeasurably useful during the last eleven months, probably more than any other time since Kina was born. We dole these snuggles out liberally—especially on the edges of slumber and during important movies—and we’ve seen how Kina has come to recognize their value and energy. She understands that snuggles are something transmitted, as if by an invisible wire, between people who love each other. This is, in a way, something new; snuggles were not always thus.

I talked a little bit yesterday about the difference between Kina as a baby and Kina as a four-year-old, in terms of how we now collectively understand discipline, but snuggles live in that space, too. The gap, in this case, is between snuggles you get and snuggles you share. As a baby, closeness is a form of protection and nurture; you can’t live without it. Snuggles give life. At four, closeness is a signal of belonging, care, and nostalgia for the time when comfort was sustenance; it conveys information. Snuggles are a statement. Snuggles, at four, are a choice.

We are here in this apartment together, the three of us, by no choice of our own. This is probably true of you, our readers, as well. I don’t mean to complain. We have not chosen to be this close, which can be a source of tremendous stress, in predictable and terrible ways for some parents—notably those who have lost family and employment this year (losses that we have fortunately been spared). We’ve navigated this fraught closeness, counterintuitively, by choosing more closeness. We literally cling closer to each other now than we have since Kina was little, and that choice to embrace closeness in a tight space has been a saving grace in the last eleven months. The strange coexistence of being unable to escape a place and feeling so far from all other places can leave us feeling as though we’re floating untethered. Snuggles remind us of the presence we have with each other—and of our own substance. Snuggles are how we choose to be close, so that we can forget that we did not choose this.

Kina hit me again the other day, square on the ear—I don’t know why; I did something she didn’t like, and her inner monster took a whirl at me. The rules of the house are clear on this; no warnings, even though it’s been a while since our last time out. Since that last one, I’ve taken off the baby gate we used to leave open in the door of her room. She’s four years old, and that gate had bordered on the absurd for at least six months, but there was meaning in its presence: It was the boundary between time out and time in. So when I carried Kina to her bedroom, surly and barking, and she saw there was no gate, she got extremely freaked out.

I closed the door behind me after leaving her in the room, and she raced to follow me out, begging for forgiveness in a tone I’d never heard her use before—“I’m so sorry, Daddy! I’m so sorry!!” As she wept behind the door, I held it shut, separated from her by only twelve inches, as I slowly fell apart inside. What happened?

I have talked before about Kina’s developmental spurts, and how great stretches of tantrums presage the unlocking of new potential in her mind. This potential is normally either amusing or impressive, but the burst I’ve come to understand she’s navigating now is different; Kina has developed a more sophisticated relationship with fear. The things she’s scared of have deeper meaning, threats have causes, danger has a face. The squeaky hinge isn’t a mystery, it’s the boogeyman. And so, as she contemplates the isolation of a closed door that was once just a gate, the closing means something bigger than it used to, the solitude becomes more ominous, the denial more vast. Why would I choose to inspire that kind of fear in my child? If my child is begging for mercy, I am clearly doing this wrong.

Welcome, new subscribers! I have no idea where you’re coming from (and would be happy to know! Please tell me!) but our publisher is always pleased by an influx of new readership. You may find our focus on a single random child you’ve never met slightly disorienting at first, but as you become accustomed to our obscure storylines and the running Nicole Kidman and Paddington serial fiction, we trust you will turn more and more often to The Daily Kina as your primary news source.

Let’s start with an obscure storyline, then: One term that recent subscribers may not quite grasp is “tree juice”, last referenced in our September 30th edition. Conventionally known as “apple juice”, Kina has long preferred her own nomenclature, since no bottle of farmstand apple juice actually depicts an apple, and “tree juice” is just more fun to say. Tree juice the beverage our publisher typically requests with dinner, and like all great media moguls, she refuses to let anybody eat before she launches off into a spirited and muscular toast. The result of this boisterous ritual, as often as not, is a puddle of apple juice and a muttered apology, but we’ve been dealing with that since Kina was two years old and running up to us with her sippy cup, screaming “Cheess!”

