Our editors are in the midst of preparing the Sunday edition for you; we imagine it will contain a number of headlines relevant to the news of the day. What I will say here is that we took a little drive up the Hudson today, thinking that Saturday would provide no more satisfaction than Friday had, vis-a-vis the whole Future President thing; clearly, we were wrong.

In the spirit of today’s top headline, I feel exhausted—the way one might at the end of a long run through a creepy abandoned hospital, chased by zombies. One is clearly glad that the zombies are no longer in pursuit, and so one can finally collapse on a floor strewn with debris and have a good long maniacal laugh, staring vacantly into the distance. I think I will sleep tonight. The zombies aren’t exactly gone, but we made it through the spooky hospital, didn’t we?

Kina’s three years and eleven months old. Four years is a long time, but it goes by. Eat some honeydew in her honor, please, and save the crusts.

This election has me sweating bullets! We’re not made for this! How do we cope? Let’s look to our fearless leader, Her Majesty The Publisher, for guidance: A day at the spa for a mani-pedi and some “massage back”, but the spa is her bedroom. A little fortress of solitude, but the door is a muslin blanket strung between her bed and the toy kitchen. A fresh coconut, but it’s a passionfruit. A fox, but it’s Kina.

I don’t have it in me for a long one tonight. Nobody should work at a newspaper during the 2020 election! Let’s get some rest and hope for better tomorrow.

dad

First of all, a brief correction. In yesterday’s edition, it seems we noted the day of the week as “Thursday”—a day of the week that is actually today’s day. While we can hardly be blamed, given [gesticulates wildly], we do regret the error. We are confident that today is Thursday.

Did you know that Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood has an episode about voting? No? I am not surprised, since there are literally six thousand episodes of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, and how might you have been expected to know that there was an entire voting narrative in there? On the other hand, true DTN heads know that the canon is encyclopedically complete, and so you probably weren’t looking hard enough. In any case, there is much for a preschooler to learn about voting from our favorite tiger and his friends, who are presented with two animated voting-themed lessons separated a live-action segment that all children hate.

In the first half of the episode, King Friday offers neighborhood residents a choice between a swing and a slide. Daniel votes for the slide, while the rest of his friends vote for the swings, and Daniel is sorely disappointed at the outcome. He’s taught to pick up the pieces and deal with it, though one can only imagine what the next four years of his life is like—imagining how it might have felt to play on the slide every day, to watch as the slide issued critical executive orders to mitigate climate change, to wake up every morning marveling that a slide (a slide!) had become president.

As suggested in yesterday’s paper, we are finding many ways to trick Kina into giving us extra hugs these days. This morning, I walked out of the bedroom to find legendary television physician Doc McStuffins offering some hug therapy to her sick patient, Mommy. Upon seeing me, Doc McStuffins ordered me—another doctor, as it turned out—to snuggle Mommy to help her with her sickness while her primary care provider applied a band-aid. In the wake of a long election night, I will admit that a little hugging treatment was quite effective at resolving existential aches—for both patient and doctor(s).

I’m kind of low on fuel today, for reasons that I imagine our readers likely understand. I wish I could go into more elaborate detail regarding the other headlines here, but here’s the general shape of the stories:

Everybody Eats Dinner Together

As I write this, I have a window on my laptop open where I can keep track of how the servers at my other newspaper job are holding up in the face of unprecedented traffic. It’s making it very hard to write this newsletter—a task that almost certainly is healthier than watching the expensive computers respond to the most consequential election of our lifetime. At various moments this evening, I’ve struggled to separate my stress at watching the computers from the stress of watching the election, but at least I’m ready this time around. The last time I had to do this, I was eating dinner out with a very pregnant Laurea, generally confident in the outcome of what seemed to be a predictable election. History will reflect that I, like many others, was wrong about that, and now I’m having a Pavlovian response to that error in judgement. It’s no fun at all.

Again, it’s probably better for me to write the newsletter.

The most significant personal difference between this first Tuesday in November and the one in 2016 is the fact that I now have a fully-sentient child instead of a mysterious unrealized almost-child. Last time, we had to reckon with the difference in a country run by an inspiring, highly-qualified woman and a country run by the person who was decidedly not a woman. The sense of fear we had at having a child at all, subsequently dragged through a pool of concentrated adrenaline, felt like being tossed off a cliff. That reckoning remains stark for people of all genders this time around (even as neither current presidential candidate is female), but at least we know the kid we have, and how to raise her in the world we’ve got.

The saga of Kina’s questionable behavior continues, as your intrepid editor once again finds himself the target of his daughter’s ire—this time, because of quesadillas. Since the point of today’s issue is the resolution of our disagreement, I will not belabor its cause, other than to say that I had made a perfectly delicious plate of enfrijoladas out of some leftover beans, poached chicken, and nice tortillas; that Kina had enjoyed each constituent part of this dish in the days leading up to yesterday’s dinner; and that I should, accordingly, have seen this coming.

Fast forward through an enormous tantrum, through me frying up three more tortillas, sprinkling them with the remaining cheese, and tossing them on a plate (“A new plate! A clean plate!!!”) Let the camera linger on my sour face as I clean the skillet, as Kina screams “I want Daddy to eat that one!” in the living room. Cut to my silent entry into that living room, to Kina’s wary gaze upon me, to our mutual silent consumption of high-quality tortillas. A medium shot, perhaps, of Laurea and Kina, as mother asks daughter to apologize to father for yelling. A closeup of Kina, mouth stuffed with cheese, as she utters today’s top headline: “I can’t say sorry because I’m eating.”

But! Signs of progress! A few minutes later, we launched together into an exploration of feelings and conflict that I didn’t really have any time to write down. The shape of that conversation: Kina now knows why people fight, that it’s hard to keep from being frustrated (even for Daddies and other non-Daddy grownups), that it’s harder still to stop fighting and say you’re sorry, but that it helps to be able to say you’re angry—even if it doesn’t stop you from being angry—because maybe the other person can try not being angry first. The look of contemplation on Kina’s face was one of those rare moments you get to experience as a parent of your child realizing something you may only have recently come to understand yourself. She still has a very small prefrontal cortex, so I do not expect my child to become the Dalai Lama by this Friday, but I did feel a lot better about myself and my kid than I had thirty minutes earlier.

Let me tell you, we have really gotten our money’s worth out of this She-Ra costume. It is possibly the most-worn Halloween costume in the history of our family, and Kina/She-Ra really pulled out all the stops yesterday, as we zoomed off to McGolrick Park in the mid-afternoon for some high-quality Halloween festival nonsense. Meeting us there was Kina’s buddy Futura, who came dressed as Elsa (one of six in the park, according to Laurea). The two of them, in classic form, terrorized the local townsfolk with their secret powers—chasing a hopped-up teen in an inflatable Pikachu costume, at least two unicorns, a pair of unrelated toddlers dressed as sheep, and a small child in a stroller whom Kina identified as “P.J. Maxxxx!!!!”

They also collected a substantial load of candy from various cleverly-built chutes and friendly young mutual aid activists around Greenpoint. That morning, Laurea had found Kina’s Halloween bag, full of last year’s haul (which she disposed of discreetly). With that in mind, we decided to hit up just six candy chutes before peeling off and sounding the Purge siren. The adults in our party, having decided that 2020 would be a good year to just not care how much candy our kids ate, looked on with resignation as Kina and Futura each plowed through several tiny candy bars, two boxes of Nerds, and a fistful of lollipops, growing more and more extremely psyched and intense with each bite. By the end of it, Futura was guarding Kina’s stash from strange children like a paranoid billionaire stranded in a shopping mall. Kina, for her part, was doing her “stompy dance” and gnashing her teeth. It was dystopian but also kind of cute.

At one point, Kina/She-Ra passed a group of three grown adults dressed as supporting characters from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power—Glimmer, Entrapta, and Shadow Weaver—who somehow had not engaged an actual She-Ra for their “Best Friend Squad” (a group that true fans of SRatPoP know canonically includes just Adora, Glimmer, and Bow, but I digress.) As they swooned, Kina sucked on a lollipop and paid them little mind. Even though they are clearly less invested in the canon, they were very nice and I took a picture for posterity.

As the sun began to set, we called it quits on the park, strolling off to end the night at a local slice joint, the kids somehow simultaneously twitchy and bleary-eyed, smearing cheese on their faces and dancing on the tables. On the whole, it was a great day.

Today’s Parade cover is an extremely accurate depiction of our favorite candy chute of the day—a dragon head in papier-maché, with a doorbell that summoned chocolate. Kina can be seen at far right. Laurea produced this illustration on her own, as Kina was being stompy over the fact that I’d asked her not to throw scissors at me. This newsroom is an HR nightmare.

The clock in Kina’s room is set to wake her at 6:15 AM tomorrow, which I believe means 7:15 AM. It is 9:19 PM now, which I think means it’s 10:19 PM. One way or another, we’re gonna end up drawing the short straw tomorrow morning, so off to bed it is. Sleep well, dream of Nerds.

dad

KINA: Talk about Halloween.

KINA: Talk about Halloween.

KINA: Talk about Halloween.

DADDY: OK, you ready to talk? What happens on Halloween?

KINA: I don’t know. What does it tick, and how do we bow?

DADDY: Do we dress up in costumes?

KINA: We do dress up in costumes.

DADDY: What kind?

KINA: She-Ra and scaaaaary monsters.

DADDY: And what do we do?

KINA: We dance. We really really really really really really dance.

