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.

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I told Kina a story tonight, late to bed after a birthday dinner with her Uncle Ken. Kina isn’t often outside after the sun goes down, and as she rode on my shoulders, she marveled at a single planet in the sky—a star, by her estimation. We don’t actually get real stars much in Brooklyn, and with the haze of distant wildfires in the atmosphere, a young New Yorker these days might look up at Venus and think the firmament held just one brilliant, lonely star. I didn’t want to keep her up much later than I already had, so I rushed her home, drew a bath, and swept her into her pajamas as my phone buzzed in my pocket.

A few minutes later, I laid her down and tucked her in, offering her one story (She’d never accept less.) I told her the story of Baby Rainbow Unicorn meeting Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court. It’s not much of a story, but it has our nation’s finest jurist in over a generation, the wisest and strongest judge in all the world—who held up the rights of not just Puppy and Panda, but even the smallest cat in the dollhouse—conveying to our friend the unicorn the unparalleled responsibility to defend those most in need of protection, and to see clearly where the world and its laws are broken, so that they can be mended. The story goes that Ruth Bader Ginsburg leans over Baby Rainbow Unicorn and says that she will need to be so strong, that the grownups around her have to be even stronger, that she should persevere and believe that she can do great things. She places that strength in Baby Rainbow Unicorn’s heart, and her wisdom in Baby Rainbow Unicorn’s young mind, and kisses her gently on the forehead as she says good night.

Baby Rainbow Unicorn, in all of this, is drowsy, and doesn’t understand how important this moment is. She asks for a cheek hug and for Panda to snuggle. I dim the lights in the kitchen and sit down to my laptop to write a story about stories. All the while, I think about Venus in the sky—so bright it outshines the stars on a smoky night. I have faith in its light to guide us, remembering always that it could never light the world on its own. That light we carry together.

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Kina loves it when I come out of the bedroom in the middle of the day; it is a Major Event. Lately, she’s taken more thorough stock of my travel patterns, remarking that she “just saw” me, and that I’m coming out of the room “so, so much”. It’s like she’s forgotten that I spent the last six months working in our bedroom—it seems so novel to her that I am around, for reasons I’m unclear about. Some days lately I barely see her during the day. If she’s here, I can hear her banging about in the living room; if not, I sometimes dip my head out just to get some air. On those days, I open the door after work and she squeals with glee. “Daddy! I haven’t seen you in a long, long time!” she’ll say. It makes me want to work at home forever.

Child Tends Tiny Plant

Last weekend, when we saw Andrew and Des, they helped Kina pot up a plant whose name I have forgotten, filling a tiny tomato paste can with soil and gently tucking a propagated shoot into the dirt. On the drive home, Kina asked if I would place the plant into the cup holder next to her car seat and looked lovingly at it as we drove. Once we got home, we stuck the can on a little plate and placed it on the windowsill in our living room. Every morning, Kina has asked to water it, despite knowing that we should only do so once a week. This morning she named it “Sooty”, which seems appropriate. I pray that I do not accidentally kill this plant.

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So, I wrote this edition thinking that today was the first day of school and immediately sat down with Kina to enjoy her first fifteen-minute class of the year, only to find that the first class of the year was just an opportunity to say hello to all the teachers. Next week is the first day of school. My bad. This is fine, of course—I’m pleased to have little orientation sessions for a school year that seems so strange. I was actually impressed with how much thought the teachers had put into the experience: sign language to help kids interact without talking over each other, moments that felt like group sharing (even if all the kids were muted), and as much of the gentle care that you could hope from from a preschool teacher forced to teach their class at a distance. It was bittersweet and absurd, but it was preschool (which is bittersweet and absurd even on a good day).

In fact, I’m glad today was just a meet-and-greet moment, because I was in such denial about this being the first day of school for her that I feel like we didn’t get the ceremony of a first day. I want to dress her up special for her first day. I need to take a picture! With her backpack! I want to tell her how proud I am of her, and how big she’s gotten. The thing about this remote school thing that is most disorienting is the absence (or unfamiliarity) of the ritual. When I used to drop Kina off in the Before Times, I’d put her backpack in the cubby, take her over to the board where she could move her name from Home to School, then kneel in front of her and ask for:

1. a high five

2. a fist bump

3. a big hug

I don’t think I was ever so happy in my life as when I’d walk out of that classroom after the big hug, and I’m trying to figure out how to build that goodbye moment into a school year where neither of us ever leaves the house.

The other thing that’s annoying me about all this relates to socialization, and incidentally to Happy Meals. I’ve been talking about preschool a lot lately in terms of Happy Meals, and what matters about them. When you go to McDonald’s to buy a Happy Meal for your kid, you’re not hung up on whether to get a cheeseburger or nuggets—whether it’s a juice or a milk day. The cheeseburger and the milk are incidental, a sideshow for the toy, which is the entire point of the thing. The Happy Meal is only about the box and the toy. The thing that feels so backwards about remote school is that it only solves for the cheeseburger (the education and structure) but not for the toy (socializing with other kids) or the box (the specialness of a preschool classroom). I don’t care about the cheeseburger here; I just want my kid to have a toy—to learn from other kids, to speak their language, and to figure out what it means to share space with other human beings. The thing that I have felt most crippled by in my work is the clumsiness of shared virtual space; it’s something you have to be good at, and we’re just… not. So when I sat this morning in front of the iPad with Kina, all I could think about were the kids whose faces weren’t flashing on screen while the teacher played the xylophone (as good and loving as she was). I just wish she could play.

Archivist Locates Missing Shard of First Edition

I found it, hidden behind a bunch of other papers on the fridge. I intend to leave it pasted there, as Kina clearly intended.

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One of Kina’s most beloved categories of plaything is Pretend Ice Cream. She has ice cream sticker books and cardboard ice cream puzzles, but her most prized possession is a little ice cream counter she got from her Lala last Christmas, which sits beside her bed on our most uncomfortable chair, manned twenty-four hours a day by Chuckie Avocado (a stuffed avocado who wears a paper hat from our local soda fountain). The ice cream counter has eight flavors of ice cream, two cones, a cup, and six different toppings. The toppings are my favorite part, because they’re made of a satisfyingly chewy kind of rubber—which I say because I like to chew it, and that drives Kina bonkers.

On most mornings, she will ask what flavor ice cream we’d all like (hers is always strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla), whether we’d like it on a cup or a cone (she always wants a “cup and spoon”), and if we’d like to spring for toppings (for her, “chocolate drip-drops”, which I think we can all agree is a much better term than “hot fudge”). Once served, I sometimes just swoop in and take a big chew out of my sprinkles or whatever she’s allowed me to order that day, which elicits a proper scolding that “this is pretend ice cream, not for real ice cream.” Chastened, I proceed to pretend-eat the pretend ice cream, but very quickly. This really sends her over the edge, because she wants everybody to savor their pretend ice cream, whereas it’s my position basically that it doesn’t matter how fast you pretend-eat the ice cream, because you can never actually finish it. Impervious to my reasoning, she then exhales deeply and takes my ice cream away. That is how the pretend ice cream game works.

She does, of course, like real ice cream, which I also eat very quickly—but she’s usually too distracted to notice.

Kid Refuses to Match Socks With Dad

I don’t remember how long ago this was, but we once discovered that somebody made The Very Hungry Caterpillar socks for toddlers—which was too cute a discovery on its own, until we discovered that they also made them for adults. As is likely true for most toddlers, The Very Hungry Caterpillar was one of Kina’s favorite books, and in her very early toddling days, she would blow through those socks straightaway whenever we did laundry. And so—in the interest of being the cutest dad to the cutest toddler—would I. This family doesn’t go in much for matching (Laurea will often change her clothes if she’s discovered that we are wearing similar colors), but I took such great pleasure in wearing the caterpillar socks together that I recently bought new pairs for Kina and myself to replace the originals, which had grown threadbare. But today, when I saw that she’d put on her caterpillar socks and went to pull on my own pair, she went out of the room to change her socks. When she came back wearing her rainbow socks, she put her hand on my leg and told me, “It’s okay to be the same and different, Daddy. People need to do their thing.” I was simultaneously charmed, heartbroken, and awestruck by this. How could I resist such a well-stated truth? My child is growing up, and as she has clearly inherited the anti-matching gene from Laurea, I will have to learn to wear my caterpillar socks on random days. Such is life.

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This is the year Kina really discovered acorns. She’s been walking around plucking them from the sidewalk (as I explained in an earlier newsletter) and giving them out as gifts to friends, family, and guys who work at the parking garage. She is careful to select only the finest and most robust specimens—she found a particularly chunky boi in Kensington yesterday on our way to see Andrew and Des, an acorn whose nutty bit (or pericarp) was larger than its hatty bit (or cupule). I was proud that she found this acorn before some enterprising squirrel did, though I venture she’ll need it less in winter than they might.

I’ve explained to Kina that acorns come from oak trees and can only be found near them, which led in turn to a conversation about how there are in fact other kinds of trees (which seemed of little interest of her, given that other kinds of trees do not produce acorns). Now that I have an acorn aficionado living in my house, I feel that I am developing an ambient awareness of oak trees that I did not have before—a sixth sense for where they might be found (parks, older residential blocks) or lacking (condos, commercial corridors). Were there more oak trees before? Why do we not plant them anymore? Who would willingly choose a linden tree over an oak?

For all of our mutual fascination with acorns, Kina and I have not discussed what they are for and who benefits from their existence. Respectively, the making of new trees and the sustenance of squirrels seems tangential to her interests in acorns qua acorns. I’m in no rush to get to the existential qualities of acorns, because it’s such a joy to hear her compare each acorn on its aesthetic merits, and to reflect on the very best acorns of the day with her as she drifts off to sleep.

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On a normal day, I’d want to talk about the nap that Kina took between frolicking at two playgrounds today—Brooklyn Bridge Park’s amazing-but-nearly-inaccessible-by-anything-other-than-a-thirty-year-mortgage-on-a-townhouse-on-Joralemon-Street Pier 6 complex (Slide Mountain! Sandbox Village! Water Lab!) and Greenpoint’s McGolrick Park (Slides! Sandbox! Water!)—but really I am here to tell you that I have finally, after months of looking, found the first edition of The Daily Kina. Drawn in crayon on a folded-over sheet of what I now know was pink construction paper, the original has eluded me since I started compiling these things into piles on shelves. Its absence was bothering me, because I’ve always intended to have the editions properly photographed when things cool down a bit—I didn’t want the inaugural April 3rd issue to be just a snap from my phone. So, I found it; that’s the good news. The bad news: somebody who clearly did not recognize the historical significance of this construction paper cut a half-moon out of its folded edge, excising the headline “Daniel Tiger: A Grreat Show”. Surprisingly, I was less angry to see this than not to have it the original at all, recognizing that a giant hole is just one of the many natural flaws in the production of this daily paper.

Crumple marks from angry publishers, bleeding ink from where the paper was laid atop a wet spot on the coffee table, egregious misspellings, crossed-out letters—all of these are threads of the fabric of this newsroom. I told myself from the outset that I would never prevent Kina from messing with the paper, in a very literal sense. If she wants to draw a line across the edition, that’s her call. If she’s angry at me, she’ll steal the paper. I presume that if she someday rips it in two, I will have to tape it back together. This is her sheet of paper. And so it seems appropriate that, at some point in the last five and a half months, she cut a circle out of the mint condition first printing and used it for some other art project. I am trying to hunt that art project down so that I can have it photographed, too—the remix laid out next to the project it drew from.

But I am also keeping these originals on a higher shelf.