For a few weeks now, Kina’s toast has been “to the new year”, which I can tell you is great, because adults have this thing about not celebrating New Year’s for more than one day, and Kina has no such boring hangup. Every night is New Year’s Eve at dinner when your child is four—complete with spilled drinks, screaming, and people dancing on your bed. Tonight, though, and without prompting, Kina made a solemn toast “to democracy”; this was moderately surprising, given her general disinterest in yesterday’s smooth transfer of power, but she appears to have read the news by now and is fully on board with democracy as a concept. It’s clear that she recognizes something has changed, in the way you might notice a recently mown lawn or a new tube of toothpaste.

She was one month old when The Last One walked into the White House and was unaware of much besides her parents, let alone the desecration of the presidency. Today, she is forty-nine months old and somehow still blissfully ignorant of the import of this moment, of his departure. This is a blessing, in many ways; there are many injustices I’ll have to explain to Kina as she comes to recognize them, but the day-to-day insults of President The Last One are no longer among them.

As I was drawing the paper today, I asked Kina if she wanted to tell a story about the new President. She didn’t so much as look up from her paper, because she had nothing to say about this event—today holds no meaning for her. She kept drawing, undeterred. “These are the stories I want to create, Daddy.”

I feel a little like we’ve all been dragged along on a story that wasn’t our own for the last four years, our own narratives held hostage by the most devastating case of toxic narcissism in American history. What stories might we have written for ourselves, had we not been spiraling around this particular drain? What I find refreshing about Kina’s refusal to acknowledge the importance of this moment is that she doesn’t have to gather escape velocity. Her stories, now that she’s writing them, are her own—and will reflect a mind just becoming aware of the society around it. When she turns eight, the stories she tells will include Black and South Asian women serving their country in the White House (and maybe even becoming President). She will have a model for what it means to be a leader that is constructive and not embarrassing. We can build on that.

The struggle to get Kina to nap on weekends continues unabated, as I (the stern librarian) unveil tactic after fruitless tactic to convince her to just lay down for just one second. Part of the reason I’ve been driving so much on weekends is because it’s the last remaining unchallenged nap zone in Kina’s life. I’ll drive twenty-five minutes away to grab lunch with her on a Sunday, because I know it will take twenty-five minutes to get home, and it only takes twelve for her to pass out if I’m driving on side streets. Stop looking at me.

Yesterday, though, I was not in the mood to drive. My movement situation is such that I either never leave the house in a day, or I drive for an hour at a shot; this is not at all how this city is meant to be lived in, and so we spent Monday morning just walking around the neighborhood, grabbing a sandwich to eat outside, and enjoying a good long swing. In so doing, I was also trying to exhaust my child so thoroughly that she’d find a good home nap irresistible. I ran around the playground with her, played hide-and-go-seek among a cluster of incongruous roadside yurts, and chased her as she scooted down countless long sidewalks. I got my exercise.

I did not get my nap.

Laurea occupies a role in Kina’s life that straddles accommodation and enforcement. Sitcoms teach us that in any parenting situation in which two adults can be played off each other, there will be a good cop and a bad cop, but in these times, I’m disinclined to identify either of us as any kind of cop—so I’d offer instead that in every parenting dyad, there is a nice librarian and the stern librarian (because librarians are saints, and I’d do that job in a minute if I didn’t live in this money pit of a city.)

Readers who know Kina’s parents may be mildly surprised to learn that Laurea is often the nice librarian, while I stake out the territory of stern librarian. It is Laurea to whom Kina goes for special treats and extra coddling; from me, she gets the rules. Laurea is usually the first to pick her up off the ground during a tantrum, while I am better known for standing silently over her as she screams on the sidewalk. Mommy nurtures, Daddy nudges. This divergence has surprised us both as it’s played out, since we both expected me to be a gigantic pushover with the offspring; it’s in my nature. Friends often joke about the intensity of purpose Laurea brings to her relationships, but her unfathomable kindness with Kina is a reminder that parenthood digs deep for the parts of your personality that you’ve been saving for a rainy day.