DADDY: Where?

KINA: On the party rig.

DADDY: On the what? On the party rig?

KINA: Rink.

DADDY: The party rink?

KINA: And then what do we have to do without Tweak or Mommy or Captain Barnacles or Dashi? I don’t know what we do without them.

DADDY: When you’re dressed as She-Ra, how do you feel?

KINA: Happy. Halloween happy. if it doesn’t go wrong then I will not do it but if I do do it, I will do it on the dance party.

DADDY: You will do it on the dance party.

KINA: Of course I will, because it doesn’t have to be anyone of course, because it has to be not a long line if it hasta go faster. It doesn’t trust me if it doesn’t have a word.

DADDY: Let me ask you a question.

KINA: Lemme ask YOU a question. My question is: I’m gonna be She-Ra with the Halloween sword with me and you and Mommy, Captain Barnacles and Dashi and Tweak and Shellington and Tunip, and I couldn’t have done this without you—thanks, Captain Barnacles.

DADDY: Are we gonna go to the park?

KINA: Yes.

DADDY: What are we gonna do?

KINA: We’re gonna get treats, but first we need a show for just a Halloween party that is just showing up for people that are like you, and then if you wanna lollipop you can have some wine. I can give you whatever flavor wine, dear Captain Barnacles to Kina.

DADDY: Lemme get this straight, if I get you a lollipop, you will get me…

KINA: Some wine that is any flavor you want. You can have any flavor wine you want and any kind of phone and any color phone and any flavor wine and jook.

DADDY: Do you think that Halloween is scary?

KINA: Halloween is not scary, because there’s funny scary monsters and She-Ra from She-Ra.

DADDY: And are you gonna see any friends today?

KINA: Futura.

DADDY: Where are you gonna see Futura?

KINA: McGolrick Park.

DADDY: What will she be dressed as?

KINA: I don’t know. Maybe Elsa! [Ed: This was, as it turned out, an accurate prediction.]

DADDY: What do we have to do now?

KINA: Whatever we’re gonna do now.

DADDY: Like what?

KINA: I don’t know what it will be. Let’s just find out and let’s see with Google. That’s a good plan. Remember that’s a good plan.

DADDY: I love you.

KINA: I love you.

dad

Last night, when I was putting Kina to bed, she asked for her nightly Baby Rainbow Unicorn story, in which, I was told, our intrepid hero the Unicorn had to “put a max”.

I didn’t understand.

“She’s gotta put the max!!!”

Still didn’t get it. “A max? What is she putting?”

“A… maxxxxxxx. Masssssxxxxxs.”

“A mask?”

“Yes, she puts onna masxs inside, because people are yelling at her.”

This is what it’s like to tell bedtime stories in 2020.

dad

We bought Kina a board game about feelings, which she has declared is too boring to play (and is certainly too complicated to set up, requiring a Daddy or Daddy-adjacent parent to separate over a hundred cards into fourteen piles). It is also probably accurate to say that this board game is too simple for America’s most facially-observant preschooler. Identify the happy kid? Kina can spot a fleeting shadow of annoyance at twenty paces. Yesterday, she asked me why I was “talking madly” at Mommy, which caught me off guard, because I wasn’t madly at Laurea in the least. After further inquiry, it turned out that what Kina had picked up on was a particular and blustery brand of intense conversation that her parents have at dinner—an intensity often accompanied by a scrunched-up brow and excited, open mouth. One can hardly fault a newcomer to the emotions game for thinking that Laurea and I are mad at each other all the time (though, in fact, we’re often mutually annoyed at something—or somebody—else).

So, in order to better understand the kinds of faces that Daddy makes, Kina asked me to make a bunch of faces, so that she could tell me about all the feelings I have. Here are the results:

Daddy makes a happy face: “Scared!”

Daddy makes a loving face: “Sleepy!”

Daddy makes an excited face: “Angry!”

Daddy makes a surprised face: “Hope face!”

What’s the take-away here? It’s 2020! Who finds it easy to put on a happy face these days? She’s not wrong, she just sees right through me. If there’s any silver lining, it’s that she’s found some hope among the scared/sleepy/angry feelings that hang over most of my days lately. Let’s hope, then, that America’s most insightful preschooler is also its most prescient.

New Smoke Detective Ordered

The freakin’ smoke detective!!!! It started going off—again—in the middle of the day yesterday—again—for no reason—again—at all, waking Kina from a well-earned nap. I had to silence the alarm, rush into her room (where she was sitting straight up and screaming), and hold her in my arms for a good long while to calm her down and put her back to sleep. A failed promise, I thought, furious at the brilliant industrial designers at Google—paid handsomely, no doubt, to strut about in Patagonia fleeces—who had once again terrified my child. After examining the innards of the errant alarm and looking around carefully to ensure that I was not missing a small, secret inferno in my living room, I gave up and bought another smoke detective. If that one fails me, I’m throwing it out the window and adopting a loyal collie instead.

dad

In her youth, Kina was known neither for her varied palate nor for a gluttonous appetite. As most contemporary first-time parents likely do, we imagined a diet for her that would be riotously colorful and diverse in its flavors: Fish eggs! Molé! Hummus! Kimchi! Injera! What we got: avocado, scrambled eggs, and allergies to peanut (no molé) and sesame (no hummus). As she grew in size, she shrank from culinary challenges, retreating to the inevitable noodle-and-french-fry diet for which she is still occasionally known. In recent months, though, she’s demonstrated a newfound appetite for risk: Strange vegetables! Tofu! Spicy things! Fungi!

You can’t always tell when Kina won’t eat her dinner (about a one-in-three chance these days), but you know she’ll clean her plate when she asks, “Is there more in the pot if I want more?” (She asks this regardless of whether the dinner we’ve made is in a pot or in a baking dish.) It’s usually after the first bite or so that she starts waxing rhapsodic about all the meals she’ll eat from the leftovers—

“I’ll have farfalle and squash for breakfast and aaaaaalllll the time!”

“Tomorrow I will eat all of this for lunch!”

I didn’t necessarily imagine, in the Before Times, that we’d be eating dinner with her every night. Laurea and I often got home after Hannah had fed Kina dinner, and we’d put her to bed before making dinner for ourselves. The pandemic has given us the gift of sharing the same dish at dinner, which has pushed Kina to eat all the things we eat. (While we consider her palate as we cook, there was no way we were going to eat quesadillas every night—much as we love cheese.) The pre-newborn versions of us probably fantasized about making farfalle and squash—with kale and pancetta, as Laurea prepared it tonight—for our daughter, but the real-life versions of us were too scarred from failed attempts to foist flavorful purées on the kid. That we now get to share our experiments in the kitchen together, with Kina, is what I think we actually should have been aiming for all along, and we get an unflinchingly honest critic as a bonus.

We’re lucky that there’s always more in the pot if she wants more. I don’t take that for granted, and I come from a family that cares deeply about having more to eat. That she wants to eat more, and that she tells us that she does, is the most exquisite demonstration of love.

dad

Again, revisiting some territory here, about Kina’s astounding sense of smell. Since we last discussed the olfactory wonders of our daughter’s nose, she’s taken to absentmindedly muttering “What’s that smell?” as we walk through the house, which always makes our anxious editor worry that the pilot light on the stove is off, or that some bit of food has been left out to rot. In practice, though, the aroma is often benign—almond butter on toast, Laurea’s hairspray, or the living room air after it’s been pulled through the vacuum. Now that she knows I’m paying attention, though, she’s using her awareness that her sense of smell is stronger than my own to make alarming pronouncements about how I smell. For example:

“Daddy, what’s that smell? It smells like butt. Oh, it’s your pants”

or:

“Daddy, your feet are stinky. They smell like old butts!”

or today’s top headline:

“Daddy, your shoulder smells like a hot oven!”

What does a hot oven smell like? Do I smell like roast chicken or chocolate chip cookies? Like an empty oven as it preheats? Does my shoulder smell like carbonized pork drippings and enameled steel? Is that a compliment?

She’s always thoughtful when she tells me how I smell, which is charming, in that it shows she’s thinking about me, but also disturbing, because it suggests there’s some deep truth to her assertions that I stink. If I have to take any of these comments to heart, I will obviously take the hot oven, which is the most metal of all smells.