Tiny Invisible Skeleton In Her Brain Eats Pizza and Rectangles

Lately, I have been giving shape to the strong emotions that Kina feels from time to time. I ask her to draw close so that I can look into her eyes, listen to her ears, and smell her nose, concluding after some time that there is a monkey in her brain. We concoct an elaborate ritual together that will convince the monkey to emerge from her left ear into the palm of my hand, squeeze the monkey until it’s smaller than a mote of dust, and blow it into the wind—after which, for now, Kina calms down. In the last twenty-four hours, we have found the following mischievous animals in her brain: a monkey, a chicken, an octopus, a giraffe, a pigeon, and a tiny invisible skeleton. The last of these we coaxed out this morning by producing a fake slice of pizza out of yellow construction paper, alongside a sticky green rectangle—both of which are potent well-known lures for invisible skeletons. I don’t know if it’s the placebo effect or what (and I don’t want to jinx it) but Kina’s been a real charm all day; these animals are making our lives harder than they need to be! Ask yourself: What animal lives in my brain today? Once you know it, hold your palm up to your left ear and say out loud, “One, two, three, [animal name] go free!” to liberate it. Hold it tightly in your fist until you feel it nearly vanish, then open your hand and blow your tiny monster into the sky. Don’t you feel better now?

Today’s Parade is a Laurea-only number, featuring three flowers—one of which, a ring-shaped beauty, was invented exclusively for today’s edition. Another note: On looking back through all the Parades for the cut-out pink paper circle, I discovered that I’ve been emphasizing the wrong sides of the letters A for months, so I’ve corrected that going forward; my apologies.

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I am, if anything, glad that the part of the original that survives includes a fantastic crayon drawing of Moosie and the legendary “Poo on the Floor” headline—the first story in a long narrative that I am grateful to have otherwise forgotten.

I can’t even recall the context of the quote in today’s top headline, but it seems like an apt reflection on the zeitgeist, does it not? As we were driving around earlier, it occurred to me that all these new things she says that I find so funny are things that either we have said or that she heard on She-Ra. Is our own frustration with the state of things leaking into her bemused worldview? Are we that resigned? (Yes. Sometimes.)

It is worth noting that I, a depressed optimist, believe that not everything will be utterly without use for literally everybody for all eternity—though all those things do feel universally aligned lately. My complaints are real and (sometimes) constructive, but they mostly serve to mark the passage of time, and if (or when) I say things like “Wow, everything is useless!” it is a way of keeping the mood from cratering as I dig in for the hard work of making things useful. My friend Jess and I frequently toss this GIF back and forth in a running text thread:

When I see it, it tells me both to let it go and suck it up. Do we want to raise a child who will spend her life crippled with rage, or one who will confront the absurd unfairness of the world with feigned nihilism, bitter resolve, and excellent taste in GIFs? This is not a hard question to answer!

In the meantime, I believe that Kina had no idea what she was saying, and that her utterance was a message from the collective unconscious. I love her, and I am resolved.

Chef Announces Apathetic Prix-Fixe

I have read the quote “There’s coconut and water you already drank” several times today, and it makes me laugh out loud every time.

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I have been fortunate, in the midst of this universal maelstrom of viruses and social collapse, to sleep relatively well. Much of this is because I am so tired all the time—either because I am tending to a small person who is constantly running or because of, you know, all of this. Last night, though, I found myself for some reason tossing and turning all night, and by the time Kina burst into our room for the 6:24 wake-up call, I was a mess. Our occasionally-sympathetic child, with the best of intentions, leapt to my side on the bed and repeatedly patted my shoulder, muttering “It’s just not meant to be, Daddy,” which isn’t really that comforting, but is at least slightly hilarious. As I dragged my way through work today, I tried to remind myself that the things that kept me up all night had nothing to do with her, and that I loved my awkward semi-comforting offspring.

Kid Tells Hilarious Joke Over and Over

For the last few nights, Kina’s insisted on repeatedly telling me her best joke, which consists only of the punchline “My name is Laurea by the Laurea-vantage!” and like forty-five seconds of outright cackling. She insists, after each telling, that I also laugh, and I do—mostly because her belly laugh is so funny. If, for some reason, I try to change the topic, she grabs my face and looks me straight in the eye as she cocks her head to deliver another hilarious zinger. This often goes on for at least half an hour. Tonight, her “joke” was to hop all over the house screaming “best of butter!!!!” It was, at least, a reprieve.

I’m exhausted. Hope you’re not. See you tomorrow!

dad

We are a no-shoes household, and it’s summer, so we’re a bare-feet household at the moment—unless you are our daughter, in which case it’s a rainbow-sock moment. Kina decided last week that she wanted to wear socks in the house “because they make me comfy”. That’s fine, of course, as long as her feet don’t get all sweaty—far be it from me to tell her what is and isn’t comfy, within the bounds of proper foot hygiene. This morning she upped the ante on us suddenly, declaring that she wanted both socks and slippers. This requires a bit more thought. We have never been a slipper household, and I’m honestly not sure how Kina even knows that slippers exist. How would we identify a proper slipper for her? What does it signify that our daughter is a slipper person? Are bathrobes next? Is this a sly commentary on our floors? I keep having this vision of Kina emerging from her bedroom, yawning over a cup of coffee, wearing raggedy slippers. I’m probably making too much of this. I hate slippers.

“The Noodle Factory Is Not Ever Closed!”

Remember that week that Kina woke up every day at 5 AM and made piles of Play-Doh noodles? Today I learned how much work that actually required, as she forced me to extrude a series of Doh noodles from what appeared to be a syringe. Some readers will recall from their 70s and 80s childhoods a series of ads for the Play-Doh Fun Factory or, worse, the horrifying Play-Doh Drill and Fill. I would watch those ads and wish that my parents would buy them for me. I could extrude huge ropes of Play-Doh! Create ersatz Play-Doh fillings! It all looked so fun and easy, with the dough just squooshing out of the extruder like pastry cream. If you, like me, were never the proud owner of a Play-Doh Fun Factory as a kid, let me tell you what I have since learned: Squeezing Play-Doh through the centimeter-wide hole at the tip of a plastic syringe is like pushing a loaf of bread through a colander. It is hard work with almost no payoff. The only person happy with the final product is the three-year-old who is using the noodles to make a bracelet—the same three-year-old who somehow did this herself several times a morning, and who will never know a childhood without a set of plastic extruder attachments. Kina forced me to do this all morning. Privilege makes for horrible bosses.

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I thought I was onto something the other day when I tricked Kina into accepting plums as a special treat, forgetting that I also like plums, and that my progeny and I might enter into competition for one of the world’s finest fruits. The fact that I woke this morning to find all the plums pitted out and half-chewed is really the extent of this story, but I feel it’s always notable to call out a creative project’s first William Carlos Williams joke.

Kid Apologizes for “Spooking Out” and Hitting Daddy

It has been interesting to watch Kina coping with her own anger lately—a transition that feels like the first step out of a long period of mindless tantrums. I have started to be more clear about my expectations with her, especially as it relates to treats and TV. This sometimes leads to lengthy screaming tantrums when I ask her to pick up a mess of Legos before playing hide and seek, or to eat three bites of dinner before eating dessert. While these freakouts (or “spook outs”, apparently) have been part of our lives for a while now, they are now often followed by a heartfelt apology and an explanation of why she was angry. I always try to take a moment to acknowledge her apology and find a way to offer her some grace, but I am constantly taken aback. This is, to be clear, more mature than I often am in the waning throes of anger. Is it possible to raise somebody to be better than you? Is it possible that we are better than we think?

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We did not have a traditional Labor Day—because all traditions get a reset this year—and since Laurea is still working on an event, Kina and I spent much of the day together. In an effort to experience some semblance of novelty, I decided we would avoid all playgrounds, which led to our sitting in the middle of a vast swath of artificial turf in McCarren Park, watching frisbees fly over our heads and playing the Tackle Game. As it turns out, two people can spend hours playing the Tackle Game, as long as one of you is willing to repeatedly walk fifty paces away and tackle the other person, and that the other person is comfortable sitting down and being tackled. That, in a nutshell, basically describes Kina and me. I think we annoyed the frisbee people by not “playing sports”, but let’s face it: they were throwing a frisbee, and my child was running full tilt towards me in an effort to knock me on my ass. I don’t know a lot about American sports, but that feels like it passes a lot more tests than frisbee does.

“Close Your Eyes and Believe What I Gave You”

All weekend, Kina gathered sticks, stones, and acorns. As she collected these objects, she carefully placed them in a snack cup (which, as a snack cup—loyal readers will recall—had very recently contained seaweed). This morning, she carefully removed each item from the snack cup and placed it in our hands, urging us to “believe what I gave you”. I imagine (though I cannot confirm) that this phrase exists in opposition to the statement, “I can’t believe what you gave me”. In fact, I could believe that Kina offered me a pine cone this morning, and it still felt like a real heartfelt gift. I don’t ask for much, really—just a strangely damp pinecone on a Monday morning, proffered by a solemn and whispery preschooler.

I hope you had as good a Labor Day as we did.

dad

I remember when Laurea first told me she had let Kina watch an episode of She-Ra: Princesses of Power, having discovered it on Netflix one morning at 5:45 AM. If I recall correctly, I think I said, “No way.” We’d been holding the line on non-educational pandemic children’s television for over three months, and I wasn’t about to let it slide for a remake of some ‘80s shlock, even if Laurea liked it as a kid. But, reader, I am here to tell you—one and a half months and five seasons later—that the new She-Ra is freaking amazing. When I draw this paper every morning, Kina and I agree on a single episode of television for her to watch, and for weeks now, it has been She-Ra. In the last week, as we’ve approached the series finale, I have found it legitimately difficult to actually draw the paper while she watches it. “Wait—what’s happened to Catra?” I might ask, or, “When did Hordak become good?” I celebrated Entrapta and Catra’s respective returns to She-Ra’s side as though they were candidates in a political campaign.

It’s rare to find a kids’ cartoon with real character arcs and complex psychologies, let alone one that agrees to find its conclusion after five seasons, and that doesn’t even begin to address how the show centers and highlights multiple genders, sexualities, and races in its storytelling. She-Ra had an all-female writers’ room and barely any men in the regular cast; if it were anything other than an action cartoon on Netflix, it’d be a cult favorite—and maybe it is. Since I first posted about it on July 19th, several friends have divulged their obsession with She-Ra, and it’s clear we’re relatively late to the game in this household. Kina and I watched the two-part series finale this weekend, unencumbered by the newspaper. I won’t spoil the ending, but there’s a big kiss and somebody saves the universe. I wish I could follow them for the rest of their lives; their world turns out pretty good—and certainly much more verdant than ours, at the moment.

Puppy Is Nervous and Wants People To Take Care of Him

I mean, doesn’t this basically describe us all? We are all Puppy. Find somebody you can take care of—and who will, in turn, take care of you. We call Kina.

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On long days, I like to take Kina aside to watch videos from The Before Times: indoor play spaces, school drop-offs, grandparent visits, birthday parties. It’s kind of amazing how we’ve managed to hold it together without any of those things—or, I suppose, how we are actively managing to hold it together—but what’s even more astonishing is how much this child has grown in the last year. In videos from last May, she looks as tiny as a sprite (I sometimes wonder how to proportion triangular Kina in the illustrations here—is she more equilateral or isosceles?) and has the voice and vocabulary of a baby becoming a kid. Yesterday, Kina and I watched one video over and over. In it, we are at the dining room table. She blows maniacally on a bowl of buttered tortellini, turns to me and asks “iss too hot?”; I tell her to give it a try, and as she takes a tentative bite, she mutters “good temp-a-chur”. This is a child who, in a few months, would walk into a classroom for the first time—a classroom in which she wouldn’t even finish the year, but would nonetheless become a real kid-like human being. Kina watched and rewatched that video because she thought her voice was hilarious, but I rewatched it because it feels like a hundred years ago, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how so much time has passed, how she’s blossomed so much in a situation that feels so desperately barren. Keeping these newspapers as a diary is a reminder of what that change has looked like over the last four months, but these videos feel like a missive from a distant continent. This is what life is like there? How can I get back to that? If this is how toddlers change as they make the journey, what has happened to us?