It’s not all cut and dried, though; Kina has been known to extract a bag or ten of gummy bears from me on a stroll through the grocery, and Laurea’s patience has limits. The nice librarian has all the same rules as the stern one, and when you cross her, the contrast is more notable. “You have judgement,” Kina told Laurea the other day, as Laurea put her foot down about the one thing she will not tolerate—a mess. Unwavering, Laurea insisted that Kina take care of her things and this apartment (a key component of our social contract), leading ultimately to a chastened but reluctant four-year-old picking up whatever it was that was out of place.

Many of the nicest things Kina says to us every day are delivered in the moments before she falls asleep, when her keen wit and fiery competitive instincts are tucking in for the night. It is in these waning minutes that Kina will tell us that we are her favorite parents in the world, that her mother has “good hair bangs”, or that she hopes I have a good dream about new Nicole Kidman stories. Kina delivered our top headline here just as Laurea built up a fortress of stuffies around her last night, draped in sycophants like a friendlier and less drooly Jabba the Hutt.

I don’t know where in particular “go in peace and safety” came from. It could be from any number of formal farewells, a generic assurance that you should not expect to be ambushed around the pass by the people whose village you’re leaving—or at least an expression of concern and support regarding any potential ambush by other villages. Thoughts and prayers. As Kina launched into her benediction, she placed her palms on our heads, as if to cast a spell of protection upon us from whatever monsters lurked in the shadows outside her bedroom.

“Be cozy” is probably not as common a send-off in nomadic cultures, but it lands well. There have been many periods in the history of civilization—this one included, sadly—in which safety feels like a stretch goal; a prayer for one’s safety can be asking a lot in the present millennium. But Kina takes the long view, reminding us that we are safe right now, in this house (or at least in her bedroom), among family, and that we must aim for higher peaks—to coziness itself.

About ten years ago, we bought a little Danish table for our living room—the first time in my life I’ve ever owned a piece of furniture whose principle purpose is supporting food. This table comfortably seats two but conceals leaves that, when expanded, make space for four adults. In its current configuration, with one of two leaves out, we have a table for three. The math holds up. We have positioned this table up against the wall between the living room and the kitchen. Kina and I frame the table; Kina’s chair is closest to the kitchen door, and mine is next to the window. Laurea sits between us, facing the wall—which she continually reminds me should have some art on it. It is only now, as I write this, that I understand why she’s always so annoyed by the blank wall.

For months, Kina’s demanded a spot on Laurea’s lap (see the story in second position from our edition of January 12th), so her formal seat has gone unoccupied for most meals. Lately, though, she’s begun to understand how large a human being she actually is, and so has taken to sitting in the big girl chair like a normal person who speaks in full sentences. This means that she and I once more face each other while eating—nice for me, annoying for the girl who speaks in full sentences.

There is a protocol for asking questions at the dinner table in our household, as frequent readers will recall. Kina’s intricate dance of conversation—a question that yields to an answer before circling back to a new asker’s question—is elegant but fragile, and frequently feels more hokey-pokey, less quadrille. On a bad day, if you miss a step, the whole thing falls apart—and by “the whole thing”, I mean Kina.

I don’t remember what I did this morning that made Kina call off the deal, nor what the deal was that was called off, but I will for the rest of my life remember her dismissive hand wave and decisive march from the room. She didn’t come to play.

I have nothing philosophical to say about this headline. She is tough stuff.

Have a calm weekend. Stay tough. See you in the morning.

What can I tell you? It was tragic. The doctor—who had gently burned her own finger just minutes before while helping Mommy spoon out rainbow couscous into a glass container, prompting Daddy to immediately prescribe two minutes of cold running water over said finger, leaving the doctor’s hand “wet like snow” and in need of a band-aid (but a brown band-aid and not an actual Hello Kitty band-aid) that she would later show off to Ms. Olenick and Ms. Perez for morning meeting in a display of tremendous pathos, which in turn would vanish the second Ms. Olenick announced a scavenger hunt whose object was anything starting with the letter “D”, sending Kina off to her bedroom in search of her beloved Tiny Dog, who had not at all burned his butt and very much distracted Kina from the tragedy at hand—believes that Hello Kitty will be “okay”. There are few, if any, clues to suggest what might have prompted Hello Kitty to place her tail in a pot of boiling water. It’s 2021, I suppose, and we’ll take anything to break up the boredom.