“Burlingame Goes to Time Out and the Toes Will Be the Electricity Monster”

Okay, let me make a reasonable effort to explain. Burlingame is the name we’ve given to my fist when it talks—hopefully you understand what that means, but if not, Google “Señor Wences Johnny”. The toes are my toes, which belong to my foot, which she calls “Footle”. The Electricity Monster, I believe, is a character from WordGirl. I’m not sure why Burlingame goes to time-out or what the Electricity Monster is doing to him, but I’m pretty sure this scenario involves some injustice and wrongful imprisonment. It passed so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to ask.

dad

Here is everything we did before noon yesterday: Woke up at 6:45, watched some She-Ra, got dressed, went to buy bread and fancy tarts, ate said fancy tarts at home, drew the newspaper, put on our cozy jackets, drove to the coffee shop, threw a tantrum a block away from the coffee shop because the bench where we’d drink our coffee and juice was too far away, meowed, walked into McCarren Park, chased Daddy around the track, got chased by Daddy around the track, crossed the street to the playground, told Daddy to walk on the outside sidewalk while we walked on the inside sidewalk, wished him luck, rode the big-girl swings, rode the bucket swings, rode the other big-girl swings, visited the concrete water turtles, looked around on the ground for uninflated water balloons, saw a kid we sort of knew, didn’t talk to him, spotted two actually inflated pink balloons on the other side of a fence, figured out how to get around the fence to seize one of the two balloons, saw another kid we knew, danced around with that kid, went to get the other balloon for our friend, shared it with her, threw a tantrum because she didn’t share her doll with us, meowed, saw our Uncle Ken, danced around, showed him our balloon, played with him until the first kid left the turtles, said goodbye to that kid, screamed “Do you remember the time I saw you at the photo shoot?!?!” as he walked away, decided to go to lunch, walked back out of the playground, chased Ken around the track, watched a guy jumping rope, saw a dog, walked back to Mochi Appley in front of the coffee shop, drove to Queens, sat in a high chair for the first time in a long while, ate Thai food outside where it was chilly chilly chilly, made Daddy chase us around the fountain where some water splashed in his eye and made him worry he’d get pinkeye, said bye-bye to the ladies, announced our intention to take a nap in Mochi Appley, and followed through on that promise while Daddy drove home and we settled down for a long, long time.

dad

The great thing about writing these newsletters every day is that I have a detailed record of when Kina last had her hair cut (in July) and what her curly hair type is (2B). Accordingly, I can tell you with real confidence that Kina bounced her tangled 2B locks over to her hair idol Christina at her brand new salon for the first time in almost exactly three months yesterday. In our daughter’s hand: a necklace of chunky lucite beads that she had strung herself that morning, which she reverently handed to her stylist before entering the salon. Christina put the beads around her neck, ushered Kina to her favorite chair (a little checker cab), and began to murmur some private small talk with her—exactly as Kina does at home whenever she role-plays Christina, which happens all the time.

I really dreaded Kina’s first haircut, remembering my own fear of the chair when I was her age. My father told Kina the story of my first haircut last week, with its classic punchline—“no clippers, and none o’ that red stuff” (which we’ve always taken to have been a jar of disinfectant for combs, though that disinfectant is almost always blue, suggesting that I was maybe right to be afraid). So with our touchy toddler in the chair for the first time over a year ago, I expected the worst. What I learned in that moment is that Kina holds hair stylists in the same regard she does phlebotomists, which is to say: in the highest esteem. Kina could spend hours with Christina, allowing her to trim each hair separately as she gazed lovingly in the mirror. We, her parents, are happy for this, because Kina’s hair is always so tangled, and she will tolerate several minutes of vigorous brushing at her stylist’s hands—something she’d never do for us. This is an event for us all to look forward to. A moment of taming—the child and her locks.

Christina always braids Kina’s hair before we go, and she really went to town yesterday—four braids, pinned carefully together, each with a blue and a pink bead (per her client’s request), topped off with a spritz of glitter. It was a cripplingly cute vision of Kina’s salon future, and you would have loved to see it yourselves. On the way out the door, our client picked up a raspberry lollipop and a rubber ducky (she has collected five so far), waving diffidently from the sidewalk to her hero. “Tank you!” Kina called, as she and I strolled off to the pizza place on the corner for a twilight date. The kid ate a Caesar salad. We shared an ice cream. The stars came out. Her hair was amazing.

Today’s Parade turned out better than expected, since Kina didn’t approve of the leaf motif that Laurea pitched. After watching her mother cut out and paste two of her own leaves, though, Kina demanded the opportunity to make a blue triangle, which has become a little stream to carry the leaves along. How peaceful!

dad

“This is how Daddy looks when he’s eating,” announced Kina recently, gazing off into the distance while absentmindedly chunkin’ on some pasta with her mouth half open. In that moment, I felt not so much seen as transparent. She’s done this same thing for just about everybody she’s eaten with in the last two weeks, and it’s alarmingly accurate. Our friend Mel told us two years ago, “Kina really looks a person up and down. She’s totally got your number.” Is it possible that she’s spent the last three years quietly storing up the behavioral habits of the humans around her, only to serve up this tableside mimicry in a burst of humiliating impersonations? It’s only lately that I’ve come to truly understand how much she’s watching us and how thoroughly she has us figured out. If she knows better than we do how we eat, how long before she truly understands how we think and what totally freaks out out?

Moreover, do I really eat like that?

Kid Unscrunches Big Toe

How long was she keeping that bead in there? Is there literally any other magician on earth who could deliver this trick? I am endlessly fascinated by the things Kina believes will be entertaining.

Kid Terrified of “Smoke Detective”

It’s clear that yesterday’s newsletter struck a nerve with readers. You didn’t ask, but Kina slept fine all night. She did ask about “the rectangle” again before she went to bed tonight, though she did immediately accept my assertion this time that the rectangle would leave her be. I imagine I’ll be making that same promise nightly for a few weeks.

dad

Just to get it out of the way: I am no longer angry at my daughter. Time heals all wounds.

I do get to write another timely email, though—this time, about fire. Top headline today is a quote from Kina playing the role of a firefighter saving her (real) family from a (pretend) fire, but I don’t think she really knows about house fires, and so the idea of a fire that requires rescue is strictly theoretical to her.

What isn’t theoretical is a malfunctioning living room smoke detector (or “smoke detective”, in Kina’s dialect), which went off at ten o’clock this morning while I was in the bedroom. In the three years since I installed actual working smoke detectors in my own apartment for the first time in two decades (don’t ask), I have learned the importance of cleaning them—a task that, when shirked, results invariably in false smoke alarms on humid days. Today was such a day; I heard Kina screaming, terrified, before I noticed the alarm itself. I rushed out, pressed a button to silence the alarm, and hugged Kina for two full minutes to calm her down. Neither Kina nor I are fans of loud noises, but at least I have forty extra years of practice, and I know what a smoke detector is (and whom to blame for not cleaning it). Kina, on the other hand, was deeply shaken in a way I didn’t recognize until I put her to bed tonight.

“Is the rectangle gonna make noise?” she asked.

“No. I promise it won’t make noise. I fixed it, and it won’t bother you.”

She stared anxiously at the smoke detector in her room, as if waiting for it to sucker punch her. I held her hand and told her again that the rectangle would not beep, that I had cleaned it just for her, and that I would keep her safe.

“Do you want me to tell it not to make noise?” I asked, pointing up at the smoke detector and starting to scold it.

“No! No. No, Daddy. Don’t talk to it. I don’t want you to talk to it.”

I had underestimated the degree to which she feared this thing, believed it to harbor some malignant spirit. It reminded me of when I was her age, staring at the wallpaper of my bedroom—a pattern of golden eagles on a field of blue—and feeling somehow threatened by the pattern itself, like a belligerent roommate you’re afraid to kick out. There’s no reason to it, this sense of threat, the first time your brain is exercising its sense of menace. A false alarm.

“Do you have a rectangle in your room?”

“I don’t have a rectangle in my room.”

“Can I sleep in your room tonight? And you can sleep here, with the rectangle?”

“No, I’m too big, and this is your room, and the rectangle will keep you safe. I promise, promise, promise that the rectangle won’t make a sound tonight. And if anything happens, I will come running so quick and grab you up and keep you safe.”

“Will you stay with me, for just a minute?”

“I will stay with you.”

And so I sat on the floor by her bed while she tucked her nose into her sleeve and closed her eyes. Every minute or so, she would open one eyelid to check warily on the smoke detector. It remained silent. I rubbed the bridge of her nose gently to remind her that I was there, that she was safe.

When I stood up to leave, she asked for a kiss. She never does that. I hugged her, again, for two full minutes. She drifted off to sleep.

If that smoke detector goes off tonight, I swear to god I’m gonna lose my everlasting shit.

dad

I’m angry with Kina tonight. If she were in my shoes, I’d hope that she’d say “I’m frustrated with Kina tonight”, but I’m angry, and that’s okay—I’ve laid the foundation for that with her, and so I have to accept that it’s true for me, too. Today’s top headline is something she said just yesterday, and it’s strange that I have to write a newsletter about it now, but also timely, maybe? Kina spent a good part of the evening just beating up on me—raging against bathtime, scratching my eyes, telling me she only likes Mommy, telling me in various ways that she doesn’t want me around. This, to be fair, is kind of normal for her—and I normally shrug it off—but it stings a little more today, and so I’m angry. How much have I done for this child, goes my internal monologue, I have wiped so much excrement off this child with my own hands, fed her food from my own plate, and lost countless days of sleep, it says, all because I love her so much—and this in return?

I know, because I read the books, that she has a very small and disinterested prefrontal cortex, and so has no impulse control. I know that she cannot regulate her emotions, nor compartmentalize her stress. I am aware—or I tell myself, at least—that she takes out her dissatisfaction with the world and its indignities on me because she knows it’s safe to do so (having already learned that the world does not respond to having its face scratched). I take pride in being the person she can take it out on. I have to, in any case. I do not, as it turns out, have to enjoy it.

For what it’s worth, I am also not great at compartmentalizing my stress (which either explains her behavior or suggests that I am an emotional toddler). Coming back to work today, after a trip that I think all parties involved desperately needed, was a bruiser, and I think I understand why Kina just wasn’t interested in getting back to the old routine; I wasn’t, either. And so we find ourselves engaged in a standoff, in which neither of us is interested in the other person’s bullshit and where each of us is mainly asking for just a little blessed acquiescence. We are cut from the same cloth, she and I—smooth on the outside but just a little scratchy on the inner face, and ragged at the edges on a humid day. A day like today was probably in the stars.