Lots of work went into this morning’s Parade, with Laurea painting all the things that have been making us happy lately: candles, cantaloupe, ice cream, fresh juices, long drives. Kina was prolific with the watercolors, producing four of her own paintings. She selected the one pasted at the center of all our little pleasures and topped off the cover with a well-selected Pizza Party! sticker.

Hope you all have an invigorating or peaceful Labor Day—whichever feels right to you this year. Kina will continue her grand tour of playgrounds and probably demand dessert, which we will likely give to her. A special treat!

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Kina is really into sending people messages and letters these days—or at least she’s really into the idea of messages. I’ll be sitting in the living room, and she’ll walk up and start dictating a note to me—something encouraging for her babysitter, the doctor, one of my siblings, or herself in the future. It could be that these little recitations are things I should actually write down and send—none of them are anything less than heartbreakingly sweet, and her doctor probably would say “Awwww” in response. Have you gotten any mail lately that told you how much you were loved? Has a toddler told you to be nice to others in a text message recently? These feel like useful shafts of light in the darkness. I’ll try not to keep them to myself.

Ballerina, Denied Recital, Wears Tutu Nonetheless

Before the lockdown, Kina took three dance classes. She liked the teacher, seemed to enjoy the class, and is clearly right in the Dance Fanatic demographic. In early March, they announced a group recital for June of this year and took orders for pink tutus, which we purchased—as all first-time dance parents must. Fast forward to May, which had us sitting outside the dance studio to retrieve a package containing her tutu and a vague promise to revisit the recital plan in late June. Fast forward to July, when Kina asked what the tutu was. Fast forward to this morning, when she insisted on wearing “the costume” around the house, twirling and leaping to “Baby Shark”. I expected her to want to wear the thing all day, but she backtracked after a while when the sequins started to annoy her. In May, I think I would have been really sad to see this morning’s dance play out, but today I’m just happy she could wear “the costume” at all, and that we have a kid who’s happy and into leaping. “Lucky to be here,” is all I kept thinking.

Went in hard on the portrait today with two things I have real trouble drawing: Open eyes and open mouths. Gotta be bad to get good.

dad

All the rain and heat seems to have produced a bumper crop of mosquitos in Brooklyn, some of which are feasting on our child. I’ve explained to her that mosquitos are bugs—mostly invisible—that sometimes bite us and make us itchy. She seems more curious than horrified by this, but asked nonetheless that I bandage one of the bites on her finger. As I did, she asked me what other animals bite. This was a question I felt I’d rather she answer for herself, and she replied, “Well, lions bite”—the kind of dangerous but nuanced truth that is largely irrelevant to a city kid. Later that evening, as we dropped off a painting downstairs for her friend Gabrielle, Kina asked if she wanted to see her mosquito bite. Gabs looked closely at the Band-Aid and gasped dramatically, which prompted Kina to reassure her that it was only a mosquito bite and not a lion bite and therefore nothing to worry about. I’m glad I’m raising a kid who understands that it’s all relative.

Kid Is Basically Exhausted

We live on the third floor of a tenement building and have often wished we had an elevator—especially since we had a baby, and more so as that baby has turned into a kid. We often get to the top of the stairs, open the door, rip off our masks, and stand there panting for a bit as we catch our breath. Kina, who really has no problem at all climbing the stairs (because she only weighs forty pounds soaking wet) has started to imitate us, bending over dramatically with her hands on her knees and going “Whooo! Whooo! Gosh, those stairs make me tired!” It’s humiliating. I need to exercise.

Hope you all have a good Labor Day weekend. Will continue through the holiday as planned, but trying to keep these newsletter sessions to under fifteen minutes for the next few days. Have a hot dog for us. Wear your masks. Love you!

dad

Big food day here at The Daily Kina, leading with an investigation into the extremely high-frequency consumption of dessert in our newsroom. We’re going feral here—Laurea is working some late nights in support of a long remote festival—which means that I’m leaning hard into delivery and dessert. We’ve done a substantial run on ice cream this week, but last night’s pasta delivery didn’t offer any frozen confections, and I am in any case a sucker for pudding (or, as they say in Italy, budino) as a lazy stand-in for soft serve. Kina was skeptical but ultimately won over by its quintessential dessert vibes. What I did not account for, one hour before her bedtime, was the effect of highly-concentrated sugar and dark chocolate on her energy levels. The nightly reading of Go, Dog, Go! was extra ridiculous (“Daddy, look! The dog has ice cream! Ha! Ha! Haaaaaaaaa!”) and getting her into bed was like herding crickets. All of which is to say: I spent twenty minutes tonight explaining to her why dessert was not an every-night thing but a special treat, which brings me to our next headline:

Seaweed Declared Snack, Not Special Treat

I’m not sure we’ve really talked about “special treat” here, but the term dates back to the earliest days of the pandemic, when we finally succumbed to using candy to bribe our child to do things like poop in the potty, participate in video calls with her grandparents, and chill for, like, three minutes. From the outset, we’ve referred to any sort of candy or gummy as a “special treat”. This was a crucial error, because without the broader context of what “special” means, she believes that this is just what candy is called. Accordingly, we are now subject multiple times a day to long wheedling litanies of “Can I have a special treat? Can I have a special treat? Can I have a special treeeeeeeat?” until we cough up the gummy. With that in mind, we’re constantly trying to swap in something moderately healthy in response, which leads to semantic debates about whether or not perfect in-season strawberries are special treats. This brings us to seaweed, the rare actually-bourgeois-Brooklyn thing Kina does ask for, which I bought in various preparations at a Japanese supermarket two weekends ago. She asked for some this morning as she watched Winnie and Wilbur, seemingly content for a while, until she declared that she needed a special treat. When I told her that it seemed like she had a perfectly good treat in hand, she patiently explained to me that seaweed was a snack with no particular value as a special treat—which makes sense if you adopt her worldview (as we all probably should) that we need frequent special treats to make the day bearable. You deserve a special treat. Kina deserves a special treat. Please have a treat.

Today, it has been four months since our first edition. I put all the originals in museum boxes this afternoon so that they wouldn’t get ripped or damp or lost. When I finish with all of this, I’ll get them all photographed properly (on something nicer than the black trunk next to our bed). It was a pleasure to hold each of them today—a record of what is happening to us, to her. Glad you can be privy to it, too.

dad

Yesterday, the city announced that school, originally scheduled to start September 10th, would start instead on September 21st. This has little bearing on our plan, which is to throw up our hands and “send” her to “Pre-K” remotely. Two weeks ago, Bill de Blasio announced that schools could implement outdoor learning plans—setting up tents outside buildings so that kids and teachers could share more thoroughly-ventilated spaces (an actually good idea, delivered far too late). Given the ongoing stalemate between the principals’ union, the teachers’ union, and the Department of Education—which may or may not lead to wildcat strikes (who knows!) on or near the first day of school—it seems implausible that schools will invest a ton of effort in sourcing and building tents. All of this chaos, on top of the warning that entire classrooms (with their families) would need to quarantine for fourteen days in the event of a sick teacher or child, led us to our decision to give the ol’ Zoom-based preschool a try and wait for more sophisticated testing protocols to come along.

My friend and NYT Parenting co-founder Jess wrote a beautiful newsletter about keeping your kids excited about school today, which I would characterize as a provocation to all of us to do our best and know that our best is all we can do. I’m lucky that Kina has our time and attention (because we have that time and attention to spare), and I’m not terribly worried about learning loss for this kid at this age in our situation—though she and I both wish that she could spend real quality time with other kids—but there’s plenty of other kids who aren’t in Kina’s situation and stand to really suffer because of the city’s incapacity to plan, prepare, and pay for the welfare of kids. Their parents will do their best, too, while everybody else goes to the gym and our mayor refuses to articulate any sort of option to help the city recover. No, I’m not frustrated, why do you ask?

“It Feels Comfy When Dogs Smell My Leg”

This morning, Kina declared that she loved dogs most of all the animals. We tried to really dwell on that, asking her about her favorite dog size (medium), dog hair length (looooong), color (brown). As dog friendliness is concerned, she’s not a fan of licking the face, but does quite like a dog that smells her leg because it makes her feel comfy. (We have seen her swoon when dogs sniff her ankles, it is true.) Any dog that fails to do this may be entertaining, but does not comfort her. Laurea and I have sworn to each other that we will not succumb to adopting a dog, and that if Kina really wants to spend time with dogs, she can start a dog-walking business and do it outside. Still, at 8 AM, when your kid tells you that she would be comfy if a dog were smelling her leg, it does make you question your priors. We’re still not getting a dog.

dad

I am not going to complain about the size of our Brooklyn apartment. It is far bigger than it could be, and I have friends who have raised more children in less space than this. But, still. It can be challenging to share your apartment with a roommate who not only has no boundaries of her own, but creates arbitrary boundaries for you. We spend most of our time between two and twenty feet from each other—in one among our austere selection of rooms—and yet the pandemic has gone in some ways better than expected, at least in the area of family space discord. We’re managing well in the house we have, even as our friends decamp to homes near the beach with two—nay, three—bathrooms. But even as we envy those friends, we are grateful to weather this together in the space we’ve loved for so long, to dwell in innocence, not having eaten of the Backyard Tree of Knowledge. I sense, among those dear departed friends, a genie-out-of-the-bottle situation, the cat out of the bag; once unfettered by multiple-dwelling apartment walls, I can imagine it is difficult to get stuffed back into them.

But even the smallest among us needs an extra room sometimes, which leads our protagonist to build corner pillow caves on our bed every morning and demand we draw close, so as to be denied admittance. The stuffies may enter, and even Mommy on a good day, but Daddy stays outside. The “exceptly” here is notable, not just because it would seem to include all of humanity, but because it explicitly carves out a space for her in the cave. Which is to say, Kina’s imaginary clubs are so exclusive that even she requires an invitation.

Kid Evacuates Balloon Collection As Mommy Blowdries Hair

The only comment I have on this headline is that I woke this morning to discover five new balloons—three filled with water, two with air—ensconced in cups throughout the house. Her project continues.

dad

For years, I’ve admired the masterfully-crafted Heckscher Playground near the southern edge of Central Park. A complex of moats, castles, swings, and fountains, this is a playground for the playground aficionado. It’s well-maintained, squishy where it needs to be squishy, and just dangerous enough to keep a kid enthralled for hours—which it did yesterday, for Kina, on her first visit. It is even better than the last billionaire-financed Conservancy playground we visited in Central Park! I count us lucky to be able to make our way into these rarified (and yet still public) play spaces, though I desperately wish Kina had her own local stone castles to leap from. Given the plaque on the $10,000 bench we sat on yesterday—donated by the owner of the New York Jets and heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune—that seems like a far-off possibility. It feels increasingly unlikely that the city will have the discretionary budget to spare on playground upgrades for kids in underserved neighborhoods, and given recent articles swooning over the departure of well-heeled families to the suburbs, the tax base to fund them is growing ever slimmer. Still, we abide. Kina saw her friend Stanley at Rodney Playground today, which she seems to have found more memorable than leaping off of castles, much as I covet them. I will remind readers of this newsletter that they are welcome to join the Friends of Rodney Playground, a still-nonexistent conservancy for Brooklyn’s most BQE-adjacent play environment. We are selling benches.