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As parents, we have never been much into the question of which of us Kina looks like. Whenever somebody has brought up the topic, we have sort of shrugged it off, seeing as we mostly think Kina looks like Kina. From time to time, we unearth a photo of ourselves when we were two, but we always talk about how much we look like Kina in those pictures, rather than the other way around. Kina has, from her first sonogram, always looked like Kina, and parts of us are there with her, but on her own terms.

At breakfast this morning, Kina was exploring those parts of us that are part of her, because I got to talking about which of us donated her outstanding eyebrows (me, I would say, though Laurea may differ) and Kina decided to run with the idea. Here is where she landed:

• Eyebrows: Daddy

• Eyes: Daddy

• Nose: Mommy

• High Lip: Daddy

• Chin: Mommy

• Neck: Mommy

• Ears: “All the ears look the same”

Kina and I periodically “play sports”, which is a very loosely-defined activity for two people who are not particularly good at sports. “Playing sports”, in this house, means throwing a ball back and forth—seldom directly at each other—and going “oh nooooo”. By contrast, “playing basketball” means walking up to Daddy and chucking the ball directly into his outstretched arms and saying “yessss”. Neither game is a particularly skillful endeavor, but both are very funny, because Kina spends the entire time guffawing and falling over.

I have—and perhaps here you will sympathize—had a really bad week.* Laurea and I started talking about current events at 9 o’clock last night, and it quickly devolved into me hiding under a blanket; I did not sleep well. So, as Kina and I worked through her daily agenda this morning, we took a detour after “get dressed” to “play sports”. She and I sat five feet apart in her bedroom and chucked the ball back and forth at each other, knocking over Legos, bonking each other in the head, and falling on our butts until both of us were losing our breath with laughter. The only reason I took leave of our game, after about twenty minutes, was because school was starting. I sometimes take pleasure in watching Kina have fun, but I think I needed the extra endorphins generated by destructive play this morning in order to approach the day. I think we both appreciated this interlude of chaos, a break in our ritual with absolutely no purpose—a close cousin to my other favorite part of the day: the prescribed choreographed pre-bath performance of Wham’s seminal lazy-party-kid anthem, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”.

I think there are two things that I have been missing in my life lately, to which I would suggest you also pay attention: the license to throw things at people, and prolonged laughter. I get both of these by playing sports with my child, though I don’t presume you have a child around at whom you feel comfortable throwing things. For us, the match works. I aim for her squishy belly and can protect my own head in a pinch. She has, as they say in sports, a good arm.

Kina is a plan-oriented leader, and routinely sketches out detailed agendas for the day ahead, following in the footsteps of her mother, who would never embark on a day without a clear vision for how it might unfold. Today’s plan, according to Kina:

1. Have breakfast

2. Get dressed

3. Pre-K with friends

4. One-on-one with Ms. Olenick and Ms. Perez

5. Hannah comes

6. Go to playground

7. Have lunch

8. Take a nap

9. Say hi to Daddy

10. Eat a snack

11. Say hi to Mommy

12. Eat dinner

13. “Wake me up before you go go”

14. Daddy gives me a bath

15. Books

16. Nicole Kidman story

17. Go to sleep

At the end of every one of these lists, Kina asks “Good plan?” and we have to say “Good plan.” (Most of Kina’s days are very similar, and so it’s easy to agree to the plan.) Having a little person who walks around the house shedding light on routine is both charming and dispiriting. We spend so much of our time in this house, at least, in a state of mindless ritual, trying to keep our eyes fixed forward on the distant goal of “shots in arms, then leave the house”. What does my plan look like?

When I was roughly Kina’s age, my family went to a July 4th celebration on a big plaza in town—a 70s-era landscape of yellow-brick ramps and shallow ziggurats, anchored by a fountain and ringed with trees. (Why we stopped building plazas as a civilization eludes me, but I digress.) A brass band played marches somewhere outside the view of my long-term memory as I ran heedlessly across the plaza. I remember the entire episode today from the geographic perspective of where my parents were sitting, because in this episode, I fell, skinned my knee, and couldn’t find my family. I remember a stranger carrying me or walking me across the plaza as the band played “Stars and Stripes Forever” (a march that still triggers anxiety in me, for this reason). I imagine we found my parents quickly, since the crowd in my memory was sparse—and the park must have been quite small—but that sense of being apart and being in need is something that is now firmly affixed in my brain.