Was her statement to me yesterday a reminder? She’s been so good, lately, at apologizing—smoothing out the wrinkles after the fact. Is this some four-dimensional chess play, where she’s reaching out to future me to apologize before the storm? They always say “don’t go to bed angry”, and she didn’t; I made a quick show of bedtime, while Laurea tucked her in and gave her a long hug and a kiss. I know she still loves me, even though she’s mean, and I cannot help but love her desperately (though I am angry, which feels so odd). If I’m lucky, we have a whole long while to spend together—frustrated, at times, but loving throughout. And I am lucky, in a way, to get kicked by somebody I love so much.

You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.

dad

Kina says this chant is something they have taught her in a Thursday music class, but I have a hard time believing it. Maybe they did, in which case I’d love to attend.

Long drive home today, so one last short newsletter. Thanks for allowing us a little brevity in the last few days. Kina had fun.

dad

School continues unabated, even on the road. At home, our “learning zone” is in the living room, which did not translate well here, where the living room is far more comfy. Kina hid under a blanket and refused to come out. Ultimately, we did what we imagine typical homeowners do, and put our child at the kitchen table to do her daily Zooms. Even so, we did have to break our “no snacks on the Zoom” rule and bribe her with several frozen cherries in order to get her to actually participate. Nothing is ever stable. Only snacks prevail.

dad

Today’s top headline is one I would have missed, but for the keen ears of my father, who has taken over as Lead Kina Listener in our time together—as I spend my energy watching my parents enjoy her, instead. Kina has reflected on the separate nature of our brains before, but as she is currently passing some real quality time with a pair of people who do not share her context and inside jokes, there’s a fair amount of Kina needing to catch their brains up to match her own—and it obviously has her thinking. “Yeh-yeh, do you remember…” or “Gramma, do you know [McDonald’s]” is a frequent conversation starter. She obviously derives real joy from lecturing my parents on the nuances of her inner world, and it’s deeply comforting to watch as their picture of that world takes shape.

Child Once Again Requests, Then Refuses Chicken Fingers

That process of getting Kina’s brain inside our own clearly never ends, since we once again bought her chicken fingers yesterday, having asked her directly whether she’d prefer them to grilled cheese (which she always eats). If you should arrive at any conclusion from having read this paper over the last seven months, let it be the now-obvious fact that Kina will never eat a chicken finger, no matter how much she insists she wants one.

dad

Going to just leave this one here for all of you, as we spend some private time with family. The beige is my parents’ carpet, which is how I will remember this visit when I scroll back through my photos of these pages.

dad

We’re off to see my parents for a couple of days—the first time we’ve packed for an overnight trip in almost a year. In the intervening ten months, Kina has matured sufficiently to entertain herself in a car (and her parents have matured sufficiently to admit that iPads are useful), though she has also developed a monstrous travel appetite. The Mazda CX-5 is a fairly roomy vehicle, and Google tells me there are 30.9 cubic feet of cargo space in the rear. By my calculations, some 20.9 of our particular cubic feet were fully occupied by snacks, each requested personally by our child. In desperation, we stopped at a bakery on the way out of town, and I swear to god I bought two full paper bags of bread and pastries—an investment to hedge against snack refusal. As it turns out, stuffing your child full of bread is a reasonable way to keep them from wheedling for other sugary treats. The power of gluten!

My Little Pony Is Accidentally Watched

I do not, for the life of me, get this show.

Kid Indicted For Calling Daddy “Stupid”

We do not use that word in our house, and yet somehow she has picked it up. Some days, I think there is horrible knowledge deeply ensconced in the minds of newborns—the word “stupid”, wielded in moments of anger against one’s father, is one such nugget of knowledge. I won’t lay out how we got to the point where she insulted my intelligence, but I will say that she spent three minutes in time-out for it. After a long crying jag with Mommy, she did approach me to apologize. I fully expect to be stupid again in a week.

dad

Kina has developed a truly astonishing talent for glowering during this pandemic, and she wields it frequently. The problem with her master of that expression, though, is that she’s created a baseline of discontent that requires more forceful declarations of real protest. Ergo, the stomping. We don’t have a very large apartment, but Kina can stomp her way through it with the best of them, emitting sounds as she does that are less “sigh” and more “steam valve”. Slamming doors? She’s got it. Foam sword? You’ll get it. As I reflect on it now, I realize that she’s finally at the point of her falling tantrum curve in which stomping is more frequent than weeping (though we very much still have weeping on the dance card), and it makes me grateful that all I finally have a kid whose rage is best expressed through the rolling of her eyes at me and a vigorous stomp away as she yells, “Daddy! You’re! Not! Lissening! To ME!” She is literally the only person on earth who can scream at me and still seem so charming. I’m sure she finds that insufferable.

Kid Dips Strawberries In Old Olive Oil

I want to say, first, that the olive oil is old only by contemporary foodie standards, given that it was one of my last purchases pre-lockdown—a bottle of really nice Spanish oil that I bought in a binge trip to Despaña in Soho, along with some aspirational keep-this-for-quarantine ham that we nonetheless ate for dinner that same night. Second, I will note that strawberries and olive oil go very well together, and I admire Kina for her refined palate and culinary pluck. Finally, I take great pride in the sharpened point of Kina’s zinger here—that Daddy bought this oil so long ago that it predates his own child’s existence. She’s gonna be a real monster, and I love her dearly for it.

dad

According to Kina, as she ate oatmeal this morning, “everybody has a lane”, which both surprised her parents (where did this come from) and did not surprise them (because it’s true, if you think about it). Prompted to elaborate on lanes, she offered that “Mommy has an exercise lane, I have a She-Ra lane, and Daddy has a blanket lane.” In those three lane assignments, there lies some truth: Laurea does talk a lot about exercising, Kina does unquestionably love She-Ra, and I often lay curled under my comforter for as long as possible, so as to avoid the crushing weight of reality.

Intrigued, Laurea and I asked about other people’s lanes, uncovering the following:

• Ms Ines (former teacher): Book lane!

• Ms Jamika (former teacher): Teacher lane!

• Ms Olenick (current teacher): Supplies lane!

• Tito Giorgio (family friend): Lasagna lane!

• Panda (panda): Small blanket lane!

• Sloanie (friend): Teacup lane!

• Futura (friend): Purse lane!

That is all that I remembered to write down, but I’m pretty sure we covered an additional twenty lanes—all of which were pretty accurate, by my estimation. The best and maybe most sinister part of all this is that, whenever you meet Kina, she is secretly filing you away in a lane. Stay in it!

dad

IN THE BEFORE TIMES, we had Kina enrolled in a sort of daredevil gymnastics class called Streb PopAction—a sort of juvenile demolition derby hosted by a fascinating dance company known for its acrobatic dancers’ propensity for courting injury at the hands of large moving objects. Kina had not always been daring as a toddler, but a few semesters of Streb had her very calmly jumping from platforms taller than her, sliding down platforms, and swinging from suspended trusses. And then, just as she was really getting into it, they locked the school down.

Our house is not a gymnasium. Nonetheless, she makes her own danger. Just this evening, I caught her jumping from the coffee table into a pile of throw pillows, inches from our bookcase. Today’s top headline is about a routine stunt she pulls, leaping roughly 2.5 feet from the dresser by our window (where she meets regularly with her pigeon friend) and onto our bed. This is as exciting as it gets in our non-gymnasium house, and until such time as we purchase three-inch-thick gym mats for our living room, also the safest form of daredevilry that I can countenance. I look forward to the re-opening of Streb, if only to see just how daring our daughter is, and to build in her the confidence to reason with and confront scary situations. You can only be a particular kind of toddler stuntperson for a few years in your life, and I want her to enjoy that—just not from our coffee table.

Last thing: I want you all to know that I did try to make an Evel Kinaevel joke in the headline, but it just didn’t land.

dad

Things Kina finds exciting these days: tents, sleep, and flashlights. Thing she asks us to do on a regular basis: pretend to sleep in a tent with a flashlight, which she turns off so that the space under the comforter is pitch black. I cannot emphasize enough how comforting it is to have your three-year-old child reassure you that, though it is dark right now, everything will be okay because she is there next to you. It is equally hard to overstate how painfully blinding a flashlight is when turned on directly in front of your fully-dilated pupils.

“I See Things In My Head When I’m Sleeping”

I cannot remember what it was like when I first realized I could dream, but it is a classic gift of parenthood to watch your child go through it. Kina has been trying to explain the experience of dreaming to us for a few weeks now, always as some variation on the idea of things in her head when she is sleeping. It’s always something from the day or two before the dream, and often some novel experience she’s had, played out in a slightly different way. We met her friend Futura and her family at Governor’s Island on Saturday, and we all piled onto bikes with the kids on the back. As we rode, they made faces at each other, joking as we sped past each other on long looping circuits of the island. In her dream, they’re on the island together, riding bikes all day. Are we even there? When adults dream they can fly, it’s our moment to be unbounded and still in control. For little kids, that sense of control and liberty can be as simple as dreaming of a day with your friend, riding a bike wherever you want to. I miss dreams like that.

dad

The first thing you notice is that the ketchup isn’t real. The server, with a solemnity bordering on the absurd, places upon the table in front of you a bottle of Heinz ketchup. “It’s pretend,” she intones, before shuffling quietly back to the kitchen. It’s not immediately clear in what capacity the ketchup is meant to serve as a condiment, but after a few awkward minutes, it becomes apparent that this is the first course, a simulacrum of an amuse-bouche. At any other restaurant, this would be merely a farce, but I would strenuously urge you here to try the pretend ketchup, because it is ridiculously good—perfectly balanced, just slightly tarter than it is sweet, a tomato in suspended animation. The thing, it turns out, that you get when the ketchup is pretend is the platonic ideal of ketchup. It seems in hindsight totally obvious, the card nobody has yet thought to play. If the emperor has no clothes, you are left to dress him as you wish. Here, he is dressed in ketchup.