Hand Expert Consults Handbook

I saw Kina sitting quietly on the couch yesterday, staring intently at her open palms. When I asked her what she was doing, she replied, “It’s my handbook. I am reading about hands.” And now I desperately want to write Kina an actual illustrated handbook about the safe and proper operation of hands. Somebody get me a book deal.

dad

Of the many things wrong about this time in history, the absence of hugs as a salve against existential pain is a notable insult. In this house, of course, we still hug liberally, but there are many people whom Kina could be hugging right now and are currently, tragically, hugless. I don’t take our child’s hugs for granted—one of the earliest rituals we developed during the pandemic was a nightly provocation to “hug me forever and ever and never never let go”, which Kina would just about deliver on, squeezing me by the neck for minutes on end. The hug would always end with Kina saying “Okay now get offa me", but the cure was effective nonetheless. She is storing up hugs for the proverbial winter ahead of us, for the family she loves and sees only at a distance. As a beneficiary of that hug endowment, I can assure you all that her accounts are deep and overflowing. Writing this brings to mind one of my favorite articles in the last few months—a primer on how to hug in a pandemic; use it sparingly at your discretion, should you and your loved ones require it.

Doctor Is Good At Vaccinations

We have covered shots before, in an edition from May 9th of this year—before this newsletter existed. At the time, a local doctor said, “Okay, this shot’s not gonna hurt a little bit. It’ll hurt so so so so much.” We at The Daily Kina wanted to note that this same pediatrician (whose patients include Daddy, Mommy, Puppy, and Simone) is now much better at giving shots, and her patients now feel only a tiny chimp at the moment of injection.

Kina decided that today’s Parade would have a “birthday party” theme. Laurea made the balloons on what we thought would be a yellow cover, but then Kina decided to go her own way and draw a “big orange face” (complete with sympathetic eyebrows!) so we compiled the whole thing on blue. It feels very 2020-festive and is one of my faves so far.

Muchas, muchas ciao—

dad

As an avid shower person, I sometimes forget how awesome it is to take a bath every night—which is strange, in that I do give Kina nightly baths. Lately, she’s been mildly obsessed with the inner logic of drains (see also: “Why Is the Drain Like a Magnet?”) and is currently puzzling through the matter of whirlpools. Why are some whirlpools big and others small? Why is it that a whirlpool, disrupted, forms anew? Is it possible to make a whirlpool with one’s hand? What if one twirls one’s hand around faster? It’s fun to think about all this with her, because I know literally nothing at all about whirlpools. Approaching a natural mystery from a perspective almost equally as naïve as your kid’s is a rare treat, in that you’re both figuring it out as you go (again, see also: “Where Does Coronavirus Come From?”, but with less existential dread—unless you really hate the idea of whirlpools). Kina and I are not much for long baths, but we have started to wait around for the evening’s first whirlpool, just to talk about it, and to howl like drunk frat boys when we see a particularly impressive one. If you don’t have a kid, it’s well worth taking a bath to see it.

Quick Reunion Is Had With Long-Lost Friend Niki

Kina’s friend Nikola has been out of the city for a while, and the two of them have missed each other tremendously throughout this very long year. As mentioned in an earlier edition (“Nikola Plays New Role in Bedtime Story Plots”), Nikola has become the main protagonist of Kina’s nightly stories—often landing in peculiar pinches like getting stuck in washing machines, waking up too early, or staying too long at Panda’s house. So when we learned that Niki would be coming to town, Kina was thrilled, and stayed thrilled up until the very moment she walked outside to see him. What ensued was a classic overwhelmed-preschooler moment, in which the children both refused to engage with each other and burst into tears because they weren’t engaging with each other. It was the saddest thing to see, because I know that both of them (like most preschoolers these days) aren’t getting anything near the daily quotient of Other Kids that they require, and Nikola and his mom were leaving town later that day. We vowed to get them together again sometime in the next few months, but parted ways. Later that day, Hannah and Kina ran across Niki on the street, and the two of them smoothed things over. I received several photos of two smiling kids on scooters, playing like it was 2019 and enjoying themselves in the way you’d expect for friends who have known each other since they were two months old. We miss them a lot, Niki and his mom, and it gives me all the more fuel I need to help us get through this so we can see them again.

dad

In the twelve minutes I just spent watching an overwrought video about the biggest whirlpools on Earth and reading the canonical Wikipedia article on whirlpools, I learned more about them than I—a person who has long assumed there are several 250-foot-wide whirlpools just permanently spinning in the ocean—have ever even casually contemplated. It turns out bathtub whirlpools are mostly different from what mariners think of as whirlpools, and while largish permanent whirlpools aren’t the width of a football field and won’t pull you into a drain at the bottom of the ocean, they are dangerous! Don’t mess with whirlpools!

I knew this question was coming. I had months to prepare for it, and yet I was unprepared last night when Kina turned to me at the dinner table and asked “Where does Coronavirus come from?”

I obviously don’t feel like I have to explain the entirety of this to her, or how viruses evolve and pass from species to species and person to person, but I do feel I owe her a thoughtful answer to things like this. As I thought about it, though, I found myself stumbling into the fallacies I’d forgotten from earlier this year. This virus doesn’t come from a place, or from a thing. There is no virus factory (or, at least, no one virus factory) or virus mommy and daddy. There was no single turning point at which the virus that got us sick in March came to be. Viruses evolve until they work, falling all over themselves in ways we never see. Noise becomes language when the noise makes sense—a thing that Kina has discovered alongside us hundreds of times over the last four years. This virus makes sense to our bodies, and to American society in particular—a virus particularly potent among the inconsiderate. But what do I tell her?

After work yesterday, she asked to watch the new episode of Daniel Tiger, which addresses this unique moment and its difficulties for both children and their parents. Daniel wants to go to the local neighborhood carnival, but it’s cancelled this year. Daniel misses his Grandpère and his friends, asking for each of them to visit the house—and being told each time that it isn’t possible. Daniel sees his father working on clocks in the living room, and wants to play, but his father asks him to find something to do on his own. Stitching all this together is a medley of familiar Daniel Tiger songs that talk about sadness and family and anger, with one song called “Grownups Keep You Safe”, which seems as much a reminder for parents to focus on staying calm and strong in the midst of chaos. One line in particular quotes Fred Rogers’ reminder, in the wake of 9/11, to “look for the helpers”—advice for preschoolers that adults often forget is their call to action. We are supposed to keep them safe, and to build a society of professional helpers who will keep them safe.

So, when Kina asked me where Coronavirus came from, I told her that I didn’t know, but that we know how to protect ourselves, that we can be safer if we wear our masks and wash our hands, and that her Mommy and Daddy and Grandma and Yeh-Yeh and Lala and Lolo Tim and Ken and Andrew are all doing that so that we don’t get sick. I told her that if we are all careful, that we’ll be able to see the people we love soon, and that we love her very much. She took it all in and then asked for a chia jelly, so I suppose it worked out. Your mileage may vary.

dad

We bought Mister Bunny at a toy store two doors down from Veselka on 9th Street about two years ago. Kina’s only puppet, Mister Bunny is typically caustic and rude, but shows occasional flashes of real empathy; he’ll be there for you in a pinch, a consolation when you are inconsolable. This morning, while I was dressing Kina, he hopped onto her arm and let down his hair a bit for a little song and dance, a touch of the old cha-cha-cha. We don’t really get to see Mister Bunny that much these days—he’s a bit of a supporting player in the menagerie—but I’ve always appreciated his brusque Brooklyn-Catskills attitude and his plush little tummy. There’s no real essay here; I just wanted you to know Mister Bunny.

Poop Looks Like a Little Witch Hat

I didn’t see the poop in question, but I could hear both real urgency in Kina’s call to witness it and stunned amazement in Laurea’s voice once she’d seen it. It must have been the spitting image.

Child Chunkin on Bread and Olive Oil Again

As I finished writing this headline (“Child Chunkin on Bread and Olive Oil”)—the last of four—in green marker ink, I realized suddenly that I’d written it before. This is the first time in 146 editions of The Daily Kina that this has happened, which says a lot about both how prolifically ridiculous she is and how much she loves bread and olive oil. Rather than rewrite the whole edition, I added the word “Again” to the end of the headline. History will look fondly on this editorial decision, I’m sure.

dad

One of the great things about Kina is the way in which she radiates pure confidence. It is hard to radiate anything approximating confidence in 2020, so when you see somebody pull it off the way she does, it really hits. Of late, she’s taken to striking poses at random—bold, fearless, confrontational stances that leave you stunned and asking how to pay for a subscription. Sitting on the couch? Expect a hand on a cocked hip. Walking in the door? Warrior pose. Disagreeing with your child? Back turned, double hands on hip; extended right hand to hold top of chair—you’re getting a talking-to. I walked into the living room this morning to find her throwing her hands up in the air and running headlong into the couch. She is animalistic. Periodically, I mirror her, and I can feel the balance of endorphins and adrenaline level out. She’s onto something, for real.

Seeking Novelty, Daddy + Kid Take a Drive in Rain

I had to step away from the computer after work yesterday, so I decided to take Kina out for a whirl in the car to get some fried chicken. Five minutes in, we hit the traffic doldrums, backed up forever as the skies opened up. Kina and I sat at a full stop under the J train for twenty minutes listening to rain pelt the roof of the car. She asked about the windshield wipers, if we would get wet from the sunroof (nope), whether I would carry her into the restaurant (yep). At Peaches Hothouse, in Bed Stuy, we pulled over to the curb and I unbuckled her from her car seat while the lower half of my body got drenched. She pulled up her collar over her face as we ran into the restaurant, grabbed our chicken, and returned—soaking wet—to the car. By the time we crawled home, the chicken was lukewarm, but Kina’s mac and cheese was still cheesey (“Cheddar cheese!”) and we were out of our rut. At bedtime, she told me, “I had a nice time with you today, Daddy.” Felt great.

Good bye, and dream big!

dad

When Kina says “night” here, she really means “before dawn”, as she flits about the apartment making mischief and “doing activity books”. This has, of course, been a recurring storyline here at The Daily Kina, and requires no further detail, but I will note that she has lived her solitary morning life in relatively quiet ways lately (no skritchety-scratching, no knocking, fewer cacophonous emptyings of Lego boxes).

And yet: a twist! Laurea has worked late for the last few nights, so I’ve put Kina to bed without Mommy around. The evenings have been pretty manageable on the whole, but the real surprise comes at dawn, when she calls out to us at the agreed-upon hour of 6:24 from her bed. It seems that Kina’s morning activity run is only relevant when both of us are around at bedtime, and that by my putting her to bed alone, we stand to gain half an hour of uninterrupted sleep. This is, you understand, a huge revelation.

Can we hope for a 6:30 wakeup? What impact can the adults of this household make on the world with so much extra slumber time? Can I just have Laurea stand outside the building every night until 7:45 PM? Reader, stay tuned.

Child Unexpectedly Enjoys Mushrooms

I was surprised, when ordering dinner for the two of us last night, that Kina chose a mushroom quesadilla for her meal. Careful readers will recall from the mushroom kit storyline that Kina does not like mushrooms, picking them meticulously from every slice of pizza and stir fry. I explained to her three times that a mushroom quesadilla has mushrooms inside—real mushrooms—and she nodded patiently at me. I asked if she would eat the mushrooms, and she assured me that she would. When the quesadilla arrived, I put it in front of her, and she opened it up (as she does all quesadillas) to promptly consume everything inside it—mushrooms and all. I have no idea what it is about the quesadilla that makes mushrooms acceptable (I know, for example, that if I were to put a slice of mushroom pizza in front of her, she’d have us disassemble it), but I felt just a little bit better watching her eat a quesadilla from the inside out like a little alien, knowing that her meal consisted of at least one ingredient that isn’t cheese. Tiny victories.

