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.

dad

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.

dad

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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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

It was crazy hot out yesterday, so after Kina woke up from her nap(!) I offered her a choice: Go run in a hydrant or watch a movie. As soon as I said it, I knew I’d made a critical error in judgement, and so I spent the next ten minutes trying to convince her of the merits of running through the water before the rain started, telling her we’d go buy a snack, offering to take her out on the scooter. But the movie prevailed, as I should have foreseen, and per the child’s demand, Moana was cued up.

A few minutes into the movie, I was feeling better overall. The air conditioning was a lot better than a rando hydrant on a 93 degree day, and Moana is actually a really good movie that holds up to repeat viewings. The soundtrack is good, the jokes are good, The Rock is outstanding, the emotional climax is good. You know what else is good? Taking a nap while your child sings along to a Disney movie featuring a non-white princess.

This morning, Kina requested some time with the Moana activity book, which is basically a coloring book of the entire movie, peppered throughout with Moana-themed spelling exercises. At the back of the book is a single, precious sheet of stickers; from it, Kina peeled off a particularly angry-looking Moana decal, affixing it to my upper arm like a tattoo while I looked at my email. I finally noticed it at lunch today, having walked all over the city on my day off like a huge Moana fan (pictured below).

In closing, true Moana heads will understand how thrilled I am with today’s logo.

Local Artist Discusses New Commission

When I asked Kina to draw in the bottom right corner the “something beautiful” that she was pretty sure I would like, Kina instructed me instead to draw a picture of a folded napkin, which I think means I have become an art fabricator in the studio of a tiny Jeff Koons. On most days, the beautiful things she’s drawing for us are abstractions in orange and pink marker. Today’s (which will likely make the Parade on Sunday) featured “a boot”. Kina is no rote drafter, does not draw horses, has no love of figure. She is proud of her work, though, even as she resists the public’s efforts to understand it. Less Koons, more Twombly, maybe. You’ll probably like it. If you do, let her know.

dad

As Kina becomes less and less a toddler (which, let’s face it, that ship has sailed) and more and more a kid, we’re all wrestling with the question of what it means for her to grow up. We talk with her all the time about the fact that she’s literally growing up (It seems her legs have grown four inches since we’ve been locked down), but it’s started to become apparent to her that growth is happening, and she doesn’t like it. The other day, she asked to sit on Laurea’s lap to eat dinner (which happens more often than we’d like, but it’s clear that they both find comfort in the arrangement, and so it persists). Kina’s legs have now gotten so long that she has to sit side-saddle on her mom’s lap, and so she could look Laurea directly in the eye and tell her that she really didn’t want to grow up, and that she wanted to stay with Mommy forever. Similarly, last night, she refused to let me leave the room at bedtime and begged me to hug her and never stop. Bedtime has rituals (a storyline that charter subscribers will remember), but I also didn’t want to let her go.

We’re all torn up over the idea of growing up generally, but there are really two things that I hate about this moment: First, that she doesn’t like the idea of growing up, which is unfair and totally out of my control; and second, that I’m frankly scared these days by the idea that she will have to grow up and navigate this version of the world. I have to believe that as callous as this society has become, it’s still more likely to give three-year-olds a pass on some of the interpersonal horrors this year, but such is not true for adults (or, tragically, even older kids), and so we find ourselves grabbing Kina into bear hugs at every opportunity and squeezing her tight—trying to hold her in, wrap her up, pack her molecules together so densely that whatever life throws at her will shatter on contact. I reckon that no parent wants their kid to grow up, even in the best of circumstances, but I feel like the pandemic should allow kids to stay the same height and age until a vaccine is produced and a new president is procured. Just a little hold up while things settle down, and then we’ll all feel better.

Before we go, a quick correction to yesterday’s edition, prompted by our Canadian friend Davin: Our description of the show Octonauts yesterday suggested merely that it was “British”, but the show is in fact a Canadian creation, based on a series of children’s books by Vicki Wong and Michael Murphy at meomi.com. Davin suggests they are lovely, and we have no reason to dispute that. We regret the error.

dad

This is a pretty straightforward edition, really. Not a lot to explain here, with the exception of the existence of Octonauts, a British marine biology cartoon styled roughly after Thunderbirds, featuring a cast of animals who all have more or less the exact same head (which I only realized after drawing them this morning) and a variety of special skills in undersea rescue, all paired somewhat inexplicably with a crew of energetically loyal but preverbal vegetables who perform simple tasks like opening hatches. They all live and work together in a fortress beneath the waves and maintain a fleet of custom submersibles, to which they repair at the slightest sign of fish trouble; they then tootle off to resolve these emergencies by, variously: towing a creature to safer seas, carrying it back to Octonaut headquarters, separating it from other fish, and careful counseling. Invariably, the fish (all of whom are experiencing challenges plausibly specific to their species) are saved by a pirate cat, an engineer bunny, a doctor penguin, or (very occasionally) an erudite octopus. Leading this ragtag fauna is The Captain, a bear with good ideas and a booming voice. He is best known for leading the charge into an after-episode segment known as “Creature Report”, whose theme song, with which I will close this issue of the newsletter, goes as follows:

Creature report, creature report

(anthropomorphic turnip) Creature report!