Across from you, your dinner partner may be enjoying “a stinky fart” or four nearly-identical courses of “Let It Go” (a song from the children’s animated movie Frozen, though the dish itself is room temperature—a rare misstep for a restaurant that doesn’t actually prepare any food). By the end of the meal, you’ve eaten countless exquisite ideas, a parade of perfect nonsense, but not a crumb of food has passed your lips (though your server will present a Hi-Chew with your check as a treat to take home). You’ll leave in a daze, but fundamentally unsatisfied, and this feels entirely the point of the exercise. You could have been eating oatmeal, cheesy popcorn, or fruit snacks—all of which might fill you up but leave you flat—but I guarantee you that nothing of substance is quite as nourishing as a meal with Kina.

dad

I have just gotten back from an actual anniversary night out with Laurea, which was among the most illicit-feeling and nourishing things I’ve done in seven months, and so I’ll keep this brief. When Kina says, in today’s top headline, “Remember before when we had rules?” what she is really saying is not, “Remember before, when we had rules?” but actually, “Remember before we had rules?”

Reader, we do. It was a time of multiple nightly wakings, of pumpkin-lantern fears, of scritchety-scratching at doors, of plaintive wailing. We have twice set rules to reduce undue parental awakenings: first, in February (right on time!) after we suffered by far the worst three-month-long sleep regression in the history of mankind; second, in July, when we created the Three Great Rules for Letting Mommy Sleep. Since at least mid-August, she has observed these rules with some consistency, and I would like to take this moment to publicly thank our daughter for respecting the rule of law. We are only as good as our promises, Kina.

Today’s Parade is a dedication to ourselves as a family. Two of us have been married for twelve years now (a full lunar zodiac cycle!) and the third of us drew this in celebration. Almost all of these letters were produced by Kina herself (though we did recite them carefully).

It’s hard for me to remember the specifics of the day we got married; bits and pieces leap out. Laurea ensconced in the changing room with every female member of her extended family. The extremely good hors d’oeuvres. The sense of being so visible at the altar. Whispering my vows to myself behind the offices of the Marin Art and Garden Center while watching multiple guests at our wedding escape to the woods to smoke weed. The two newborn babies in the audience—who are, of course, now twelve. Laurea’s face, behind the veil. We probably did not think about our becoming parents that day—and we specifically didn’t offer that in our vows, being still so unsure about what it would mean to make that kind of a promise. That we now are parents, then, feels like such a good choice to have made together, and our renewed commitment each year to being a family together is one of my favorite celebrations.

Obama was not yet president on October 11, 2008. The economy had only begun to visibly collapse. We had two tickets to Indonesia. My hair wasn’t gray. It was just the two of us, and all of the two of us. We were very happy.

We still are.

dad

The self-portrait that I have reproduced here in extremely high fidelity was one of Kina’s assignments for her second week of school, and I think it’s fair to say that the result is pret-ty stunning for this devoted abstractionist. At this time last year, our little Picasso was giving us rough lines, solid fields of primary colors, and paper-ripping ballpoint squiggles. Her recent foray into faces (as noted in the commentary on a recent Parade) has been fascinating, but limited—coyly primitive, even. And yet, today’s portrait, which demonstrates the artist’s new and rudimentary command of hair, also features two of her signature purple “buns” and what appears to be a blue face snake. The original, a masterpiece in pastels, can be seen by appointment on our fridge.

dad

It must be wild to be three years old, as you just begin to realize that there are different kinds of “the past”. Kina’s relationship to things-that-once-happened has evolved dramatically as she’s grown, but her journey actually started with “in a long long time”—a period that referred, in its infancy, even to things that had happened earlier that day (but was most often used to refer to books she had forgotten existed). “When I was a baby” then entered the scene as an epoch that predated “long long time”, once she began to fully absorb that the Baby Kina we’d watch in videos was in fact her, as a baby. Kina then learned to distinguish between the recent past (“long long time”) and the distant past (“when I was a baby”), which was at some times confusing, until the dawn of “yesterday”—a term whose precision has improved dramatically in recent weeks, but for a long time meant “not an actual long time ago, but possibly up to a week ago”. More recently, we saw the emergence of “one month ago”, which adds precision to the gap between “yesterday” and “long long time”‚ but which still often means two weeks ago.

But today’s headline is the headline because of her statement at breakfast this morning that her stick was a thousand years old, which led her to a series of pronouncements that many things were a thousand years old. She has, of course, no concept of what happens in a thousand years, but it seems to be a placeholder for the totality of the period before “when I was a baby” (with the exception of one additional period called “when I was in Mommy’s tummy” that she understands immediately predates “when I was a baby”). I’m pretty sure she learned about “a thousand years” from—and this is not in any way surprising to long-time readers—She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, whose two eponymous mortal incarnations, Mara and Adora, were separated by a millennium. Madame Razz, She-Ra’s immortal garden witch (and one of Kina’s favorite characters) knew them both, and often mistakes them for each other as she floats clairvoyantly through her own memories. Like Kina, Madame Razz plays fast and loose with time, compressing a thousand years into a day. Maybe we’re all doing that these days; is March a long long time ago or one month ago? It’s not an exaggeration to say yesterday and when she was a baby feel like near neighbors.

In any case, she got this stick on the playground. It might be from when she was a baby, but Kina says it’s a thousand years old. Same diff.

dad

People often say that the tantrums of a three-year-old seem like they will never end, and then they turn four and are suddenly fine. Kina is now two months shy of her fourth birthday, and I can assure you that the first part of that well-trod assertion remains true—let’s hope things look abruptly different in December.

Last night, Laurea made pasta (which, as you know, is our publisher’s favorite food), grating some primo Parmigiano-Reggiano on top as a finishing touch. As we sat down to eat, Kina was so excited, bouncing up and down in her seat, ready for a big chunk of noodles—until five seconds after we mixed the cheese into the pasta. I think she barely got one sentence out (“Where’s the cheese?!”) before collapsing in tears. Fifteen minutes of gasping, snot-soaked weeping ensued as Kina grasped at her mother’s shirt, burying her head into her shoulder. We walked her around, picked her up, put her down, asked her what she needed, got her stuffies to talk to her, sat as she lay on the floor and screamed, watched as she turned beet-red. I finally asked her if she wanted more cheese, and she nodded her head violently up and down. Within seconds of my picking up the grater, she calmed down.

Why did I not do it sooner? Because these are not the rules of the house. After she apologized (which is new), we explained to her that when Mommy wants me to take out the trash, she asks me to. When I want Mommy to get some water, I ask her to. In this house, we do not weep for cheese, child.

Insufficient cheese is a problem that can be solved. There are many things to cry about, and I need her to save her tears for moments that will put to better use every milligram of adrenaline my body can produce in response to those tears. For less tragic situations (like scary cantaloupe crusts), we can talk about it. I am liberal with cheese! I can bring parmesan to bear! Just ask me! Maybe I need to accept that we live in an age where bawling over pasta is a luxury, and I’m certainly discounting the need for an average 3.8333 year old to cry—because crying is a craft that requires practice. I just feel like I don’t ever get to cry these days, and I suppose that the point is that I am jealous of this person who gets to cry whenever she wants.

Maybe when she’s four, I’ll take my turn.

dad

Kina makes for an exasperated nanny, running around as she does with three demanding stuffies. How can she be expected to maintain with all their various needs and complaints? It’s worth noting that Kina never takes all of them outside—she takes them to “pretend outside”, which is usually somewhere in her bedroom (and never on her bed). I think she’s somehow internalized this idea of cabin fever in the age of COVID and knows instinctively that you can’t just spend all day locked in an apartment with three loud babies. Get out while the numbers are good, I say! Enjoy that pretend sunshine!

“Can You Water the Plant Mommy Bcuz My Hands Are Too Cheezy”

Two things I want to say here: First, I really fretted over the word “Bcuz”, mostly for reasons of Kina-nunciation accuracy—she would actually write it “P-cuz”, which is hilarious when you hear it in person. Second, I am extremely proud of my cheeto-finger drawing. The plant, by the way, is fine.

dad

We have spent a lot of bedtimes lately exploring the concept of opposites. Today’s headlines are a representative selection, reflecting the spectrum of vibes in which Kina dwells on a daily basis. While she has achieved a certain mastery of most familiar adjectives, she stumbles a lot on nouns, which don’t really have opposites but are fun to explore.

“What’s the opposite of Puppy?” (Panda)

“What’s the opposite of truck?” (bike)

“What’s the opposite of nose?” (butt)

She’s accused me of being stinky a lot lately, which is probably fair, since I’ve spent the last four years calling her stinky. It stings a bit, though, when she walks into a room, sniffs a bit, and declares that the room “has a Daddy smell”. I would like to think that I am on the “good” side of the good/smell dichotomy. You’d have to ask her.

dad

We went to the beach yesterday to do a little grilling with Andrew and Des, and to celebrate Laurea’s recent liberation. The events I have not written about here (for lack of space to explain them) are the countless chasing games and role-playing of late-night Amazon deliveries that Kina engaged in with everybody; while exhausting, those were easily as nourishing as the food. The kid was having so much fun, in fact, that the offering of her very first s’more felt almost like an afterthought. I took great care to produce the ideal marshmallow—golden brown, jiggly, almost light enough to float off the stick—and squished it just so between the graham cracker and the chocolate. She took one bite, thought about it, and then raced off to play “mustard” with Des (a game that involves shouting “mustard” and chasing Kina). Despite my recent efforts to “eat healthier”, I ate two s’mores myself; you cannot light a fire and not make s’mores. Kina will learn that—eventually.