I hope you’re all not sad or sick, and that you’re managing to afford this publication at its steep daily rate of $22—except if you are in fact sad or sick, in which case Kina gives you a pass today.

dad

Our family is generally an ardent farmer’s market family, but we missed out on much of June and July as the crowds got heavier and lines at the Williamsburg Greenmarket ballooned. (For pandemic safety reasons, you can’t touch the produce yourself, which means every customer gets a personal shopper—a nice touch, but not great for throughput.) Opting out of early summer produce, though, meant missing out on the height of strawberry season, which was a huge bummer in the midst of a much larger bummer. It was a pleasant surprise last week, then, to find at the Union Square Greenmarket exactly one vendor with dozens of pints of sweet little Tristar strawberries. Kina noshed on a few tiny berries at the playground, eating through the rest over the next couple of days. We’d find her watching Octonauts with strawberry juice on her chin, blissfully unaware of the aftermath of her feast. Laurea found some more at the market this weekend—a late-season double-header!—and served up a few for breakfast today as a rare seasonal treat in the midst of an otherwise undifferentiated lump of days. Kina’s subsequent reflection on her preferred berry size is forgivable, but only because I take the blame for plying her for three years with flavorless, apple-sized, off-season Californian beastberries. I feel like there’s a moment in your development as a mature human being at which you discover that small berries are good berries and learn to leave the bland giants as traps for philistine babies. Kina’s not there yet, but we are working with her, so long as this languorous season holds. I am patient and will enjoy the little berries for myself in the meantime.

As the other headlines suggest, we went to the ocean again yesterday, which may or may not be the last time we go for the season. Kina avoided crabs, played with larvae and her friend Toma, and complained about sunscreen. I won’t pretend that I didn’t wish we owned a house outside the city, can’t say that working remotely from the beach for the last three months wouldn’t have been peaceful and nourishing, but we feel an incredible loyalty to Jacob Riis and the beach park that bears his name. I’m fiercely proud that we stayed in this city over the last five months, but can’t say we could have weathered it without the ocean. It has been our constant friend and salve. Avoid the atrocious clam strips.

dad

I made pasta last night—ziti in tomato sauce with pan-roasted eggplant and cubes of fresh mozzarella tossed in before serving. I had figured Kina would be “not an eggplant fiend” (as she would put it) and omitted that ingredient from her bowl, but given her track record for stripping entire pizzas of their cheese, I would have thought she’d appreciate the mozz. Not so! In the spirit of “this bacon is too chunky”, she declared that the cheese was too unwieldy to eat, and no amount of re-portioning would reduce it to an appropriate size. Accordingly, the enormous mozzarella was offloaded to Mommy’s plate. Free cheese being a reward in itself, we could hardly have imagined the bonus of today’s headline zinger, which brings together “to chunk on” (Kina’s longstanding favorite phrasal verb), her avid cheese obsession, and a sassy form of address whose origin in her vocabulary is unknown. I assume she’s picking all this up from She-Ra, but she also called me “Toots” this evening after her bath, and I know that’s from Daniel Tiger. I expect she’ll be calling fully grown adults “honey pie” by the end of the week.

“Why Do People Call Me Tina?”

My favorite thing that Kina does lately is a kind of mimicry of adults in routine social situations, and of those situations, the one I love best is “face-saving appearance of realization”, which is relevant to her question here—though she has deployed it several times in the last week while talking to her parents and other adults. When Laurea and I answered her last night by explaining that people sometimes don’t hear her name clearly, we asked what she does when people do call her “Tina”. She explained:

“I say, ‘My name is not Tina, it’s Kina,” and they say, ‘Ohhhhhhh, yes, yes, right, of course of course Kiiiiiiina, yes, yes, I know, of course. Ha! Ha!’

This is, in fact, exactly what grownups often do when confronted with their errors. She has us all pegged, people.

Force Captain Catra Is Planting Turnips

As I mentioned in an earlier newsletter, Kina has begun to identify as Catra from She-Ra lately (as opposed to She-Ra herself), which is fine, given Catra’s late re-alliance with the Rebellion. Catra has opened her own ice cream shop in our house, and she has a thriving garden of turnips. This morning, as I was searching for images of Catra’s face for our photo illustration on this story, Catra identified a picture of herself in full-on anime lovey-face, which she asked the art department to reproduce faithfully as Kina’s portrait. Catra has one blue eye and one greenish eye, except when she’s been captured by Horde Prime and has two bright green eyes. Catra loves this portrait of herself.

We had real trouble getting our young Parade art director working this morning, but she finally agreed to a theme. These are real outlines of her feet, and the drawings are scoops of ice cream. They can’t all be Norman Rockwell, I suppose.

dad

Laurea told me the other day that I “like to be annoying”, which, on reflection, I think she might have right. Kina certainly agrees, and after tolerating a long stretch of me repeating everything she said this morning, she pushed me down on the bed and started piling pillows on me, running to every room in our apartment to gather throw pillows, body pillows, baby pillows—anything that would muffle my voice. It was funny until it got hard to breathe; Laurea would tell me that I should have thought of that before I pissed Kina off. I should probably strive to be less annoying, but it’s such a pure thrill to needle the ones you love until they bury you alive in bedding.

Specific Balloon Grows Tiresome

I know you’re all dying to know the latest balloon goss—to hear that Kina’s balloons are arrayed throughout the apartment in cups like rotund sentinels, a latex menagerie. Well, friends, the news is not great. Sometime in the last two days, it seems all the water balloons met their demise. I had to ask Laurea about this just now, because I realized I hadn’t seen a balloon in a cup all day, and she informed me briskly that they were no more. (I don’t want to read more into it than that.) They are missed. The water balloons were survived, at the moment of their passing, by four balloons filled with air, two of which are now a few weeks old and slightly wrinkly. It is one of these two balloons for which Kina requested a replacement, preferably filled with water. Reader, there are now five balloons filled with air.

My proudest moment in this edition is the little butt dance. It’s tough to get the little shaky-shaky lines right.

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Speaking very literally, Kina has not lived in so many places, though I grant that her definition of “to live” is expansive—to include places in which she was born, places inhabited by the people she loves, places she has heard of, imaginary places ruled by She-Ra, outer space, and the city where she actually lives. At breakfast this morning, after her careful recitation of homes, Laurea and I responded with all the places we had lived. As a military brat, I had a lot of examples: Miami, Boston, Upstate New York, Ohio, Virginia, Oklahoma (“Ok-la-hoooooo-ma???? Ha! Ha!” said Kina), Germany (“Whoa!”), Upstate New York Again, and Brooklyn. Laurea clocked in with three: Manila, California, Brooklyn.

Though Laurea and I spent the first halves of our lives in various state of relocation, we have lived in this Brooklyn apartment for nearly twenty years, and we have no immediate plans to change that. What does it mean to raise a kid in a place? I have no idea, other than that I assume she may start and graduate elementary school with mostly the same kids and develop a more opinionated accent than I ever did. Laurea and I do want Kina to be worldly (a term that is more than a little loaded and definitely borderline colonizing), but it’s hard to say that either of us want to move anywhere in our adulthood near as much as the two of us did as kids. I took a step the other day towards admitting that we’re going to be here, in this apartment, for a while, when I measured Kina against the door frame of our kitchen and marked her height in pen. I’ve been afraid to commit to staying somewhere with her, without considering whether or not it even mattered. I don’t really care how many places she lives, as long as we have a family and a home together—a lesson I think my parents tucked away for me as our family moved around.

In a way, I think Kina has it right. She does live in California and Virginia (understanding that she could stay in her grandparents’ houses for the rest of her life if she wanted to). She does live in Etherea for most of the day—and certainly whenever She-Ra is on. And, while South America is perhaps a stretch, I think we can all agree that the lot of us live in space, if we’re being really honest about things. I hope we can be here, together, for a while.

I am incredibly proud of my bacon logo, which came to me like a bolt from the blue. It borders on “tasty-looking”.

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Ever since we set up the Morning Rules, Kina has taken to pretty elaborate pre-dawn creative exercise. We have, of course, discussed the Play-Doh noodles, but she’s better known lately for her avid work as a Lego magnate. Though she’s adhered to our agreement not to open the door or skritchety-scratch at it, the living room is directly outside our bedroom, and so Laurea and I often have to pile pillows on our heads to block out the sound of intense Lego construction (the pouring out of blocks on the floor, the sifting through those blocks to find the one pink block, the placement of the block, and so forth). Once she’s legally permitted to wake us, we often emerge to a multicolor urban superblock—an airy tower sitting atop a massive, windowless plinth. The young architect presents her commission to us, uncompromising in its disdain for the surrounding figurines. We blink in amazement. She asks to watch She-Ra.

“What Can We Use For This Big Giant Serious Booboo?”

It really was a big one! A minor contusion with various little scrapes, it didn’t appear to bother Kina, except that she really didn’t want me to wash it in the bathtub. To keep her occupied while I washed the rest of her body, we discussed the most effective method of bandaging a booboo of epic proportions. We figured, together, that four Hello Kitty Band-Aids would do the trick, so long as we were careful to put them all side by side—and to not use lotion. After she was all dried off, and we took a closer look at the damage, we agreed that three (lotion-free) Hello Kitty Band-Aids would be sufficient. All of which is to say, if you have a Big Giant Serious Booboo, you will need three Hello Kitty Band-Aids and absolutely no lotion. That should do.

“I’m She-Ra! I Fight For All People!!”

The real She-Ra does not make such broad claims, focusing instead on protecting Etherea, the generally helpless, and her closest friends. Kina’s willingness to extend She-Ra’s mandate in this way seems to have come from nowhere; no other hero or parent in this household routinely yells “I fight for all people!!” We are proud of her, and eagerly await her cabinet nomination.

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Kina is obsessed with how things smell these days, both for legitimately curious reasons (what frying onions smell like, or rain on pavement) and for absurd disgusting reasons (“What does my foot smell like, Captain Barnacles?!”) The idea that a thing’s smell carries with it either icky or noble connotations is something she’s trying on for size—studying me as I decide whether or not something’s aroma is good or bad. In many ways, she’s literally learning how to smell; she still hasn’t mastered the mechanics of sniffing, for example. (She blows out of her nose like she’s trying to clear her sinuses, looking to me for approval every time.) I don’t want to brag, but I used to have an amazing sense of smell, before I sacrificed it to the gods of SARS-CoV-2. It was like a superpower; I could smell a storm half an hour before it arrived, a leaking gas main in the street on a windy day, the particular kind of stew the woman two floors up was cooking on a Sunday. So when I see Kina’s eyebrows perk up suddenly, I feel like she’s smelling something that is rightly mine to smell. I’m jealous. I do enjoy making her laugh when I pretend to smell her feet and pass out, though—some consolation.

The “Aah, Yes, Yes” above Kina’s portrait is from breakfast, when she asked what Laurea and I were talking about (something about work, who knows). We explained it her, and midway, she vigorously and knowingly nodded her head—“Aaaaah, yeah, yeah. Yesss.” The kind of thing you do at a party when somebody is telling you something you realize you wish you’d never asked about. Our children, ourselves.

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Back when our friend Kelli first released This Book Is a Planetarium, Kina wasn’t yet a year old, which didn’t bode well for a popup book (no matter how well-built it is), and so we left it high up on a shelf for, well, a moment and an age like this. Given Kina’s skyrocketing curiosity, we decided finally to break it out and give her a tour of its many functioning machines. The spirograph got a bit of play a couple weeks ago, but today’s discovery was maybe the best spread in the book—a planetarium. We turned off the lights, switched on my phone’s flashlight, placed it under the dome, and stared in collective amazement at the stars of the Northern Hemisphere projected on our living room ceiling. Kina was rapt.