Whale sharks are definitely (check check check)

the biggest fish in all the sea (check check check)

They open up their mouth really wide (creature report creature report)

and eats whatever swims inside (creature report creature report)

Though their mouths are oh so huge (check check check)

whale sharks all like to eat teeny tiny food (check check check)

(Dance break!)

Go whale sharks! Go whale sharks!

Creature report! Creature report!

(anthropomorphic turnip) Creature report!

We’re done with our mission!

Octonauts, at ease, until the next adventure!

dad

And, just like that, she’s entered the Scientist phase of child development. I take notes every day of the things she says and does, so that I have material for the next day’s edition of The Daily Kina, and when I looked at my notes from yesterday it was all about Kina’s fascination with basically everything. In the last few days, Laurea and I have come to expect a constant barrage of the following sort of question:

“Where do XXXXXX come from, mostly than XXXXXX?”

For example, “Where do muffins come from, mostly than muffins?” or “Where do Legos come from, mostly than Legos?” I have no idea what inspired that sentence construction, but it’s cute and we always try our hardest to answer the question. As it turns out, lots of things come from either farms or the ocean!

Speaking of the ocean, she’s also really into fish, and has taken to asking me if we can watch videos of marine life whenever we have a free moment. My approach to this is to search YouTube for “bbc FISHNAME”, which usually yields a high-quality David Attenborough video about parrotfish and the fine sandy parrotfish poop that makes up most tropical beaches. Also, we have learned that ocean sunfish skin has over forty kinds of parasites, and that the sunfish float listlessly among schools of cleaner fish that eat those parasites. (A side note here: Laurea and I, after first seeing a giant ocean sunfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, made up a little song for it called “Fish Head With Fins”) Kina’s favorite fish video as of today, I think (based on a conversation we just had at dinner) is a video about flying fish, which “have wings like birds [flap flap flap]” and live in a sort of hellish ocean surface hunting ground where they are consumed alternately by mahi mahi (another Kina favorite) and marauding birds.

Speaking of birds, we have befriended a shabby-looking pigeon who comes to roost on our fire escape. We recognize him because of his rakish little white underwings, and because he’s utterly imperturbable. Kina talks to him while sitting on our dresser, asking him how he’s doing, and telling him that he can be my (Dad’s) little brother. In return, he stares at her with his beady little orange eyes. They are the best of friends.

Speaking of orange, I have no idea why she got it in her head that oranges melt, but I’m glad she asked. I suppose they eventually melt, but not fast enough to deny our home’s most avid orange fan her daily snack.

Gotta read up for tomorrow’s quiz. Everybody have a good night, and may your dreams be filled with zoned-out mola mola.

dad

I remember the moment, as a kid, when I first told my Mom that I was jealous of my younger brother. I was probably about eight years old, and we were sitting in the front seat of the car. She told me that she was so proud that I could talk about my emotions, and I remember feeling that pride reflected in myself. It is one of the weirdly pivotal moments in the development of my identity as a man who reckons with his feelings. Accordingly, I was very proud of our kid when she walked up to me this morning, crossed her arms in front of her body, and declared, “I am feeling very angry.” Whatever it was I’d denied her just moments before (see also: “I Don’t Like Limits. Don’t Limit Me”), she’d decided not to Hulk out on good old Dad, choosing instead to point out that I had a chance to turn this one around. I got down on her level, explained that being angry was normal and that I was proud she could talk about it, then asked what was making her angry. She scowled intently for a few moments. “There’s probably sand in my ears,” she replied, then picked up a balloon and bopped it across the room. I’m very proud of my sandy-eared rage child.

Napping In Car, Child Misses Ice Cream Stop

On our way back from the beach yesterday (which explains Kina’s sandy ears), she asked for a scoop of strawberry ice cream with rainbow sprinkles. This, of course, elicited no protest from us, and we headed off into Rockaway to the local ice cream shop. Just two minutes into the drive, however, she announced she would be taking a nap in preparation for her ice cream, falling immediately into a slumber so deep that not even a loud announcement of our arrival at the scoop shop could rouse her. I bought her the ice cream anyway, in case she woke up—which she didn’t—then ate it (reluctantly) myself. We got home forty-five minutes later, and the very first thing she asked when she opened her eyes was, “Where’s the ice cream?” This, in hindsight, is probably why she was angry at me this morning.

I think I’ve decided that the enemy of head-on portraits is the human nose. A while back, I drew a Tintin-themed A1 and drew Kina’s portrait accordingly. It’s always been one of my favorite Kina portraits, and I think it’s because the nose isn’t grotesque. If I take up this angle more frequently, it will be 100% button noses all day—I have no idea how professional cartoonists deal with this. I’ll point out, by the way, that the portrait was intended to just be “cute angry”, but then she walked up to me, stared at the portrait, and said “Do my eyes pink” (which means red, in Kina’s taxonomy of marker colors). I averred that it looked cute as it was, and she looked me dead in the eyes and said “Do. My. Eyes. Pink.” So, a perfect representation.

dad

Saturday was a big day on the playground. Fountains on, balloons everywhere, Kina’s favorite hairstylist on surreptitious rounds with scissors in a holster like an old-timey sheriff. As regular readers will recall, we’ve been learning a lot about curly hair in recent weeks, and the tangles of her ever-lengthening tresses were threatening to overwhelm even the most patient of gentle brushes. In the wake of yesterday’s masked-up playground cut, however, Kina’s hair no longer rests on her shoulders, her curls are tight and bouncy, and her considerable mane is more manageable for the stickiest months of the summer. Plus we got some A+ tips for dealing with tangles. She spent the rest of the morning—and much of the afternoon—running through the Rodney sprinklers, chasing a pink balloon, and eating pizza. Don’t know that there’s a whole lot to add; it was a do-little day in the tradition of a typical summer, which feels like a luxury in this particularly atypical one.