Pops Purloins Pasta

The rare alliterative headline, this story is about how I secretly did want a meatball, but (again) am not allowed to eat them at the moment, and so was forced to stealthily pick off her rigatoni while she didn’t notice, until she did. God, I love meatballs.

dad

Our friend Amanda invited us to join her and her two kids at the Bronx Zoo yesterday—another escape we have somehow never made, due to the fact that getting to and from the Bronx by subway is unreasonably difficult for a kid who naps. Now, of course, that Kina barely naps and we own a car, the time was ripe for us to make our first visit to New York’s premier zoo experience. Lions! Giraffes! American Bison! All the finest of Earth’s creatures, laying out languorously on reconstructed veldts. Kina has long been a fan of zoos—or “zoo”, singular, since the only zoo she’s ever seen is the Oakland Zoo, with her Lala. On her two visits to that zoo, she was a huge fan of tigers, giraffes, and baboons (whose red buns were a source of tremendous fascination). We expected similar responses this time.

And yet, as we really ought to have expected, her response was dissimilar, a mishmash of demands for treats and apathetic responses to small mammals. We made an early raid on the Children’s Zoo—which was probably our best move, even though it’s laid out like an Ikea; you’re there for the alpacas, but you have to walk through catfish, prairie dogs, otters, and flamingos first. In any other situation in which alpacas were not involved, each of those animals would inspire prolonged adoration, but Kina was impatient and had no interest in tarantulas. So, upon reaching the besieged pellet vending machines (“Sir, please keep moving. There are more stations farther along. We are trying to social distance. Ma’am, please keep moving. There are more stations…”) we purchased a handful of mealy pellets and sent Kina down a gauntlet of goats, sheep, and alpacas to feed them all. Kina, ever the paragon of fairness, tried to identify those animals most ignored by the other kids (even when they—the alpacas, not the kids—chomped her fingers), coming to me frequently to purchase more and more fifty-cent handfuls of kibble. I think I spent at least six bucks on pellets before we literally washed our hands of it and made our way out.

Reader, that was the highlight of the visit.

Other medium lights: the shuttle to Wild Asia (a part of the park that, once you reach it by shuttle, you cannot see except by monorail), two curious peacocks, the three-dollar grapes, the “candy trail” (don’t ask), and numerous outcroppings of Manhattan schist—over which Kina patiently led her young friend Simone the Person whenever we encountered it.

Things that did not register: lions, giraffes, the tiger mask we asked her to wear, kudu, antelopes.

Things she asked to do, and which we could not do because she was too small or it was not permitted: crawl through the log, walk up the stairs, sit in the turtle shell, climb on the rope course.

On the whole, I suspect the Bronx Zoo is a very fine zoo. If there had not been a 45-minute wait for the Wild Asia monorail, Kina might have enjoyed seeing a tiger. It did not cross my mind to find the baboons—with their red buns—but I fully intend to go back and try again. Next time, I’ll walk her straight through to the alpacas.

The Daily Kina in Print for 6 Months and 1 Day

Today’s Parade is a nameless abstraction, painted suddenly by Kina in the minutes before we had to leave the house today; the paint you see captured in the photograph above is still wet. I have decided that this is a cover commemorating the six-month anniversary of our esteemed daily publication. Though much has happened in the few months since our One Hundredth Day edition, there’s a lot still the same. We’ve built a rhythm here—not just in writing these front pages, but in living through a pandemic. I said early on that I figured I had about a hundred of these drawings in me, and now I have nearly twice that. As of yesterday, I’ve written these little newsletter essays for a hundred days straight—and I wasn’t betting I’d make it more than a week. The sheer volume of doofy dad jokes I see when I scroll through the history of this publication is mind-boggling. We have definitely reached the phase of this hobby when I’m actually really impressed with my own effort, and I can only hope that Kina someday appreciates that it wasn’t just so she could watch She-Ra every morning. I don’t want to bet I’ll make a year, but I hope I make it to the end of 2020. I hope we all do.

After yesterday’s tale of seeing flowers in Kina’s brain, a few of you asked to see our flower-nose portraits. Herewith, the flowers threading up into our own newly-wed brains. In each of these, we are mere milliseconds from sneezing.

Have a good week, everybody, and remember that if you own any CDs, you are a dinosaur.

dad

Two related vignettes—

First: Periodically, when Kina is tormented by injustice or her father or the injustice of fathers, I will ask to see if there is something in her brain that might be annoyed. If that request calms her down, I then conduct a thorough examination to confirm the presence of annoyance. First, I look into her eyeballs to see if I can identify anything annoying inside her head. Then, I try to see the sides of her brain through her ears. Finally, I have her open her mouth so I can get underneath the brain. If I find something—which I often do—then I’ll whisper into Kina’s ear so that the annoyed thing can hear me clearly, asking what it might accept to make its way out of Kina’s brain. Often, the answer is “a special treat”, but occasionally I can convince it to leave by doing a silly dance.

Second: On our living room wall hang two portraits, of Laurea and me, taken on our honeymoon. In them, we are each sitting in front of a gauzy red background, dressed in comfortable clothes, with jasmine flowers stuck up our noses. Kina is fascinated by these pictures, and often points out to us that we had just gotten married (true) and that the flowers were probably itchy itchy (true). Sometimes, she talks about putting flowers up her nose, but seldom proposes we actually follow through. This is the only art in our entire house that she ever comments on.

So, this morning, after regaling me with stories about these portraits once again, Kina asked me calmly to look into her brain and see if I saw flowers in there. It took a bit longer than usual to notice anything in her brain, since the flowers were quite small and unassuming—but there they were. I asked them to come out, since flowers are often so itchy itchy, and they replied that they might, in exchange for some eggs. This came as a surprise to me, since Kina has not liked eggs for many months, but on further reflection, I understood that these were new flowers with their own tastes, and that we couldn’t let our past perceptions of Kina’s brain hold us back from new (or renewed) cravings. Goodness, no! We gave her a big bite of eggs, which Kina savored as the flowers invisibly emerged from her ears. I will look for them again tomorrow.

dad

Kina has been asking all week about her flu shot. “When is my flu shot?” she will ask. “Are we going to pediatrics?” “Is it tomorrow will I get a flu shot?” Well, reader, our esteemed publisher has finally awakened to Christmas in October—the day of her scheduled vaccination against seasonal influenza, a fantastic day on which she will receive a lollipop. As we were eating breakfast this morning, she asked which pediatric office we’d be visiting, and we told her she’d be seeing her regular doctor a couple blocks up Grand Street; she was fine with this, if mildly disappointed, because her very favorite place to be stuck with needles is the extremely-sterile LabCorp facility on 14th Street in Manhattan, where she has twice had blood taken.

The first time we took Kina there, Laurea and I had prepared ourselves for the worst. The only other time she’d had blood drawn before that, Laurea and two nurses had to restrain her, and I nearly ended up curled up into a ball myself. We would not be caught off guard again. The phlebotomist walked us to the back of the storefront lab into a fluorescent-lit, minty blue room festooned with decals of Minnie Mouse. She calmly asked Kina to sit in her mother’s lap and put her arm in Mommy’s hand. I braced as she swabbed the inside of Kina’s elbow and placed the needle against it. And then: silence. Two vials of blood were drawn in complete, tranquil silence—as Kina looked on directly. The needle was withdrawn. A band-aid proffered. Lollipop granted. Stickers stuck. We walked to a nearby playground as Laurea and I basked in the miracle of a perfectly-content and recently-poked lollipop fiend.

One year later, same story: Minnie Mouse, Mommy’s lap, needle in, Kina watching, blood drawn, needle out, band-aid, lolly, stickers, playground. Blood draws are Kina’s happy place. You can see why she was mildly disappointed.

A couple months back, you will recall, we got Kina a new doctor’s set, and one of her very favorite things to do is to give and receive vaccinations. She applies “lotion” to my arm, raises the syringe, and tells me to look at Mommy, that “there will be a little chimp”. A brief sense of pressure. “Not so bad, right!?” I am very, very healthy now.

Today’s shot—at her regular (and extremely comfy) doctor’s office—was apparently a great hit. The very famous (in our household) Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes showed up wearing a very chic black skirt and matching black sweatshirt, addressed her adoring fan, asked about her companion Simone the owl, administered the injection swiftly, and applied a neon-orange band-aid. Girls, she assured Kina, never cried when they got shots; boys, invariably.