I’m not entirely sure that Kina grasps what stars are, to be honest, aside from characters in a song she loves. The idea that those stars are part of something bigger, that people without phones told stories about the stars, that we stitch the stars together to make sense of things—it feels like she’s beginning to encounter those ideas. I almost hesitate to explain it all to her, because then she’ll know it, and I can’t open that book for the first time again. Laurea makes fun of me because I’m scared of the vastness of space; I find comfort in the way that stars break up the darkness, but it frightens me that they’re so far away. I don’t know if I want Kina to feel at peace with the stars in their distance or to maintain an innocence about them, to know them only by the outlines they trace. Sometimes a giant bear is the less-scary option, and that’s the story I want to tell. Eventually, I’ll have to tell her the other story, another way that being a parent is about growing up twice.

Local Shelter Now Home to 4 Young Water Balloons

We think she’s hustling these balloons from unsuspecting parents, hovering close to the water fountain and looking sweet until they hand one over. When we’ve seen her do this, she always says “Thank you”, which feels like the appropriate exchange rate for a kid her age. Laurea and I joke that she’s a balloon rescuer, because she never, ever, throws these water balloons. She looks on in horror when other children toss them at the ground or pelt other kids with them. They’re spending mere seconds with their balloons; Kina keeps hers for literal weeks. She’s figured out a way of storing them in cups so they don’t burst, and only occasionally takes them out to cradle them in her hands. When one started to leak yesterday, she mourned it. This is not something I prepared for as a parent, and I’m assuming the phase will pass, touching as it is. Until then, we are going to have to find more cups. Think of Kina next time you see some little ruffian throwing a balloon, and send it comfort.

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Do I need to explain this headline? I do not want to have to explain it. I am glad she is potty trained.

“Talk To Puppy. He Knows Me and My Angries.”

Yesterday, Kina made it clear to me that Puppy could have unlimited hugs, even as my affections were unwelcome. She repeatedly told me to have Puppy declare his love for her, to which she invariably replied, “Awwww!” and drew him close for a snuggle. Between each snuggle, she would tell me also to confess my love, replying, “I’m not dealing with this, Daddy. I am not. Dealing. With. This.” Then, this morning, as we were exploring her frustrations, she redirected me to Puppy, her anger agent, who explained to me at length why Kina was angry—silently, in a language that only Kina can understand. I remain perplexed.

Local Physician Buys New Doctor Kit

The house doctor got a new kit yesterday, complete with stethoscope (fake), syringe (fake), and cloth bandages (real). This means that (fake) checkups conducted on our couch no longer require that she use a duck call to listen to my heart, nor a ballpoint pen to give me a shot. When I came out of the bedroom this morning, I encountered several meters of gauze unspooled across the living room, and a pediatrician intent on giving me an injection in my knuckles. She applied a liberal smearing of fake Neosporin and shushed me. I’m feeling great.

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At the playground yesterday, as Kina cavorted in solitude, a little girl came up to her and asked very sweetly, “Will you play with me?” Kina took a moment before replying, “I’m playing on my own right now, but I’ll see you soon,” and sprinting off. This, in a nutshell, is also how my playground brain works, and I’m actively watching our child fill in our shared portion of her Mendel square. Kina’s inherited choosiness about how and when she shares space with other people—including random kids, her family, and apparently her own shadow—is becoming evident in every aspect of her life.

Her continued exasperation and periodic shouts of “For the honor! of! Grayskull!” from across the apartment suggest she’s still Not Wanting To Deal with us and our unreasonable requests for her to—for example—stop swinging a cane around like a sword. This quest for independence and solitude is itself a double-edged cane, though, in that it brings with it some peace and quiet in the mornings; she’s been playing contentedly in the living room when she wakes up, saving her bombastic wake-up alerts for our agreed-upon deadline of 6:24 AM. We do not know when exactly she is waking up, and it’s not an investigation we care to take up anytime soon, but it’s conceivable she’s spending an hour or more with her stuffies—the only people she truly cares about.

Today’s Parade started with a beautiful watercolor that Laurea did of our big Greenmarket haul yesterday (see “Blueberries Are For Playground, Blackberries Are For Home”), and at first I hated to see her chop it up, but it seems that the Parade is more than the sum of its parts, which also include Kina’s trademark strip-o-papers and a selection of sticker page edges. This was the first week we’ve done the Greenmarket in almost two months, so it’s nice to see it celebrated here.

Today’s price gives our readership three options: Pay the steep price of $22, hand over your finest sippy cup, or (very controversially) be somebody with whom Kina is Not Dealing—a large and distinguished community, as we all well know.

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The ongoing fish research project that Kina and I are conducting has progressed to its jellyfish phase. After an initial obsession with the Cassiopeia jellyfish, which sunbathes lazily on the shallow coastal seabed, Kina has moved on to deeper sea invertebrates. She finds the humble moon jelly fascinating, but has shown interest in its scarier and weirder cousins—the kitschy Atolla, the spaghettilike Lion’s Mane, the unfathomable Stygiomedusa Gigantea). I am no fan of jellyfish and live in constant fear of encountering one in the wild, so our shared YouTubing here is a form of exposure therapy for me.

As it turns out, most of this morning’s headlines are about marine life. She encountered a photo of a hammerhead shark yesterday and very understandably lost it. (Have you looked at one recently?) In the world of large oceangoing things, Kina rates hammerheads well above most other sharks and whales, though still well behind her beloved and goofy ocean sunfish. (As with jellyfish, you can count me out when it comes to swimming with the things. Don’t trust something that can put its mouth around my head.) The other ocean headline here is a major plotline from the Octonauts Christmas special, which is mainly an opportunity for the Vegimals to strut their stuff by saving Captain Barnacles and the other non-Vegimal crew from certain death in a “snot blob” made of decayed organic matter. Today you will learn—as I have—that sea snot is a real thing, and that it is, of course, spreading wildly due to climate change. I’m trying to keep her inspired by the ocean, but these Wikipedia articles are depressing!

Becky + Joe, Bees, Seen Cavorting On Lavender

For our morning Daddy/daughter hang on Friday, we skipped off to the local coffee shop for our cheddar-cheese-and-bacon sandwich and sat outside by a patch of lavender. Kina hates bugs, longtime readers may recall, and I’ve been trying to make her comfortable and familiar with bees so that she doesn’t develop an irrational fear of these very important (and largely harmless) pollinators. So, to that end, the two bees who were drinking lavender nectar while we ate our sandwich came to be known as Becky and Joe; now she kind of thinks that all bees are either Becky or Joe, and she’s really hoping to meet more bees. I can’t help feeling that I’ve set my own trap here.

The price today, “$Katra”, is a reference to a villain from She-Ra. She was Katra all day at the playground today (except when she was frustrated and self-identified as She-Ra herself). Katra’s super mean and underhanded but you kind of get that she’s been hurt in the past. I dunno, I’m getting too into this show.

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I think I know what she means when she says she does impressive things to scare people—most of those impressive things look a lot like walking around with a stick or cane yelling “For the honor! Of! Grayskull!” at the top of her lungs. If you aren’t expecting that at 5:30 AM, it is quite scary, but otherwise it’s merely impressive. On a more existential level, though, the impressive things she does—comforting us with gentle whispers, sounding out words, learning what rules mean, building absurdly large towers—are in fact quite scary, in the way that watching a human brain acquire skills is scary. I find on most days that I’m impressed with her, and that what’s scary is setting this person up to be okay in the world outside the apartment door, but I’ll let her believe it’s the shouting.

Kid “Not Dealing With This”

Today, she is Dealing with:

• Mommy

• Andrew

• Des

• Grandma

• Lala

Today, she is Not Dealing with:

• Daddy

• Nikola (sorry, Nik, she wavers on this)

The way you know she is not dealing is that she is walking around quietly shaking her head, muttering to herself, “I am not dealing with this” and waving her hand around behind her. Neither Laurea nor I have any comment on the matter of where she learned this.

“Close Your Eyes / And Think Of Something Happy / You Can Think, Think, Think / About Your Favorite Things”

All I have to say about this particular Daniel Tiger song is that I had only ever heard Kina sing it until about one minute ago, and that when she says “think”, it still comes out as “tink”—so when we sing this song at night, it’s mindblowingly sweet to hear her sing “You can tink, tink, tink about your faaaavorite tings”.

Have a good weekend, and may you deal with all your tings.

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Kina’s room (once our home office) is small and oddly-shaped, a triangle roughly thirteen feet from end to end. At its narrowest point, it is six feet across; at its longest, ten. On its most spacious side, next to a closet, are six precious square feet of IKEA changing table (STUVA/FRITIDS). That STUVA/FRITIDS holds many swaddling blankets, a folding crib, a toy barn, and a dispenser of wipes—none of which (except for the barn) is useful to us anymore. Back when she was eighteen inches long, we would lay her down on that table to change her diapers, and it was very cute (the baby, not the diapers). But the other day, two things happened: I measured her, finding that she is now literally twice as big—three feet tall; and I actually looked at her while I was putting her pajamas on, enormous—her legs dangling completely off the table—realizing suddenly that what she was teetering on was a very large piece of baby nostalgia.

This is a person who can put on her own clothes now, who no longer craps in her own pants, who is so tall when she stands on the changing table that it is difficult to dress her from that position. We have waited too long to carry STUVA/FRITIDS downstairs. We have done so because we are having trouble coming to terms with her big-kidness, and that denial manifests in several other objects in this house: the book Pat the Bunny, two artisanal rattles, an ice pack for milk bottles, many swaddling blankets, and 164 diapers. While I will probably keep the expensive rattles, we need to get rid of everything else—including the changing table. Laurea, Kina, and I have discussed on multiple occasions the right piece of furniture to replace it, settling ultimately on “a tent or teepee”—the kind of space that is Kina’s alone, and not a place we share, which feels unfair (given the number of diapers we’ve changed) but is just. Her small triangular bedroom-née-office is growing up, and while I’m not entirely comfortable with it, I’m perfectly capable of buying a teepee and obviously need to get over it.

Tiny Forensic Detective Hunts Down Source of Blood on Floor

It looked like tiny splashes of raspberry juice on the linoleum. Kina wanted to know what it was. She crawled around the living room floor, identifying little patches here and there. We were stumped, because nobody had identified a booboo. As it turned out, the booboo was secret and small, and on Kina’s big toe. We put a Hello Kitty bandage on it. We cleaned the floor. As the resident anxious person, I have spent the rest of the day looking for the little sharp culprit, which remains at large.

Welcome, new readers of The Daily Kina. I hope you like reading about a specific three-year-old every night. There are a number of back issues to read in our archives, which—if read carefully—will explain things like the fluctuations in price, Kina’s obsession with rainbows, the television show Octonauts, and my progress as an amateur portrait artist. We are one hundred and thirty three days into the life of this publication. Let’s see how long we can keep this up together.

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I remember bouncing around the living room with Kina when she was six months old, singing along to “Mahna Mahna”, the classic Sesame Street jazzy absurdity. She’d stare at me, puzzled, as I scatted my way through the verses, then laugh as I bopped her around for the chorus like a Muppet. “Mahna Mahna” is a classic of the genre. “Mahna Mahna” is on my playlist of emergency toddler car songs. It is only in the five minutes that preceded my first draft of this newsletter that I discovered the origins of “Mahna Mahna”—a scene from an Italian mondo documentary about Swedish sexual mores. From its Wikipedia page: “The song accompanied a scene in the film set in a sauna which gave its original title ‘Viva la Sauna Svedese’ (Hooray for the Swedish Sauna).” This tawdry new information does not in any way diminish the joy I felt when my kid, out of nowhere, strutted across the living room yesterday singing our favorite song. I am looking forward to the day when she randomly bursts into our second favorite song: Midnight Star’s groundbreaking 1983 classic “No Parking on the Dancefloor” (whose origins, best I can tell, are less spicy).