Today’s Parade, as with many of our recent inserts, is a collaborative cover effort involving both Kina and Laurea. Kina’s entry is a gorgeous abstraction in pastels. Laurea’s illustration of poppies is a reflection of her most recent pandemic obsession (flower arrangements, not opiates) and is, I would say, pretty spot-on. Laurea also pasted on Giovanni Boldini’s Gossip here, which is the kind of scene we all wish we could reproduce on a Sunday at brunch this year. We hope this newsletter passes for a sort of gossip, and that you’re sufficiently scandalized by the idea of a child’s hairstylist roaming the parks of Williamsburg in a mask. But don’t tell! We’re respecting you to be quiet!

dad

Kina’s annoyance with us, in the midst of our spending so much time together, has started to grow fangs. It shows itself in a variety of extremely normal situations— when I am drinking imaginary rainbow tea, for example, or stocking her tent with imaginary meat. She might get flustered with us when we refuse to call her by the correct doctor’s name (on one day, the name of her actual doctor; on another, “Doctor Elsa from Frozen”). She is often annoyed that I sit on the wrong chair or cushion when I have been told already very clearly where to sit and the specific logic behind that seating arrangement. Whatever of the context, though, she gets very annoyed with us and typically responds with a bog-standard toddler scream or, charmingly, an exasperated sigh. But today she rolled her eyes—like, an almost Olympian ocular gesture—and it really hit home in a way that induced both a flood of parental dread and basically no surprise at all. (Laurea and I are world-class eye rollers; The Roll is a favored expression in our home, deployed for the most minor of transgressions.) In some ways, we should have seen this coming earlier—and might have, were we not rolling our eyes at each other so often—but here we are, unprepared for a searing premonition of the teenager we are raising. When schools shut down, I worried that she’d go into a sort of suspended animation, cut off from the professionals charged with her growth (and the children growing alongside her), but I think she’s simply charted a different course—one that emulates ours in excruciating detail. The last few weeks have been emotionally difficult for us as she wrestles with some new developmental hurdle we haven’t yet fully understood, but the eye rolling and spike of tantrums is all part of a personality continuum that has it upsides, too. She comforts us now when we’re frustrated, keeps my coworkers occupied at the start of video calls, summons us for “family hugs”, and engages us in conversations that make just enough sense to convince us we’re seeing the person she’ll be in twenty years. It makes us see the people we are today, too, and honestly got me thinking about whether or not I should pay closer attention to my own eyes when they roll.

“There Is Something in My Teeth”

I took the 5:30 shift this morning, after Kina deployed this new early wake-up tactic. Laurea was inclined to let it go (no pun intended) and see if she’d return to bed on her own, but I am a charter member of Camp Annoyed-By-Stuff-Between-Teeth, and I couldn’t bring myself to let her suffer. You will be totally unsurprised—as Laurea was—that there was nothing in her teeth to floss away, and so I absorbed the subsequent half-hour tantrum that emerged from my not being Mommy as a gullibility tax. After considerable calm coaxing—and the occasional roll of my eyes—I finally got her to watch a YouTube video about jellyfish and took a nap on the couch. That’s the job.

See you tomorrow. Share the word and floss your teeth.

dad

Let’s add hiccups to the growing list of things Kina dreads (see also: rain, bugs, ricotta). I realized last night, as Kina was begging me to MAKE THE HICCUPS STOP, that I do not remember the last time I actually had the hiccups, nor when in my life they stopped. Is this normal? Am I an evolutionary oddity? I could just be forgetful, because I also don’t remember the last time Kina had the hiccups, but it’s likely just because she didn’t care about them until having finally realized that hiccups are a thing to which nature is subjecting her. I tried a few angles last night:

“Hiccups are like a friend stopping by to say hello. They’ll leave soon.”

“Let’s rub your tummy and breathe.”

“Just close your eyes and they’ll go away.”

Laurea stopped by the door and offered a drink of water, which goes against our rule of “no drinks before bed or she’ll wake up to pee at 4:30”. Kina wasn’t interested, in any case.

At the end, I just ended up checking in on her a bunch for maybe half an hour or so, as she required my reassurance that, yes, hiccups go away—and no, you will not be hiccuping forever. I am, it bears noting, living proof of it.

Local Resident Declares Pride in Neighborhood

Sometime down the line, when this has passed, I will be insufferable about having never left the city. People will talk about The Hard Time, and I will say “but did you live through it? Did you walk the empty streets like Will Smith?” I am particularly proud of having stuck by my neighborhood, and am also proud of Kina, who insufferably sighs that she is “from Williamsburg”—and in particular “from Borinquen Place”. She will always be from here, even if we leave, which of course we won’t, because we’re stubborn and insufferable.