A lollipop was offered. Strawberry. The patient had a fantastic day.

dad

I have alluded a few times in the last thirty-five days to a giant virtual event that Laurea has been working on, which is now—officially—done. We are, of course, grateful to be working at all in this house, but hooboy has it been a haul. I was just looking back at the last month and change of TDK issues, and it’s pretty astonishing how much happens in five weeks (considering, especially, how quickly the last six months have gone). Mostly what has happened has involved my spending a bit more solo time with Kina than usual—mornings, evenings, and usually one of the two weekend days—and relishing a moment in which my daughter does not treat me like chopped liver. Laurea is a tough act to compete with here, dear readers, and while she’s been distracted by [checks notes]:

1. senators

2. former Secretaries of State

3. Gloria Steinem

4. epidemiologists

5. filmmakers

6. famous journalists, and

7. a number of surly old white men,

I have in the meantime been able to lean on my:

1. natural charm

2. capacity to invent stories

3. love of fart jokes

4. familiarity with She-Ra, and

5. shared love of cheese and bacon

in order to win the heart of America’s most famous preschooler. A few weeks ago, we took Kina to the temporary office that Laurea is working from—a little glass-doored monk’s cell on a massive floor of an industrial building. Kina has since been obsessed with the idea that Laurea must somehow “escape” from work, and with the injustice of her being trapped in that room at night (when she should obviously be putting Kina to bed, by her estimation). So, now that she has escaped, we have to rebuild all our equitable Kina rituals again, all while trying to make the readjustment as easy for her as possible. She is dealing with this mostly by calling out to Laurea from distant rooms at all times of the day and evening, listening for her own echo. Last night required a lot of hugs and returns to Kina’s bedroom after we put her to bed, but she seems more confident today that Mommy has truly escaped.

I’m proud of what Laurea accomplished this September; it’s certainly one of the hardest things I’ve ever watched somebody pull together, and it was a huge success. It’s important to both of us that Kina knew she was doing it, and that seeing a bit less of her carried with it the message that Kina will herself someday boss surly old white men around, too. Gloria Steinem would approve, I think.

It’s ever too late!

dad

I woke up this morning and saw an article about “The Best Outdoor Space Heaters”, which of course led directly to my badgering Laurea about whether or not we should buy a little heater so that we could spend the winter outside—fully be-parka-ed, sledding, drinking hot cider, warming our hands by our hundred-dollar propane torch. Laurea shot it down (though she was strongly in favor of parkas), but Kina picked up the slack. At breakfast, she started running through all the things we could do in winter, but as if in a fever dream—a version of winter told by somebody who had only read about winter from half-burned scores of Christmas carols, like Narnia on acid. Who among us has given any thought to a sleigh drawn by sparrows? Sign me up.

Truly, I want to feel okay about the upcoming winter, though it’s hard to feel okay about much of anything these days. The city and its collective sense of safety today, when compared to what it felt like in April, bodes ill for us. We should not all be mushed together as we have been lately—even as I don’t relish the thought of being trapped in our homes again, though that may be exactly what we need. To be able, occasionally, to toss the parkas and a space heater in the trunk of the car this January and drive way out to quiet-ass nowhere (cider, sledding, and all the rest), is a comforting thought. I just want to be alone with our bird sleigh and the snow mooses, set apart from the things that got us here, with hands all nice and toasty.

Did You Know: Apple Juice is Called “Tree Juice”

I have been meaning to tell you this for months. It belongs in the historical record.

dad

Laurea and I have been reminiscing lately about past trips to other countries—at a time in which cramped transoceanic journeys feel like an absurd sensory luxury—and I think it’s rubbed off on Kina, who now wants to role-play international flights by riding on my shoulders through the house. The flying-through-the-house thing is nothing new—we “fly to California” multiple times a week—but today she wanted to fly to both Italy (for pasta) and the Philippines (for family), and it seemed only right to accept her business class ticket (our fantasy, not hers) for a long-haul intercontinental jaunt. Flight attendants asked her politely to buckle up tight and stow her bags under the seat in front of her, and after a short taxi, we were off. The flight, as it turns out, is not much longer than a flight to California! We made the journey to Italy in just under two minutes, after two gummy snacks and a hearty slug of apple juice; one episode of Daniel Tiger was watched. Upon landing in Italy, she demanded a plate of pasta and immediately fell asleep. Poor thing was just crushed by the jet lag.

“At Night We Do Hugga-Mugga From Close-Away and Far-Away”

Speaking of Daniel Tiger, Kina and I have purloined the young tiger’s classic expression of affection for our own use, adapted for bedtimes to allow for some loving closure and my own swift departure. Background: Kina’s very selective about hugs and kisses—which we fully respect—and deploys them at bedtime only when absolutely necessary. For a long time, we subbed in a nice hugga-mugga (nose-to-nose, wiggling faces), before she decided she wasn’t keen on that level of facial contact either. So we moved onto “hugga-mugga from faaaaaar awaaaaay”, which has me standing five feet away from her as we shake our heads slowly side-to-side—the hugga-mugga equivalent of an air kiss. Before long, though, she decided that some amount of closeness would help her sleep better, asking if we could add a “hugga-mugga from clooooooose awaaaaaay”, in which our faces are five inches from each other instead. So now, if you were to watch our bedtime ritual with the sound off, you’d see me slowly backing away from her bed, both of us tenderly saying “no” to each other until I vanish through the doorway. It is my favorite time of the day.

dad

As Laurea approaches the finish line of her month-long odyssey of long, exhausting days, Kina has just now begun to get a sense that there are coworkers involved—and we all know how much Kina loves coworkers. Of course, without direct access to Mommy’s colleagues, she’s had to lean on indirect interactions in order to charm them: a Lego “air thing” that her mother can use to breathe more easily in moments of stress, for example, or cute pictures and animated recordings of unicorns. The crowd of people on Laurea’s screen has included more than just coworkers, though; in the last month, she’s produced conversations with Hillary Clinton, Rachel Maddow, Willie Nelson, and Beto O’Rourke. These are important people! And yet Kina’s worldview (rightly) suggests that Laurea might interrupt HRC briefly in order to see a cute picture of Kina draping herself over a swing in the playground with her friend Nikola, and that Hillary herself might feel a sense of sweet relief if Laurea were to show that picture to her. I mean, just imagine. It’s a great picture.

Kina Enters Slide Tower Through “Elf Door”

Kina is at an interesting playground age, in which she is big enough to be adventurous but still eager enough for her parents’ company to want us to join her on large-ish playground equipment designed for small-ish butts. We’re often telling her that she’ll have to go on her own, that her parents aren’t allowed to enter into some twenty-foot-tall enclosed spiral stairwell with four-foot ceilings (true), and that the elves who live inside it might get squooshed (false). Accordingly, she must go through the little “elf door” at the base of the tower herself, navigating the rowdy big kids on her way up to the turret and whooshing down the slide into a fluffy sand pit on her own. It is something that I have no interest at all in doing myself (false), but I love to watch her sense of joy and accomplishment as she does it herself (true).

dad

A clothing-designer friend invited us to have pictures taken of Kina wearing various clothes that this friend had designed, for the purpose of selling more of those clothes—which makes a ton of sense, given that Kina is very fashionable and influential in certain newsletter circles. Kina has never been one of those photo shoot kids, unless you count the thousands of photos we have taken of her on our phones, and Laurea and I have never shown her what the absurd art of modeling entails, and yet.

And yet Kina has somehow osmotically absorbed the art of disdainful model faces and weird contorted poses that really show off cozy knitwear. The other kids on the shoot lolled about as kids do, looking pleasantly at the camera and playing with toy trains, but our esteemed publisher, a fashion icon to her core, glared witheringly at the creative staff and growled through the entire shoot. The only way you could infer that this was modeling and not misandric rage was that she stood patiently (albeit dismissively) on the seamless the entire time.

It is conceivable that she might actually have stormed off, actually, were it not for the bag of Trader Joe’s gummies that our friends brought for their kid. By the end of the shoot, all those kids were so wired on sugar that the whole thing turned vaguely manic. I imagine this is what real photo shoots are like. But what do I know? She didn’t inherit this from me.

I can’t wait for the pictures.

Today’s Parade is a collaboration between Laurea and Kina, and it commemorates the last weekend workday in a thirty-five-day stretch of extended production days for Mommy. We suspect that most readers can identify the parties involved, but for those who are new to this publication: Laurea is on the left, and the hairy melon with legs is Kina. This is an unusual self portrait for Kina, in that she typically draws all her giant-headed people with “buns” (two ovals underneath the head). It could be that the finish line is blocking them. This is what the art historians will say at the exhibition of these Parades, some forty years from now.

dad

I’m going to let Kina literally speak for herself here, in that these headlines—when read through—together compose an unprompted and thoroughly disarming soliloquy that she recited to me this morning. I hope it’s as comforting for you as it was for me.

dad

Today was “Fun Friday” at school, an official wacky-clothes day for which Kina immediately demanded her special tutu. Presented with the need to make it “wackier”, she then added a denim jacket, which Laurea and I immediately noted was less “wacky” than “oh my god extremely cool”. Kina took to the outfit quickly, locking me in my room like the inveterate nerd that I am and strutting around the apartment, a true ballet bully—Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club meets Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. Inspired by her rage tutu, she was extra-shouty all morning, at least until class, when she fell silent and obedient in the presence of actual educational authority. Other kids came dressed as astronauts and chefs, but only Kina was prepared for the activity of the day—dancing. When asked to pick her favorite dance moves and show the class, she walked away from the camera and twirled around slowly for three straight minutes, holding the edge of her tutu in one hand and her rainbow cup in the other. It was a touching performance, if slightly dizzying. Immediately after class, she stripped off the outfit and asked for a t-shirt. She truly is my child.