I tell you all of this because Kina, yesterday, took her scooter across the playground at our local park while Laurea and I were talking. We paid it no mind, as she’s been getting more and more independent, but it soon became apparent that Kina had gone farther afield than any of us are used to. The two of us fanned out across the playground to look for her—on the swings, under the playsets, by the concrete turtles. Nada. It was only after I walked out of the only entrance to the playground and took a survey of the area that I saw her standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by friendly adults, bereft and weeping inconsolably. As I shouted her name and sprinted towards her, I found myself immediately the picture of a parent whose child has been lost.

Being untethered from the part of yourself that you most cherish is an unsettling thing at the best of times, but there is little, it turns out, that is more anxiety-inducing than thinking your child has vanished—as unlikely as that actually is. I grew up roaming freely through my neighborhoods at an age not that different from Kina’s, and I rarely felt the sense of separation I did yesterday for those three minutes looking for my daughter, with the crucial exception of that moment on the yellow-brick plaza with the tubas and a skinned knee. We do not actually know, as children, how fragile and precious the connections to our parents are, until we need them. As parents today, we are cognizant all the time of that connection, knowing that the force of our protection weakens exponentially with distance. I still feel that it’s important to allow Kina to define and protect her own boundaries, but in a world so governed by fear and vigilance, it takes real effort. She will be all right. We will be all right. “Give me space,” she’s been saying lately. I’m trying.

The latest news in Kina’s mental development—and in the hot new trend of conversational turn-taking—is questions at the dinner table. This is Kina’s idea, the exploration of our collective ignorance over a meal, and she’s as interested in the asking of a question as she is in its answer; since a true aficionado of questions knows that the best compliment one can receive is “Good question!”, she insists that every question we ask each other be accorded that respect. This is not necessarily to say that every one of her questions seems that sophisticated at first blush. Some of Kina’s more recent questions, for example, include:

• “Why is there not adobo in this rice?”

• “Why is there not light for my eyes in the doctor kit?”

• and the classic, “Why are clams spicy?”

Other questions are slightly more probing:

There is no person on earth whom Kina idolizes more than her pediatrician, Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes. Whenever we play “checkup” (which is all the time) Kina immediately identifies herself as “Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes”. If you mistakenly address her as “Doctor Desgrottes”, she will promptly correct you; it is “Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes”. Kina’s hands on the side of your face. Eyes front. Doctor. Stephanie. Desgrottes.

One of our longstanding (and most frequently-requested) bedtime stories is “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Meets Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes”, in which our protagonist visits the pediatrician. There is a scene in the waiting room, a summoning by the receptionist, some niceties with the nurse, and an extended slapstick bout of confusion over where to sit with the good Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes. This story is inspired by Kina’s actual behavior when she was a baby, in which she would sit literally anywhere but on the examination table. Guess who sits right on the exam table now? Hint: She is a big girl.

Yesterday, Kina painted a picture for Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes in honor of her annual well visit—a portrait of her pediatrician in blue, standing in front a giant mountain. At the top of the page, with guidance, she wrote DR STEEPHANIIE, before giving up for lack of space. She is allowed to do this, because she and Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes are on a professional title and first name basis.

I’m not sure what to say, in the context of this newsletter, to you, today. Ever since I woke up this morning, I’ve been spooked by normalcy—the normalcy of a day following a literal armed insurrection, a takeover of the halls of the Capitol by white supremacist groups incited by the current President of the United States, and a quasi-Constitutional debate over the admissibility of electoral votes to a purely ministerial Congress. Those debates only glancingly referenced a brief and failed coup attempt, a slight awkwardness that also characterized my totally normal meetings at my totally normal job today. What does normal feel like on the day after a coup? I drew a newspaper for my pre-literate child and tried to figure out what the headline should be, is what it feels like.