Off to bed with all of you!

dad

I had always heard about this pivotal moment in the development of a child’s mind—the sudden realization that things do things in ways that you cannot control and that may, if you are not careful, make your life unpleasant. I had been thinking about this recently as it related, in particular, to thunder. It’s been a torrential summer (for us. For you, too?) and she has seemed not at all to notice the rain, let alone the flash and bang of the passing storms. But lightning struck close last night—about a block away—and the sudden peal of thunder startled her enough to distract her from an episode of She-Ra (a big deal). Staring intently at us, she then spent about ten minutes at the window asking about where the thunder was, and why we kept the window closed in a storm. What would happen, she asked, if we were to open the window? Would the rain get on the front door across the room? (No.) Would it get our stuff wet? (Probably.) Would it come and take us away? (No, the rain will never take us away.) It took some time for her to wrestle with the idea, and she had us lift her up to look out a few rain-slicked windows before she let the matter rest, but I know she’s thinking about thunder now, reckoning with the mystery of it—in ways that I think I am, too.

Sprinklers On at Rodney Playground

The editorial board here at The Daily Kina takes our mission very seriously, and when we’re called on to hold our local government to task, we rise to the occasion. So when Kina arrived home yesterday from her short afternoon walk soaked to the bone, we nodded solemnly in the knowledge that our work in defense of the Rodney Playground sprinklers was not in vain. Either that or the Parks Department just got around to it. I mean, honestly, they just got around to it. In any case, East Williamsburg got its water—a month and a half into the hot season. Stop by, bring a towel.

And make yourself a drink.

dad

Kina has figured out the trick where Laurea and I talk to each other by piping our conversation through her, and she is greatly displeased. So, with that tactic out of the picture, we’ve come up with the frankly brilliant idea to merge our child’s fascination with musical theater and our need to have the occasional adult conversation. The result looks a bit like Laurea and I performing chipper little Broadway numbers about interstate quarantine policy while Kina leaps and twirls around, emoting wildly. We did a long bit last night about a challenging work situation, in which we were able to rhyme “Daddy” and “gladly”. Kina boogied emphatically, unaware all along that her parents were communicating directly with each other. One of the rare win-win situations in this household.

Kid Teaches Mommy How to Eat a Cheeseburger

So sayeth the cheeseburger expert: “See, Mommy, you have to peel the paper, then you put your fingers on the bun and you can eat it!” For somebody who has never in her life eaten a cheeseburger, she’s got a lot of bright ideas about how you do it.

Stuffed Unicorn’s Hair a Total Mess

My parents got the kid a stuffed rainbow unicorn (which, careful readers will recall, is the optimal Kina animal). When we opened the box it came in, we were struck speechless by its gorgeous flowing mane of multicolor nylon monofilament and the comb tethered directly to its back. “Why would you stitch a comb to the back of a stuffed animal,” we asked, having never considered how the physical properties of human hair might differ from those of nylon monofilament. As it turns out, what we have is a mane-brushing routine masquerading as a unicorn. Since Kina sleeps with the unicorn every night, the tangles get worse and worse, and combing them out yields little nests of nylon. I never thought hair and mane care would occupy so much of my life in this pandemic.

If I may—I’m actually pretty proud of both the logo and the portrait today. Been a long time since this former music major wrote a good semiquaver, and I could do side profiles all day. Taking next week off work, so maybe I’ll work on different angles (and note durations). Thanks, all, for sticking with us; I can tell you that it feels ridiculous to produce a daily newsletter, and I can only assume it feels slightly ridiculous to read it. Regardless, I hope it’s a welcome and fortifying distraction from what is—let’s be honest—a scary moment in history. If it’s any comfort, Kina is happy.

dad

For the first couple months of this pandemic, I wasn’t thinking much about beating the heat, but as May set in—and with playgrounds closed—I started to wonder what would happen in summer if the playground sprinklers weren’t on. Being trapped in your house is no fun regardless of the weather, but for families who can’t afford air conditioners or the electricity to run them, the prospect of surviving July and August is bleak. (Cooling centers, which older folks in neighborhoods like ours rely on to get through the hottest months, are inconceivable when you contemplate the actual prospect of putting a couple dozen octogenarians in a gym.) Playgrounds, then, with their shade and spray (a communal suburban backyard), are literal oases for city families in need.

The problem with playground sprinklers is that nearly all of them somehow break over the winter, during which pipes split, valves break, drains fill up with debris, and electrical circuits corrode. So every year involves a delicate dance with beleaguered park workers, in which sweaty parents ask, “How soon until the water’s on?” and the workers reply, invariably, “A few days.” But in truth, the answer may depend on the block. In our neighborhood of Williamsburg, McCarren Park and East River State Park (pictured at top right in this morning’s edition)—parks that serve areas with higher median incomes—generally get their pipes fixed and water running just after Memorial Day. Our local playground, across the BQE on Rodney Street, by contrast, has not had water all summer—including yesterday, when the temperature reached 98 degrees.

It’s typical for our playground, with its scenic view of a six-lane highway, to be served last, but it’s especially galling this year, in this place, with so many families in poverty, people out of work, and kids out of school. On a good year, entire families spend the whole day at Rodney in the sprinklers (and playing, for better or worse, in the lake that forms over the clogged drain). But this is not a good year, and people are on edge, so the prospect of not having water to help kids and their parents cool down is dramatically more fraught. What do families do in the meantime? We try to decamp to McCarren Park or the river, where the water features are on all day, but it involves a fifteen minute walk on hot asphalt in direct sunlight (hardly an easy escape). We turn on the hydrants, which puts kids in the middle of the street—fun to watch, but considerably riskier when you weigh it against recreation that doesn’t involve dodging cars. None of this is ideal, let alone safe.