“Lemme Show You. You Don’t Know What I’m Talkin’ About!!!”

In today’s episode of “Lemme show you. You don’t know what I’m talkin’ about”, we are sitting at the breakfast table, and Kina is explaining to us why she does not like toast. “It makes my teeth grind,” she says, then thinks for a moment about her choice of words. “Grind! Grind like the pink box with the pig!” We have no recollection of any box with a pig on it, no pink boxes, no grinders. It sounds ominous. We ask her, repeatedly, to describe the pink grinding box with a pig on it, as she grows progressively more frustrated. Finally, she takes Laurea’s hand and says, “Come, let me show you.” She takes Laurea to the kitchen, points to the top of the pantry at a bag of pork rinds—pink, with a pig on it. “Those are pork rinds,” Laurea tells her. “Rinds! Grinds! Pork Grinds!” She is thrilled. We feed her pork rinds for breakfast. She makes a little sandwich of them with her toast. We live, we learn.

Doot dooo da doo doo

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After almost an entire summer and one very long tirade at the playground, Kina finally convinced us to buy her one (1) pack of water balloons. Most typical kids would burn through a pack of twenty balloons in five minutes, but given Kina’s predilection for nurturing water balloons as pets—as noted in last month’s “Water Balloon Lasts All Day”—we’ve made our way through exactly two of them in four days. After the first exploded on her way back from the playground, I intentionally under-filled the second balloon, which she managed to keep around for long enough that I began to worry she was developing an attachment disorder, so I hid it in our room overnight. My concern proved warranted, because she felt strongly enough about its absence to knock repeatedly on our door at five in the morning (a glaring loophole in our morning rules, which I will lay out shortly), saying that the water balloon had “gotten lost”. Naturally, I had forgotten that we’d hidden the balloon in the first place, so I went hunting in the living room for a few minutes before waking Laurea up. She pointed to the radiator, and we sent Kina back to play house with her precious inflatable child. I don’t know why we try to out-maneuver our our daughter, or why we care so much about restricting her access to water balloons. (Of all the environmentally-wasteful things we could be paying attention to, they consume a disproportionate amount of our attention.) All I know is that she managed to lose the balloon herself sometime later in the day, which means there is an unexploded piece of water ordnance somewhere in our home. I have already produced a third water balloon for her. She has already popped it.

Knocking On Door At 5 AM Technically Does Not Break Rules

Here are the morning rules, in order of their creation:

1. If you have to go potty in the middle of the night, you can take yourself, because the gate is open. Afterwards, you can put yourself back to sleep. Do not wake Mommy and Daddy.

2. In the morning, you may not open Mommy and Daddy’s door until the light is green (on her wake-up clock).

3. No scritchety-scratching at the door.

We did not technically forbid knocking. Rule three has now been amended accordingly.

“Nice Place Ya Got Here,” Says Bunny Puppet

It is only after writing the amazing dek on this story—“Stuffed Rabbit Issues Hollow Threat”—that I realized it should have been the main headline. I’ll tell you about the bunny at another time. He’s a troublemaker.

In the last minutes before going to press, Kina insisted I make this issue The Daily Tunip, in honor of the intrepid “Vegimal” from The Octonauts. That is why there is so much Tunip furniture and so little Tunip journalism.

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Given the loving soliloquy about Rice Car the other day, you’d think we didn’t care about the subway, but you’d be wrong. I am a massive fan of New York City’s subway system, having watched its recovery over the last twenty years; we as a family are card-carrying straphangers. Laurea and I actually talked about getting a car years ago, in the months before Kina was born, but we decided to lean into public transportation instead—and that decision served us well, carrying us all over the city with our newborn kid. Kina’s grown up on the train. She knows the different lines, learned the letters “L”, “J”, and “M” by watching for approaching trains, and habitually waves at train operators (all of whom wave back heartily, if prospective parents are curious). In the months preceding the pandemic, we realized she didn’t need a stroller anymore, and getting in and out of stations was suddenly a breeze. Soon she’d give up her nap, and our ride radius would balloon! We could ride to Central Park and not come home until after dinner! We could do the Transit Museum and Chinatown in the same day! Then, of course, the thing happened, and all bets were off (cue Rice Car).

Yesterday was our first time on the train as a family in five months, and it wasn’t stressful in the least. We had a bench all to ourselves, and Kina wore her mask patiently. (A note here on kids and masks: People tend to assume that kids won’t tolerate them, but Kina is totally nonchalant about wearing hers, and I’ve seen similar behavior from other three year olds. To them, it’s no more absurd than being told to wear pants.) We traveled only one stop, to the Lower East Side, but I would have felt comfortable going all the way across town, and Kina was excited to be back on the J. Moreover, I was excited, and grateful for a transit system that is still holding it together (even as it confronts the reality of massive losses). I want Kina to grow up with the subway, as challenging as that sounds, but I’ll take every ride we can get.

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P.S. The price today comes with a horrible discount, but if you do eat eggs with your butt, please send along a note and we’ll refund your twenty-two bucks.

We used to be a cussin’ house, but ever since Kina started to speak, we have pulled sharply back—not because we are afraid of her becoming a linguistic ruffian, but because we are frankly too lazy to deal with the judgment of other parents in the matter of coarse language. This means that I, too, have become a “frickin” person, which is a source of endless amusement to Laurea—we assume Kina picked it up from me, but I can’t say I’ve heard her use the word before today. As a miracle of language acquisition, she is using it appropriately, in its nuanced “yet another irritating…" sense: “I have [yet another irritating] booboo”, “I stubbed [yet another irritating] toe”. The bathtub booboo is, to be fair, a relatively common issue in our house (which explains the “frickin”), and it must always be respected; no heavy scrubbing of the booboo, the occasional standing bath to avoid dipping the booboo, the immediate bandaging of the booboo after. It’s no small source of pride to me that our daughter is constantly crashing into things and tumbling off platforms—we wear our bruises well here—but of course we want her to weather the booboos well. In a way, then, it feels good to know that she can vent her frustration, as it takes the pressure off of us to keep her from experiencing it in the first place. In this frickin’ frustrating year, it’s nice to fire off a mild obscenity to clear the air—I’d encourage you all to do it, in Kina’s honor.

Someone Puked on the McCarren Swings

File this under “things Kina says that she will say again in sixteen years”—when she is a college student on the way to the dining hall on a Sunday morning (should that ever happen to college students again). She would want me to tell you that the puker was not her.

“Daddy’s Talking And Disturbing Me. That’s What ‘Disturbing’ Means”

In case you were wondering, the sound of me talking is the very definition of the word “disturbing”—a concept she is exploring in some depth this week. Besides the sound of my voice, you can also find me disturbing her by sitting on the couch and pausing her TV show.

Parade is pretty much all Kina today, with the exception of one or two construction paper cuttings. The inverted green teardrop is from me, as is the rushed wordmark at the top (as always). The theme today was supposed to be “boats”—we leave it to you to find the connection.

Hope your week is frickin’ fine, and may the chaos of the world leave you all undisturbed. Send this newsletter along to a friend if you think they need some mindless toddler news.

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I started a daily ritual of reading Goodnight Moon to Kina before she could understand books, rituals, or the moon. We shared it consistently every night until she was almost two and a half. With all that traffic, it’s gotten some wear; there’s a little bite mark (two tiny incisors and a canine) that serves as a reminder of how small she was when we started reading it, and the spread that includes the passage “Goodnight little house, and goodnight mouse” is a bit sticky from all the times she leaned in to smooch the little mouse cameo. Kina, like many kids, will get obsessed with a book for weeks on end, learning it until she has it memorized (She once accurately recited the entirety of Madeline to me while I was changing her diaper.) But Goodnight Moon was the very first book she memorized with us, and in our nightly litany, she’d finish every page herself—leaning particularly hard into the last word of “Goodnight to the old lady whispering ‘hush’”.

Though we get a lot of mileage out of each book she owns, she’s begun to forget them as her library grows, the dialogue no longer in her head, the names less familiar. “It’s been a long time since we read this,” she’ll tell us, as we set off to relearn Pierre or Corduroy or Little Owl’s Night. As we read, I try to dwell a moment to let her finish the lines; sometimes she does (“hush”), but when she doesn’t, we just rest on the page quietly—the kind of silence that follows a recalled memory.

Ever since we first read Goodnight Moon, I’ve always amended the last farewell of the book, a goodnight to noises, to say, “Goodnight Kinas everywhere”. She does remember that part; it’s less fanciful, but this is our book, and it’s one of my favorite things to say to her before I take her to bed.

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Last night, we lit some candles, set the table, dimmed the lights, and shared dinner together as a family with Hannah—Kina’s best friend and long-time nanny. Laurea made moqueca, a Brazilian seafood stew, which we chased with cupcakes and approximately nine thousand live performances of “Let It Go”. And we talked—a lot. Hannah, Laurea, and I don’t often have a chance to sit and chat about things unrelated to the tactical ins and outs of Kina’s day; we look forward to these meals together to joke with each other and pretend things are normal for a night—dinner, cake, music—because raising Kina as a shared endeavor in 2020 feels like flying through a storm. And so, aside from the jokes, we try also to use these moments to re-establish what the three of us are collectively comfortable with, how the parks and playgrounds are feeling, what to plan for in the months ahead, what’s showing up in the research. It’s a wildly different kind of relationship than we all had before this year set in, but it’s working—us against the pandemic, our squad of protection for Kina, a family. Laurea and I are not religious, but Kina’s learned from Hannah how to pray, and when Kina whispered blessings over us at the table before we ate last night, it felt right for us—to have her call, by candlelight, on a higher power to protect her protectors.

The other day, when I said I do this for Kina, for us, and for you? Today’s paper is really just for us. But I wanted you to know that Hannah stayed for dinner last night, and that we had a good time.

Kid Reminisces About “Pumpkin Lanterns”

We first saw the pumpkin lanterns in these pages back in April (pictured below), when Kina called, frightened, from her room late at night to ask, “Are the pumpkin lanterns in the sky?” Turns out we’d stumbled on her first nightmare. Back in October, five million years ago, Kina and I would try to spot Jack-o-lanterns on all the stoops between our house and the school; she loved that game, and so I was surprised that her mind had chosen that item to haunt her (though I suppose the point of Jack-o-lanterns is to be at least mildly scary). For weeks afterwards, when I put her to bed, I’d open the curtain so that she could peer outside and check for pumpkin lanterns. Her more recent dreams and nightmares have featured marine life; at breakfast today, she told us she’d dreamt of sharks chasing her at the beach and mused wistfully about those carefree nights when her only worries were of pumpkins. I wish it was just the pumpkins for me, too, kid.

dad

The early wake-ups are killing us. We recently took down the gate in front of Kina’s room, hoping that she’d walk herself to the bathroom when she woke up—which maybe she is—who knows—but it does not appear to have slaked her thirst for our attention in the wee hours o’ the morning. Our most recent countermeasure is to pretend that we are in a slumber so deep that we cannot be roused, hoping that the creepy velociraptor that is our child will move on to some other form of entertainment. This works, for short stints, as long as she has something amusing. For each of the last few days, that amusement has been the 36 cans of Play-Doh that I accidentally bought on Amazon, which she passes through her little pasta extruder, making long chubby noodles in different color gradients: lavender to pink, green to orange, yellow to sky blue. She saves them for us until she thinks we should wake up, which I’d like to say is at a reasonable time like 6:24, when the wake-up light turns green, but is usually half an hour after she’s initially tried to wake us—today, she gave us until about 5:45. This is manifestly unacceptable. We have re-enlisted the help of a woman we call “Dr. Pam” (not actually a doctor), a Canadian child sleep aficionado who got us through our last bout of horrible sleep practices by telling us sternly not to be weaklings. This time, her strict admonition is that we are to walk her silently back to bed over and over again until it is reasonable for her to wake up, and to make “the rules” very clear to her at night. We dread this, but will report back. Until then, noodles.