Last night, with dinner on the table and the tear gas in DC still lingering in the Capitol rotunda, Kina was crying. Laurea had made a delicious dinner of chicken and mushrooms in lettuce cups—a great distraction for cook and diners alike—and Kina’s lettuce was falling apart, to her evident dismay. I sat there watching the tears flow down her cheeks as my phone buzzed on the windowsill next to me, knowing that there was a lot to be sad about, in various chicken- and non-chicken-related areas, in the world. How much was our fear on her mind? Would she have burst into tears over a messy taco had democracy not been falling apart?

There are times when Kina’s sadness is indistinguishable from our own, but her sadness and mine are often at least distantly related. Often, I’m blue because she’s blue, or vice versa. At other times, we’re sad for different reasons and the whole house becomes a confusing maelstrom of rage and grief. It’s like that in marriage, too, but a kid can’t yet reason that somebody needs to step back from the brink if you want the bad vibes to go away. This means that you find yourself, as a parent, accepting that the only way to de-escalate is to let your petulant four-year-old weep over a floppy piece of lettuce while you take a deep breath and smile as the fascists take a stroll. It is surreal.

I don’t have a lot to say about our newspaper today; the real news is just too much. I’m going to sit here and watch our nation’s Congress certify some electoral votes instead. I suspect all of you might benefit from today’s edition, about cozy babies, as a distraction.

dad

Records of Kina’s post-bedtime roaming suggest a near-total absence of enforcement of bedtime law by her parents, despite multiple edicts issued by the local Parental Sleep Board that forbid both repeated demands for post-story parental visitation and roaming to locations other than the potty. In one night alone, Kina was shown to have left the confines of her room on six separate occasions—of which only one was a sanctioned potty visit and in four cases was a direct and illegal incursion into the living room. The Daily Kina has uncovered multiple recordings of Daddy reciting the bedtime rules (which clearly prohibit any non-potty-based emergence from Kina’s bedroom before the light turns green at 6:24 AM) and videos of Kina mere minutes later being walked back to her bed. In no case was the prescribed penalty, a closing of the bedroom door and gate, levied; those same videos show, instead, that Daddy provided several hugs upon Kina’s return.

Sources close to the family say they’re baffled by the inconsistency and have privately put pressure on the parents to follow through on their promises, indicating that an unwillingness to do so might suggest to Kina that bedtime has no meaning at all. Less egregious transgressions, such as summoning Mommy to change her blanket “because [she] is sweaty”, are nonetheless even more frequent, which scientists probably think is even worse and might result in higher levels of delinquency and insomnia in adulthood. When contacted, actual scientists refused to comment, telling this paper to “chill out”, that Kina would “be fine”, and that it “is a pandemic, you have to remember.”

Some in the household have speculated that Kina’s increased and unsanctioned post-bedtime exits are related to Daddy’s recent acclaimed serial retelling of Paddington—a 2014 live-action animated comedy film starring, among others, Nicole Kidman. Forensic analysis of bedtime recordings has uncovered quiet demands from Kina to have her father release more of the story than scheduled on each of the last four evenings.

In any other year, I wouldn’t necessarily advocate for spending the last two weeks of the year at home, sans childcare, away from family, with no indoor spaces to escape to. This year, however, I can say it was quite nice. We watched a bunch of movies (including both Paddington and Paddington 2—only one of which features Nicole Kidman and has been adapted into a serial bedtime story), drove around the five boroughs, made lasagna, and visited countless playgrounds. We watched as Kina grew up a little bit, and I got to do a lot of writing. I already miss it, this staycation, and I know I’m lucky to have had it.

I promised myself I wouldn’t get the Sunday Scaries yesterday, knowing full well that a lot of people didn’t get to go back to work today—I don’t get to be picky about my first day back at work this year. Kina dealt well with her case of the Mondays, too, playing “I’m busy on my computer” with her mother but otherwise being pretty mature and cool with Hannah’s arrival. She is still wondering what leisurely wonders await us after she wakes up, but I think she’s starting to grasp that what we had at the end of December was special and unusual. What I don’t think she understands is just how unusual this holiday was, and what an outlier it has been for all of us. I’m so glad we had this time together, I enjoyed it immensely, I’ll remember it for the rest of my life, and I hope we never have to do it again. Does that make sense? Does anything these days?