It’s clear that city budgets play a role here, and there’s a lot to be said about that (I wonder where we might find the budget to maintain plumbing in corners of the budget that are… more padded?) but it does boil down—no pun intended—to somebody making a choice. Kids in tenements come last. Fountains stay broken, old equipment decays. The people who arguably need these common facilities most, who most benefit from the open space and cool water, will have to wait.

You will recall we went to “Zentals Park” on Sunday. The playgrounds there are absurdly nice. Clean, all surfaces padded. Adventure playgrounds! Three types of swings! Everything made of hardwood! And the water flowing, lead-free and in full working order. This is what park conservancies get you (the playgrounds in Central Park are governed by the “Playground Partners” subcommittee of The Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy, which is… a lot to unpack in 2020.) Laurea and I sometimes talk about forming the Rodney Playground Conservancy, an organization whose funds will be spent on finally killing that poison ivy in the corner, removing the exposed bolt from under the toddler playset, and putting new Belgian block stones in the holes that trip up running kids. Our Sprinkler subcommittee is seeking a treasurer. If you’re interested, we’ll invite you to our annual gala.

Kid Lists All Her Favorite Foods

That was a lot, so I’ll just lighten the mood here by pointing out that Kina’s list of favorite foods includes an actual inconceivably-large body of water and somehow no cheeseburgers. I suppose I’d take the ocean, too, if I had to choose.

Finally, a correction, which I will now render in house-style italics: I sent yesterday’s email out with the subject “Kind Enjoys Pasta Picnic in Zentals Park”, which would be more embarrassing if the headline didn’t include the hilarious word “Zentals”. I assume you all know that I meant “Kid enjoys…” because that’s the grammatical construction of 70% of our headlines. We regret the error.

dad

Kina has talked about visiting Zentals Park (or Lentils Park, or Sentol Park) several times during this pandemic. In her fantasy Park world, we take the train, or we drive, or we take a balloon. It’s never clear exactly what we’re supposed to do at Zentals Park, but yesterday we finally decided: a pasta picnic. So, having procured a parking spot and some noodles at Parm in the Upper West Side, we located a broad clearing at the edge of Central Park with nobody in it to enjoy a little nosh. Kina, as is her wont, went back and forth between eating spaghetti and sprinting around the trees, pumping her arms valiantly like an Olympian. As she chased starlings, Laurea and I talked about nothing in particular—a luxury Kina seldom allows us when we’re in close quarters. I don’t think I’ve felt so relaxed since, honestly, last year. Something about rediscovering a place in New York that I love so much and has felt so inaccessible to me since the start of the lockdown really helped us all reset a bit. It felt normal. After a run through the sprinklers, we grabbed some ice cream and drove home. On the way downtown, Kina said, “I’m going to take a nap now” and passed out cold. If you don’t see how amazing this all is, you clearly don’t read The Daily Kina.

Girl Spews Cantaloupe All Over Mom in Laughing Incident

The headline says it all, but the illustration really hammers it home, in my humble opinion. I felt bad for Laurea, of course, though hearing Kina laugh is one of the finer experiences in life. As somebody on whom Kina routinely slobbers, it all feels tolerable. We abide.

dad

Correction: I sent this email out with the subject “Kind Enjoys Pasta Picnic in Zentals Park”, which would be more embarrassing if the headline didn’t include the word “Zentals”.

What are the topics we’re hitting a lot these days? Pizza, witches, rainbows, beach, sleep. Weekends are intense, so the cost of a missed nap on a busy Saturday eclipses that of a weekday, which can make us all exhausted (though it hits the kid extra hard). An intense Saturday, then: We drove out to the beach, pitched our tent, drew our giant circle, and basically spent four hours in the water with Kina. She worked on swimming and dunking, built sand castles, performed “Let It Go”, ate chicken, coached us on very specific language we should use to appreciate boats (another version she wanted us to parrot back to her went, “Wow that’s very good; yes, I told you that that is very good for night.”), and asked me several dozen times to throw her as high into the air as possible—all while being buffeted by waves. By the time we strapped her into her car seat and got her home, she was totally fried and insisted that she and only she could climb the stairs to the apartment, that she needed to take her shoes off, and that only Mommy could give her a bath. Cue more or less an hour and a half of crying. I have no idea what my neighbors (many of whom I’ve shared my life with for the last twenty years) actually think about my screaming child, but I do know—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that they are aware of her.

She did fall promptly to sleep, I should point out, upon being offered the opportunity. I measure her exhaustion by how many Baby Rainbow Unicorn stories she will settle for, and the number last night was barely two (down from a steady four). And she woke up after six, which makes—and you heard it here first, friends—four straight days of wake-up times that start with the number 6. I think we unintentionally scared her into compliance by putting a potty in her room, and now she doesn’t yell for potty stuff—not because she intends to use the room potty, but because the thought of using it weirds her out, and she’d rather just sleep in. I guess most everybody hates the idea of peeing in their room. So, right, incentive.

“Hurry, Hurry, Before It Gets Late!”