“Kina? I Don’t Know Her. Is She a Boy or a Girl?”

The kid is now spending most of her time with us as an Octonaut—Dashi, the “sweet-natured IT officer” dog—and has taken to asking us about Kina the strange human and what he/she/they are like. I will go so far as to role play as Captain Barnacles, but refuse to engage in deliberate dissociation. I have my limits. Also, I will reiterate that once you know how to draw one Octonaut, you can draw all of them. It’s all in the ears.

“I Couldn’t Do Tracing Cuz My Lip Hurts”

You know how you’ll be trying to do a thing these days—work, eat, wake up, take a shower—something simple and not exhausting, but all your energy is just drained by living through this year? You are tracing with a busted lip. This year is our busted lip. We trace nonetheless.

dad

The tropical storm is probably the most newsworthy headline in today’s edition—a rare cameo from actual current events in the world of The Daily Kina, a publication that exists in part to get me away from the news (most of which is frankly devastating; the news of the day in my other newspaper job is the horrible explosion in Beirut.) I try always to remember that there are three different audiences for this paper: Laurea and I, who need a place to reflect on Kina’s absurdity; Future Kina, whom I want someday to read these and see what she was like in this weird sliver of time; and all of you, who are reading this both to understand the mental state of a preschooler who is largely unaware of [waves hands wildly] and to give yourselves some shelter emotionally from [waves hands wildly]. All of this is to say that, while it’ll be good for Kina to know there was a storm on August 4th, it’s probable that at least one of you still has no power and didn’t open these pages to be reminded of it, but I can assure you that your frustration likely pales in comparison to the annoyance the leaf booboo has caused her.

“Daddy, Why Did You Come Out of Your Room?!”

I took last week off, after realizing suddenly that I was spending sixteen hours a day in my bedroom and seeing how that might have been affecting my emotional health. I have worked from home in the past, but not since Kina was born, and so we’ve had to adapt to sharing this apartment for our respective jobs (mine, taking video calls and typing loudly in the bedroom; hers, playing with Legos and singing in the living room). Inevitably, I do have to open my door, and I always have to explain myself to her: I’m going to the bathroom, or I’m grabbing lunch, or I just wanted to see her. Half the time, she shepherds me back to the room, joining me very occasionally to see coworkers and talk about gummies (as noted in a minor story from the July 25th issue). I like being able to see the kid during the day, honestly, and I’m incredibly grateful that we are able to work with Hannah to help us balance child care. That I am, for the most part, trapped in my room while working is an extremely small price to pay—in comparison both to the challenges others are facing with lost work right now, and to what this would have been like if Kina were still a baby. That she can tell me specifically what she needs me to do is actually a whole lot better than being screamed at, on the whole. On my way into the bedroom-office yesterday, Kina suggested that my job is essentially to talk about coffee with coworkers, which is a more useful and pointed midyear review of my work than I think I’ve ever gotten from a manager. I’d say that I hope someday to work for her, except that I actually do.

A Jellyfish Flew All the Way Over From California and Knocked the Doorknob Off Lolo Tim’s Head + Put It In the Mud

That was literally the dream she had. So much better than any of mine. I’m fond of the little “PUNT” to illustrate the noise a jellyfish would make if it were kicking a doorknob off of somebody’s head.

I don’t want to always make these newsletters so moody and philosophical. I gotta pace myself. Thanks for humoring me today. While I’ve got you humoring, though, one last note about the real world—you should donate to the Lebanese Red Cross.

dad

I have two main theories for the origin of the term “Rice Car”, and neither of them is racist. The first theory comes from a headline in the April 26th edition of The Daily Kina: “Daddy Scolded on Madcap Drive to Corona Park / ‘Why You Going Like a Race Car, Man?!’” (I was driving 27 in a 25, for the record.)

It is plausible that Kina’s reference on that day to our “Race Car” would eventually drift, as many of her absurdist terms do, to “Rice Car”. The second theory is simply that the car—a late-model Ford Fusion hybrid—is white, and pretty much anything white in Kina’s world is “white like rice”. Now that I am writing this, though, it seems possible that both are true, which would bolster the argument for Kina’s evident cleverness.

In either case, the Rice Car was a welcome addition to the family, in that it gave us the freedom to visit places in this pandemic-stricken city that were hard to get to and sparsely populated: The Rice Car drove us to Randall’s Island, where we would eat picnics while watching boats traverse Hell Gate. We hid out from the rain and listened to George Michael in the Rice Car. It was on the hood of the Rice Car that we ate a Joe and Pat’s vodka sauce pie after hiking the Staten Island Greenbelt. Our many trips to Fort Tilden (a route I can now drive in my sleep) were made in the Rice Car. We visited Corona Park, the Cloisters, and FDR State Park in its cozy confines, and whenever we were headed home, Kina would point to it in the parking lot, saying “There’s the Rice Car!!!”

Our rental car got us out of the apartment at a critical and tense moment—in the weeks after our family’s two-week quarantined recovery from COVID-19, an extremely scary time when we desperately needed novelty and distraction—and during which long-term extendable deals on rental cars were incredibly cheap. It was on the same weekend, actually, that I started drawing The Daily Kina, though it isn’t formally named in these pages until May 19th (“Kid Demands New Car / ‘Why We Still Have This Rice Car?’”)

Most of the story of our weekends since then—and by extension all the weekend editions of this newspaper—is a product of having rented the Rice Car. I’m not sure what our life in the last four months would have been like had we not made the decision to spend our money on it, but that life would almost certainly have revolved around the part of this neighborhood we could have walked to, which includes very few trees, sparse open space for a kid to run amok, and considerably fewer vodka sauce pies.

I have not wanted to own a car in New York since a relatively brief stint in the early aughts, when I owned little red ‘94 Toyota stick-shift pickup. After it got rear-ended overnight by a trash truck, I drove the pickup back to my parents’ house and swore off NYC car ownership forever. The subway has served me well, and it’s served our family well; I am deeply committed to public transit, and I have been very happy not owning a car. But now that we’ve returned the Rice Car to its home, we’re considering buying a car of our own—a decision I never figured I’d make, but which makes just enough depressing sense to a parent in today’s New York to feel like the right move—we have discovered a part of this city that is hard to get to, and we need a way to get to it. Whatever we buy will be larger, more comfortable, less dopey, considerably less white, and absolutely no more lovable than the Rice Car. There are many white cars, but only one Rice Car—I thank Avis for making it available to us and I hope the next family who rents it loves it half as much as we did. I’m sorry about all the crumbs behind Kina’s seat.

dad

Discipline is an issue, and so politeness is the talk of the house these days. Of the three key phrases—“please”, “thank you”, and “I’m sorry”—we are in particular focused on two: “Please”, for Mommy, who faces a constant barrage of demands; and “I’m sorry”, for Daddy, who is the target of most of the physical abuse here. I sat her down on Sunday morning to explain how important it is to be polite and considerate, and how her parents also try to use these words in their lives with the people they care about. Still, after breakfast this morning, she tossed her used bib at Laurea in the kitchen, and we had to start the whole thing over. We used to threaten to call Ms. Ines—the most sophisticated disciplinarian in her classroom—and discuss incidents like these with her, but that promise has lost its sheen. So now, we do our best simply to demonstrate civility in an effort to build civility in Kina. For what it’s worth, in the minutes leading up to this morning’s print run, our publisher did in fact make a promise that she would not hold our supplies hostage, which seemed like progress—until she followed it up by demanding an episode of Octonauts. A ray of light, though: she did say “please”.

dad

I learned a lot about the integrity of sand holes yesterday, having spent an entire day slowly expanding one at the beach. I learned that that you cannot simply add stairs to an existing hole, that instead you must carve them into the land surrounding the hole. I learned that no amount of wet sand will actually prevent a giant hole from slowly filling up in a matter of minutes, and that it requires constant tending. I learned that kids at the beach love holes, and that you can quickly become the most popular parent at the beach if you put your back into it—which I did, with a little plastic shovel, to the detriment of my back. Kina, for her part, was proud to be the primary beneficiary of this enormous pit, and she guarded it jealously from invasive toddlers; when she was not in the water, she was tumbling into the hole and asking me to build more stairs. As a former kid who appreciated a good fort and bunker, I was pleased to make her requested improvements. Before we left the beach, when I started shoving sand into our construction project (safety first), a neighboring parent asked me to leave it empty so that her toddler, who had been eyeing it from inside his (much smaller) hole, could take ownership of our huge and well-appointed cavern. We graciously obliged—a good sand pit is hard to come by in this market.

Parents Claim TV Is Broken in Apparent Scam

We have come to beware a tired child bearing requests for TV shows, as it typically ends in disaster, tears, and misery. She was extremely tired last night as we unpacked our dinner (which, as noted elsewhere in this edition, she did not eat) and begged us for “a show”. Knowing better, we told her the TV was broken. She asked if I could fix it. No, I replied, I cannot, but Eddie the Super might be able to. She asked when he would fix it. Tomorrow, we ventured, at the earliest. She demanded proof that the TV was in fact broken. I handed her the remote while I unplugged the power strip. Pressing every button on the remote, she asked why the lamp had turned off, but reluctantly accepted our assertion and made off to the bathtub. This, reader, was a huge and hard-earned win, but it did not keep us from giving her an episode of Octonauts at 5:45 this morning, just for the extra sleep.

The Parade this week took shape over the course of the last few days. Our friend Kelli Anderson built an amazing popup book called This Book is a Planetarium, which we recently showed Kina for the first time. The last page in the book is a working spirograph, so we drew a bunch of these designs, and Laurea helped Kina watercolor them in. Kina’s neon abstraction this week, according to her, is a journey, which gives the magazine its weekly theme.

All of you, strangers or not, are beautiful. Remember that as you head into the mouth of this week. Don’t worry—we’ll keep the hole around for you.

dad

This edition is largely a collection of quotes I’ve been holding onto all week, but the headline quotation is reflective of Kina’s recent cognizance of her own newsworthiness. See this quote, from June 15th: “My favorite part of the whole day was eating cheese from the tacos! Put that in the newspaper, Daddy!” I regret in hindsight not including that on June 16th, as it seems you’d probably have wanted to know that nothing on the Ides of June could beat a cheesy taco.

Typically, I’ll try to look into whatever it is our publisher asks us to, but there is a longstanding division of church and state in this newsroom—as in most—that protects the integrity of our journalists (me) from the business interests of the publisher (Kina). This occasionally leads to internal strife, as when the publisher steals my markers or attempts to crumple up the morning edition—the editorial staff will simply print a new one, but this can seriously delay delivery to our subscribers. Lately, the newsroom has found that distracting the business office with an episode of Octonauts will give us enough time to report and close the edition before she has an opportunity to meddle. While we have always let the publisher set the price (which has hovered roughly in the $22.32.30 range or so for weeks now) and occasionally offer a quote for the portrait, we steadfastly refuse to allow her to dictate the tenor or direction of our coverage. After all, we’re working for free.

You can probably see that I was going to include a top hat in Kina’s formal portrait today, but I didn’t have time to see how top hats look on a real head, because the episode of Octonauts was nearing its end (“Creature report! Creature report!”). I am nonetheless proud of the way I drew our little W. Randolph Hearst, lording it over me with her cigar as I toil away, back bent, sitting on a rickety stool. This is the state of journalism today, people. Look it up.

See you for the Sunday edition, everybody.

dad