She went to school this morning. It was Stuffie Club day, and she brought Cloisters the Unicorn. She was happy to see her teachers. The year begins.

We may have only a few weeks of data, but I think it’s safe to say that the conventional wisdom about four, as an age, being better than three has a lot going for it: more language, better conversation, fewer public tantrums, and increased self-reliance. All these things have made for an outstanding holiday interval, for the most part. The strange outlier is some vestigial maternal clinginess that seems to have ratcheted up in intensity over the last few days. Kina is, in her words, a little kleengy.

“Kleengy” made its first appearance in these pages way back in Easter, in reference to her then-dominant stuffie, Puppy, who had apparently spent all morning pestering Kina for love and attention. This complaint did not come out of nowhere, I imagine, but without more specific notes from the time, I can neither confirm nor deny that Laurea or I have ever used the language “Okaay okaaay whaaat” in the heat of the moment. Parenting is strange, in that one both craves a child’s attention and is annoyed by it; the sweet spot is slender, and so we ping-pong back and forth between sweeping our kid into our arms and looking for a quiet spot to hide.

Welcome, new readers! Today, I will be talking about french fries, the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, and Kina. Hold onto your butts.

French fries are in many ways the ideal food, living as they do in the cozy overlap of a Venn diagram representing fried foods and foods best consumed in piles. Though I don’t have any data to back it up, it seems uncontroversial to say that French fries are a universally-beloved food (blame Ray Kroc) and should be kept at the ready in any culturally-ambiguous situation—say, while sitting at the FDR Four Freedoms Memorial on New Year’s Day with a bucket of fried chicken from Jollibee (the Philippines’ most famous culinary export). French fries are delicious, but they’re horrible, and so we do our best to save them for special and strange occasions like an outdoor fried chicken lunch on the first day of the year at an austere memorial to Freedom. They are, in short, indulgences.

The Medieval Catholic Church had indulgences right, in a way; they were good for you. A few extra prayers, a nice little pilgrimage, or some money to rebuild St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome could all buy you a few indulgences, good to reduce your wait time in the afterlife. They were to be pursued at all costs—the more indulgences, the better. Of course, as with so many things, the Protestant Reformation rolled through and turned everything on its head. The Ninety-five Theses get nailed to the door of a church, cast a shadow of shame over the notion of indulgences, and now we have to be conflicted about fries. The Catholics may have invented guilt, but Martin Luther ruined indulgences.

I, for one, do not make resolutions for the new year, for two reasons:

1. I don’t have the kind of naïve faith in myself to suggest that I’m capable of fulfilling a truly ambitious resolution.

2. I do not deal well with the feeling that I have failed to deliver on a promise.

But Kina hasn’t yet developed the pungent mélange of neuroses that I have, and so the idea that you might make yourself a reliable promise on the first day of the year seems fun and achievable. I still have it in me, I think, to feel that sense of resolve—to dare yourself to be better. Every year, at the cusp of January, we take stock of the things we didn’t do and haven’t become and, rather than curl up into a ball, stand up and proclaim to ourselves that IN THIS NEXT YEAR, I SHALL EXERCISE, BE MORE FORTHRIGHT, OR EAT LESS RED MEAT. It’s a completely irrational form of personal reflection, but it’s charming.

I have started, probably later than I ought to have, to mark Kina’s height against the frame of the door between our living room and our kitchen. The two marks I’ve made so far, from August and December, are a little less than an inch apart, which seems like a lot to me—a person who has not grown at all since he was in college. To Kina, growth is just one of those things one does to pass the time, a ritual that frequently leads to new shoes and astonished adults. The other day, Laurea mused out loud whether Kina would end up taller than her someday; Kina later wondered whether Laurea would ever be taller than me, to which we replied that no, probably she wouldn’t*, and that people do eventually stop growing—a strange thing, when you think about it.