With this headline, I just wanted to hammer home just how much of Kina’s role playing is based on rushing. Should I feel bad about that? Is that all New Yorkers? Is it genetic? I just imagine her telling me on the phone in twenty years that she is so busy these days, and that work is just crushing her, and I am one hundred thousand percent going to remember her sprinting back and forth from her room to the front door in her undies carrying her “toke bag” and breathlessly telling me to get a move on.

Today’s Parade is ice cream, which is probably the one Kina topic I have not sufficiently covered on A1. We’ll get a team on it. Might need to do some research. I assume all the scribbles here are sprinkles.

Getting started on the Monday edition. Everybody sleep well, and do feel free to share this with your friends and loved ones who enjoy ice cream, rushing around, the new She-Ra, or collapsing in tears at the smallest provocation.

dad

Now that she’s a real poopin’ pro, Kina has taken to instructing us on the finer points of the potty. In addition to the basic notes detailed in the dek here, we’re advised to ask for privacy and encouraged to use a stepstool as needed; it’s nice to revisit the basics sometimes. In other potty news: A couple of issues ago, I mentioned something about an in-room potty gambit that seemed to have corrected for 5:30 wake-ups, and our investigations desk is working up a related exciting piece for tomorrow.

Kid Hears Front Door From Bed, Checks to See if Mommy Still Here

In other sleeping news, the child continues to be roused by only the most delicate and subtle of noises. Car horns and fireworks are like white noise to her, and though the margarita palace across the street blasts a raucous and incredibly grating mariachi take on “Happy Birthday” at least once every night, she pays it no mind. On the other hand, we take great care not to leave the living room until an hour after she’s gone to bed, because she reacts to the sound of the front door opening like a well-trained guard dog. Her first assumption is always that Laurea has left us alone, and so I have to console our distraught and exhausted toddler until her mother comes back from picking up a package in the lobby. So last night, when Laurea did come back, and the door latch did make a mild clicking sound, and Kina did wake up, and I did go into her room to settle her, Kina demanded that Laurea prove she was actually here by yelling from the living room—a shortcut that she has not taken before. This appeared to resolve the matter, leaving us impressed by Kina’s diligence and bristly auditory nerves.

This edition’s illustrations are all of the stick figure variety, which is typically easy for me, but I found it tricky to draw a bow and curtsy. I think I did well nonetheless.

We remain yours, dopily.

dad

Yesterday’s pizza was absolutely ruined, if you ask my daughter, by splotches of ricotta cheese. I remember Kina’s early solid food days, and how we would remark at her tolerance of new and exotic flavors—leafy greens, funky fish-saucey things, legumes of unknown provenance. Just a year later, we would find ourselves cajoling that same child to try “cheesy eggs” in an effort to keep at least two foods on the plate. She’s recovered slightly, and I no longer fear I’ll raise an adult who subsists only on pancakes (which, fine, if it works for you). Still—and I know I talk a lot about pizza—she does refuse to consider toppings on pizza, which she forces us to peel off and eat separately. So when last night’s pie arrived and she saw the ricotta on it, I tried to explain the fundamental similarities between the part of the pizza she likes the most (mozz) and the mystery ingredient she liked the least (ricotta), and that to eat them both together was an exciting opportunity—an position with which, upon further consideration, she found little common ground. We ended up wiping off the ricotta meticulously with our fingers, then she wiped the slice with a napkin and proceeded to eat through the slightly papery mozzarella from the top to the bottom (as described in an earlier edition).

Small Celebrity Demands Selfie During Work Call

As a little subscriber benefit, I will share with you the selfie in question, which was taken during a very serious and stressful call with like twenty other people—I counted seven of them smiling.

Off to the weekend with all of you. Let’s hope you all get to sleep in until 6:24 AM—or at least that we do. Let it gooooooooo

dad

She really catches you by surprise sometimes. This particular poetic turn, delivered over a half-eaten drumstick last night, is the kind of phrase that makes me both thrilled to have a kid with a rudimentary understanding of astrophysics and sad for having lost an inner voice so elemental that it draws the moon closer. Kina has these developmental bursts that last a week or two—in which she develops tiny obsessions with things like the solar-lunar dyad—and the thing I most love about being a parent is that I can keep her company in her fascination, gazing at it together like a little geode. I miss thinking of the sun and moon as abstractions. It’s fun, and you should try it.

Denied Channels of Direct Communication, Parents Use Child Intermediary to Talk

I think I’ve mentioned before that she doesn’t much like it when Laurea and I talk to each other. Not long after we get started on a topic unrelated to her, she shuts it down with a bark. The way we get around this, as often as not, is by telling her what’s going on instead. This often means that we end up in earnest conversations with our preschooler at the breakfast table about negotiating contracts, the impending arrival of new masks, work drama, and whether or not to buy a new refrigerator. As we do this, she looks back at us with hilarious gravitas, nodding subtly as she considers her response. This adaptation is probably something that a child psychologist would have thoughts on, but we are too lazy to convince her that it’s valuable for Mommy and Daddy to talk, and really, if you saw her serious little face, you’d do the same.