Kid Busts Out Where The Wild Things Are

Every night, when I ask Kina to pick out a book before bed, I pray that she will bring back Where The Wild Things Are, and every night she denies me. This is unequivocally my favorite children’s book, by my favorite children’s book author—a classic for rebellious kids who are doomed eventually to be responsible for other rebellious kids (in one form or another). I have a signed copy of this book on my shelf that I had for years expected to read to some kid of mine, and which I ultimately realized was too valuable to read even to myself, and so the copy of the book I have on Kina’s shelf is a burner copy that has gotten barely any reading time, because she refuses to bring it to me out of spite. So last night, she knew she was giving me a special treat, raising her eyebrows expectantly when she told me we’d be reading Wild Things. I really went to town on it, too—roaring the terrible roars, and gnashing the terrible teeth, and rolling the terrible eyes, and showing the terrible claws (all in concert with a very solemn Kina). By the end of the book, we were both very sleepy, and she drifted right off, but I wished—as I did when I was a kid—that there might be a little supper there in the room right next to her, still hot.

dad

Kina did not always like ants. In her young toddler years, she would screech to a halt on the playground at the very sight of an ant and demand that we lift her over it. In our edition from May 17th of this year, we covered her early efforts to categorize bugs, not realizing that she’d eventually rule in favor of some of them, let alone ants—clearly among her least favorite bugs of May 17th.

We have talked about the bees before. The other day, in fact, when the air was still chilly, she and I went to our local coffee shop for her regular “cheddar cheese and bacon” and sat by our favorite lavender plant. Kina asked about our bee friends Becky and Joe, who were nowhere to be seen. I told her that bees don’t like the cold, and she nodded knowingly, even as she scoured the skies for new apian companions.

I don’t know if she likes small bugs because they’re less threatening or more lovable, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that she hates a roach, like a proper New Yorker.

Kid Oblivious to Injustice

This is another one of those headlines that’s here to help me remember this day. It’s a hard truth to face—the idea that the justice system, sworn to protect our citizens, would deem it largely acceptable for three law enforcement officers to shoot into an innocent person’s home and let her die. I work in a news organization—no amount of personal privilege allows me to ignore this, and nothing should. But there are Black folks on my staff who had to come to work today and build the software that distributes this news. It’s traumatic for them, and for me by proxy, and I struggle to see any light at the other side of this at the moment. This world is not a particularly good one right now! So what is my obligation to Kina? I sweep my worries under the rug when I’m with her (and, frankly, being around her is comforting to me), in part to ensure she has the longest possible uninterrupted beautiful childhood that we can offer her. Am I sheltering her? Absolutely. At what point will she learn about this, and how am I supposed to teach her? What am I supposed to say?

I attended a presentation today by Britton Williams, a psychologist who specializes in trauma-informed care and came to talk to the team about secondary and vicarious traumas—the very real psychological harm that emerges from observing the trauma of others (a particularly relevant scenario at my work). In that presentation, she talked about an experiment with a group of young rats, who were allowed to play freely and curiously for three days. On the fourth day, they introduced a single cat hair into the play space, and the play came to an abrupt halt—even though these rats had never seen a cat. The worst part? Even after the hair was removed a day later, these baby rats never played together in the same way. “It makes me sad for the rats,” she said. How could it not? Innocence is so fragile, and rat or not, it’s terrifying to contemplate the idea that innocence can be so irreparably shattered.

I am fully aware that I cannot shelter Kina forever, and that despite all our collective traumas, we muddle through. I just don’t want her to feel the way I feel when I look out the window these days, and I intend to do everything I can to fix what’s outside the window, so she won’t have to.

dad

Flying through fast tonight with a brief newsletter, since Dad is late with some conference talk prep (one of Hello Kitty’s scintillating “office games”) and nearly forgot to send this. If I had started this note an hour earlier, I’d be talking about the weird ways that kids are obsessed with pretending to eat their own parents, and how they (or Kina, at least) enjoy making their parents pretend to eat their beloved stuffies. What? Is it just us?

Tomorrow, a more timely missive. Tonight, remember Valentine’s Day.

dad

What is there to say here? Kina looks snazzy in a coat. She’s been moaning for months that she wants to wear “down-sleeve” dresses and pajamas instead of the arm-baring “up-sleeve” tops we’ve been dressing her in all summer. We can’t tell if it’s because she is more comfortable in down-sleeve dresses or just prefers the look of them, but she’s quite happy these last few days of sixty-degree weather to have her arms and legs covered as she heads out the door. The problem here is that she appears to have grown significantly, and things that we called dresses last year are shirts for the tall girl with whom we now reside. I know I say this a lot, but how did she get to be this big? The shoes-too-small headline from the other day is just one of several examples in which Kina has become a giant. Fortunately, we bought her a coat last year that was comically too big, and which now fits her like a glove. Again, I’m not interested in her staying the same size, but I seem to keep forgetting—despite approaching our fifth winter with this kid—that she outgrows seasonal clothes every year, and I’m starting to understand why my parents always bought me shoes that were a size too big.

Unexpected People Mess Up Entire House

I just want you all to know that I have been asking our management company for five years to replace my 1980s-era windows—which never closed correctly, are not properly sealed, and leak both air and precipitation. Yesterday morning, seemingly out of nowhere, they arrived with eight brand new windows. I skedaddled Kina out of the house for the day, while they tore the windows out of my walls and methodically replaced them. When she came back, eight hours later, the installers were carrying bent and torn aluminum and bags of trash out of the house, and Kina’s toys and animals were shoved in a pile all on one side of her room. Her takeaway, predictably, was that these men had rearranged her room for her, and she was thrilled at the novelty. She didn’t even notice the windows. To each her own.

dad

As we have discussed before, Kina is growing up, and so I find myself frequently trying to identify ways in which she is not yet grown. When she and I were playing earlier, I took great comfort in the fact that she still can’t (or won’t) pronounce th sounds, and so I still get to hear my big kid say “tings” and “dat”, in a voice that is still so high that even helium doesn’t change its pitch. I know this will change, of course, and even today she uses that squeaky voice to rattle off much longer narratives than her 2019 counterpart (and dad) could possibly imagine. When she stumbled into the apartment earlier this evening after a full day outside, she regaled me with stories about how she went to the bathroom three whole times, and how she wanted to make sure that Hannah had a chance to go to the bathroom before she did (which, she noted, was the fair thing to do). Her notes on paneer—a cheese she met only yesterday—were conveyed with the kind of detail I expect from a restaurant critic (and a conversational devotion she appears, once again, to have picked up from She-Ra). On some days, I worry that it’s going by too fast, careening down a hill with no brake (which is true in some ways), but on others I remember that her voice is still tiny, and that we’re here together now. She is growing up, but she’s small enough.

dad

It’s not entirely true that our love for Kina is unrequited, but it is requited on her own terms and at a time of her choosing. The moments when she does declare her love for us are extra precious to us—a special treat—and usually fall either just before or just after she sleeps, when she is most unaware. The rest of the day, loving her is like living with a tiny Han Solo.

I don’t know that it matters if she loves me or not, actually. That’s the point of unconditional love, which is either comforting or terrifying as we contemplate the years ahead and simultaneously look back on how carelessly we navigated our own teenage years with our parents. A few hours ago, Kina tried to tell me how she felt about me by repeatedly and pointedly slamming my bedroom door. Once it became apparent that I wasn’t going to respond, she decided instead to hit me, and then to start inconsolably weeping, and so I found myself holding and comforting this small person who—by all outward appearances—was really angry at me, and who was definitely being a real dick about it, actually. I love her so much that the conflict didn’t even enter into my mind. I can’t know what it’s like to be in her head at this age; nature makes us all forget that (probably for good reasons), and so I can only assume that Kina’s love is complex, is messy, is big enough to include five minute periods where she is both slapping me in the face and laying her head on my shoulder. She’s brave to live in all of that, and all I really care about is that she knows that I love her—which, our readers will note, she does.

I have a confession to make: I almost forgot to draw The Sunday Kina today. Kina and I were half an hour away from a play date with Sloanie when I finally remembered. This is partly because Laurea left early this morning—without the prompt of watching her cut paper for the Parade cover, a Sunday morning just blends together into one long whining-for-special-treats noise. But draw it I did, and alongside me, our intrepid sticker collagist. She asked me politely to help her get the polar bear off the sticker backing, but the placement and selection here is all Kina. I take credit for the increasingly jaunty logo at the top. Sunday funday.

dad

Kina’s new teacher, Ms. Olenick, really loves plants and has a cute cat. These things are endearing to Kina, and she reacted accordingly in her first one-on-one meeting of the year, pulling out all her favorite items of the week to hold in front of her iPad camera: Sooty the plant, a children’s book about anarchy, her doctor set, and an enormous toy stroller. I don’t expect that every one-on-one meeting of the year will be about show and tell, but I think this set a good tone for the two of them—like a first date where you talk about your favorite bands and authors. They’re well-matched.

The whole idea of one-on-one meetings like this is sort of new to everyone in the context of school (though I, a classic business drone, am quite used to it). It occurred to me halfway through the meeting that teachers typically learn about individual children only in the context of a classroom, as they interact and cross paths, which—let me tell you—is not that easy in a video chat. I hope that having this time together once or twice a week leads to Kina feeling a deeper emotional connection to her teacher, which seems so important for kids in preschool. That these meetings happen at all—and that they take place on a screen—seems inconsequential, as long as they work.

We drove past her school on the way home from the playground today, and she pointed at the building as we passed, saying “That’s my new school!” How strange it is to live through this year, in which a massive brick building is just a totem for the social experiment that is happening on screen in our living room. I feel like we should stroll by to just lay our hands on it, for good luck.

dad