Do you remember when you stopped growing? Do you remember what it felt like to outgrow your own shoes? It feels boring now not to grow, in a way, like I’ve been cheated out of that constant state of change. Growing up felt so mundane—I left school on the last day of eighth grade and came back three months later and four inches taller. Old folks would remark on how much I’d grown, and it felt like a real accomplishment. Good job, hormones! What does it mean, to a child, that we stop growing? You spend your whole childhood and adolescence in a state of evolution, and then… pfft.

What does it mean that things stop? How much of the drama we face as a civilization stems from our deep-seated need to create struggle and change for ourselves once our bones have settled? Reflecting on the year you’ve just survived (and congratulations, by the way), imagine what might have been different if everybody on earth was awkwardly lanky and wearing oversized sweatshirts, too preoccupied with the machinations of their own bodies to formulate elaborate schemes and executive orders to subjugate entire swaths of humanity to one person’s will. I suppose that’s basically middle school, which I do not recall being much fun, but at least I knew that everybody was confused, achy, and had horrible complexions.

Some days, less is more.

dad

There have been days this year in which I’ve wondered just how worse than average my days have become. As a person with forty-six years of life behind him, there is a lot to compete with: the deaths of people close to me, various breakups, business failures, three years of middle school. Kina, by contrast, has had none of this, and so it’s all the more surprising that yesterday was the best day of Kina’s short life, since so many of her days are, by our standards, outstanding.

While the rest of us have been living in a maelstrom of existential crises, our intrepid publisher has, for the most part, been doted on hand and foot—in part because her parents need somebody in the house to have a reasonably good year, and she claims to be having a good year, as it turns out, which is comforting. We know there are exceptions: the foreshortened first year of school, the second year of school experienced largely over Zoom, a dearth of playdates, less time with grandparents. But here we are, in the last days of 2020; Kina has her first Christmas tree, not one but two karaoke microphones, a selection of warm blankets, a car in which to ride around and nap, and two parents who adore her. On most days, she sees a playground, and we are lucky to be able to feed her a quantity and variety of food that even a hearty adult would find gluttonous. Kina, by most measures, is having the time of her life.

In some ways, I’m jealous. Imagine if yesterday had been the best day of your life. I suppose her standards are still comparatively low; when you’re only about fifteen hundred days into your life, any given day stands a real chance. She’s had so few truly exceptional days, when I think about the great days I’ve had: falling in love, getting hitched, hearing the Tallis Scholars in Berlin while riding trains solo through Europe, taking a nacho tour with friends, holding Kina for the first time. It stands to reason that a good Caesar salad and an hour in a playground with a trampoline would fly up the ratings, day-in-the-life wise.

Yesterday we had a little British afternoon, bringing home cakes and scones for tea and a good screening of Paddington, which none of us had ever seen before. I will allow that this might be the pandemic speaking, but I thought it was hilarious. Kina clearly agreed, laughing at all the appropriate slapstick moments, but was most taken by the evil taxidermist, played by Australia’s hottest limited-miniseries housewife-in-a-nervous-breakdown, Nicole Kidman. Viewers of Big Little Lies will be pleased to hear that somebody else gets shoved in this one! No spoilers.

Anyhow, today’s front page features the complete list of questions Kina asked us after the movie about Nicole Kidman, her career, and the likelihood that she might be nicer in person. Much of this is reflective of her naïveté about acting, generally. When we explained to Kina that Nicole Kidman is an actor, she didn’t register that acting was something somebody did, rather than, say, somebody’s nationality; she insisted that Nicole Kidman had to have one of the two jobs that Kina is actually aware of—coworker or stylist. It occurred to me after I drew the paper this morning that Kina doesn’t really understand that actors play roles, has not yet seen any actor play a second role—let alone Nicole Kidman—and so will for the rest of her life think of her principally as the power-hungry taxidermist from Paddington. Imagine the beauty of that. One day, Kina will watch Eyes Wide Shut and say to herself, “I preferred her with the animated bear.” Me too!

In celebration of Kina’s inquisitive streak, I busted out one of my many new calligraphy pens for Nicole Kidman’s trademark flowing locks, which I believe I convincingly brought to bear on Kina’s portrait. It might be the weird peaky eyebrows that make it, actually. Very sneaky-looking. No wonder you can never really trust her in those miniseries.