The witch portrait today is actually from last Halloween, which feels like seven years ago (along with everything else). The price today is very specifically $30.222222, down from her original offer of $30.222222222220. She drives a hard bargain.

dad

I won’t belabor the sleep thing, having covered that yesterday—no improvement yet. I will, however transcribe for you here one of the stories Kina invented for us, and which she now reliably asks me to tell as one of her three guaranteed stories every night. It is called

Baby Rainbow Unicorn Goes to McCarren Park and Sees a Baby and the Baby Sneezes on Her

Daddy: Once upon a time, Baby Rainbow Unicorn went to McCarren Park to go on the swings, and when she got there she saw all these babies walking around like this [hands held out at neck level warily, swerving around] and going “ehhh, ehhhh”. As she was walking to the swings, one of the babies grabbed her right on the tummy, and Baby Rainbow Unicorn was all [weird face] and she looked down at the baby, and the baby looked up at her, and

she looked down at the baby, and

the baby looked up at her, and

she looked down at the baby, and

the baby looked up at her, and

then the baby went ahhhhhh chooo! and sneezed all over Baby Rainbow Unicorn’s face! And Baby Rainbow Unicorn said,

Kina: (enraged) “Ew! That! Is! Dis! Gus! TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!”

Daddy: And Baby Rainbow Unicorn went over to the water fountain and washed off her face like [blubba blubba blubba] and she was so angry and she wanted to leave the playground, and Hello Kitty—who was just sitting on a bench outside—said, “Baby Rainbow Unicorn, look out for all the babies!” because the babies were gathered all together by the gate going “ehhh, ehhh”, and Hello Kitty yelled, “Baby Rainbow Unicorn, you need to sneeze on the babies!” So Baby Rainbow Unicorn grabbed a feather and tickled her own nose until [preparing to sneeze] she SNEEZED on all the babies at the same time, and the babies all ran away and said,

Kina: (sweetly, as a baby might) “Ew, that is disgusTING!”

And so Baby Rainbow Unicorn and Hello Kitty went home and had chicken and french fries and they both took a nap. The end.

As Kina would say: That’s it. That’s the story. Last thing to say for the night: I really like the portrait I drew of Kina today, and I think I’ve learned that her cheeks are still chubby and more or less how lips and chins work. See you tomorrow. Quack, quack.

dad

Kina has an “okay to wake up clock” that we bought for her the last time she enjoyed a good sleep regression. You set it for an appropriate wake-up time (we’ve set it, somewhat contentiously, for 6:24 AM), and every day the clock will light up green at exactly that time, at which point Kina will yell, “MOMMY, THE LIGHT IS GREEN!”, and we will go perkily to fetch her from her room. This, at least, is the idea. In recent weeks, however, she has elected to ignore the advice of the clock, waking up closer to 6 AM every day to yell, “MOMMY, I GOTTA GO POTTY!” We cannot, for reasons that long-time readers will understand, argue with that assertion. So, every day, Laurea gets up to take her to the potty, after which Kina chirps, “Okay, Mommy, let’s do an activity!”

This is bad enough, but today’s wake-up potty time was at the god-awful hour of 5:30. I am The Serious Bedtime Guy, so I got up to see if I could get her out and back, to no avail. Attentive parents that we are, we decided then to let her simply have her run of the house, thinking she might entertain herself. Instead, she proceeded to bring every chair in the apartment into our room, show off her “new backpack” (a tote bag), drop off a selection of books by my head, steal various pillows, offer other pillows in exchange, and declare that the mushrooms had grown as we slept (they had).

There’s not a moral to this story. We’re just tired. At least she’s using the potty.

Kid Notices Bug

Kina does not like bugs, and she has a sharp eye for them. So do I (on both fronts), and so when she freaks out, I also freak out. Laurea, when she spots a bug, yells like a marauding warrior and crushes it with the nearest shoe.

Obituary: Balloon, Full of Water, Pops; Was Two Days Old

It had a good run.

dad

I’ve never known a child to care so tenderly for an object designed to burst. She walked everywhere yesterday with the balloon nestled inside her Hello Kitty helmet (shown here at top right), swinging from her elbow like a handbag. She got it at ten in the morning from a kid in Gowanus, on one of the nicest playgrounds I’ve ever seen in Brooklyn—amidst a fleet of garbage trucks. The kid’s name, I kid you not, was Heaven.

“I’m Not a Fan of Cheeseburgers,” Declares Local Heretic

I’ve been trying to sort this out for over a year. I’ve plied her with every cheeseburger you can imagine. Bits of cheeseburger. Cheeseburgers with no burger that I can then inform her are “mostly cheeseburger”. It’s just today that she’s finally told me, unequivocally, that she’s no officially no fan. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this going forward—the love of cheeseburgers seems like a family tradition (Laurea, as her triumphant return from vegetarianism, chose Shake Shack for her début). We’ll find common ground in some food or another—pasta seems likely, pizza if you can tolerate how she eats it (see last Wednesday’s edition). We will learn to live with the disappointment. More for me.

dad

As moods are concerned lately, high highs and low lows predominate, but the edges of sleep (and its absence) are where she is most volatile—at her sweetest and most terrible. We are living a kind of Heisenbergian uncertainty with respect to her naps; the attention we pay to nap times seems to tell us a story about whether or not they are developmentally appropriate on this particular Sunday, even as she careens in a different direction for tomorrow. It is very much rocket science, but parents will know what I mean here.

There’s a full story in today’s edition, if you read between the lines. Yesterday, she took no nap, confidently watching an entire Studio Ghibli film (The Secret World of Arrietty, which is worth watching in its entirety, whether or not you are a toddler) as Laurea and I traded catnaps. This, the absence of sleep, was one of those languorous parenting moments you treasure—your kid leaning against you, transfixed by a story, asking in hushed tones about sugar cubes. What followed a few hours later, at the cusp of bedtime, was the payoff—a full-bore rage sesh that lasted from the opening of our front door, through bathtime, into the selection of pajamas, in and out of reading time, and straight to the edge of the bed. Ten minutes and two Baby Rainbow Unicorn stories later, she was out like a light. The final act, which takes place half an hour after she woke up this morning, involves her knocking over a full glass of orange juice as she tries to slug me with her foot—she does not particularly want me to be nearby when she’s waking up, preferring that I stay somewhere in the periphery, and preferably out of sight.

So when we were driving back from Red Hook with lunch today, and she fell asleep just before the exit to our house, we made an Observation: this is developmentally appropriate, and you should not wake her. We sat in the car for an hour, eating brisket with our hands as she slept in her car seat. She was an angel for the rest of the day.

Regarding the mushrooms

The mushrooms came as a surprise this morning, but I suppose the box did come with a guarantee. We plan to eat them on Wednesday. Kina does not like mushrooms.

Today’s Parade

Most of it is chalk, so I need to find a kind of fixative if we want it to last. It’s actually one of my favorites so far.

She’s sleeping now. You should, too, lest you find yourself kicking over a glass of orange juice in the morning. Happy to be here.

dad

April 3rd was one hundred days ago. Pretty much everybody in the house was on the mend from a nonspecific-at-the-time respiratory illness, and while we were all quite happy to be on the other side of it, we were bored, and the kid needed some creative distraction. I drew the first edition of The Daily Kina (shown at the bottom of this newsletter) in crayon on a folded-up piece of construction paper. The top headline that day was “YOU A CHEESE FIEND, HUH”, and the illustration was Kina’s moose. We scrawled a picture of her at the top right of the page and decided together that the newspaper cost twenty-five cents.

Every day since then, we have (or, mostly, I have, with her prodding) spent about half an hour drawing the newspaper before I go to work. Just after I’ve asked her what to charge for it, I take a picture of the print edition on the trunk in our bedroom and tape it up on the kitchen cupboard, where we can read the news in passing—an old city newspaper tradition that I wish all newspapers would bring back.

Since early April, both Kina and this august publication have changed (and, in many ways, the world has changed around them). For Kina’s part, significantly: She’s taller and more patient, her friends have variously entered and left the scene, she graduated quietly from her first year of school, and she reliably poops in the potty (a miracle worth documenting). The paper evolves, too, in more superficial ways: I’ve gotten better for the most part at drawing her portrait, the price is now more consistently in the $30 range (having spent the first several weeks at $3, “because I’m three”), and we now have four headlines on A1 instead of three (hence the price increase). In the main, though, The Daily Kina is still mostly just horizontal lines and a portrait of my kid. That we all remain entertained by it is a testament mostly to her.

It’s neat to have gotten here. A hundred of anything is hard to make, but it has helped that this is an enjoyable task—both the reading and the writing of it. Lots of friends have said that The Daily Kina is one of the only things they look forward to reading—which, given the alternatives, makes a ton of sense. Most of the news is factually very bad, and while the news here is not all happy, it’s about somebody who for the most part is heading in a good direction. “This will be an amazing memory for her,” people say, and I hope that’s true. It’s also a great memory for Laurea and me and the rest of her family, and I think in some ways it’s a nice memory for all of you to have. It makes me happy to have the obligation to peer more closely at Kina, even in a moment that has us penned up together. I hope you find it equally enjoyable.

See you tomorrow for the Sunday.

dad

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I know I said Friday would be the hundredth edition of The Daily Kina, but then I sat and counted all the pages again and I realized that, technically, it’s tomorrow. So here’s the ninety-ninth edition of The Daily Kina, which is principally about Kina going to work.

Regarding Going to Work

Kina did not, before the pandemic, go to work. Her relationship with work emerged in March, as I began to lock myself in the bedroom and type. Shortly after that, she showed troubling signs of office labor, setting up her “computer” (a board book) on her “desk” (her chair) to “type” (whacking her fingers wildly on the cover of the book). She soon began to notice that I was frequently on the phone and began to take calls from an unnamed coworker: “Hello, yes? I am going to work.” Since then, her departures for work have become more urgent and unexpected—sometimes coming in the middle of a conversation, as she turns on her heel and breathlessly tells us, “I gotta go to work. I’m going to work” as she speed-walks through the kitchen. I’ve decided that this is probably a healthy response to a change in her surroundings, though I am mildly dismayed when she refuses to talk to me because her coworker is calling. That the entire charade has entered, like Inception, a new level of kid pretending to be at work asking if it’s okay for her kid to pretend to be at work is both a little sweet and conceptually exhausting. She has not yet given me my mid-year review, but I assume I will have some growth areas.

Regarding the Mushrooms

Speaking of growth: Kina’s Tita Cindy and Tito Giorgio sent a box that sprouts oyster mushrooms from spent coffee grounds. We’ve cut it, soaked it, and laid it on its side in our living room window. The instructions say to give it two teaspoons of water every day, and so Kina—the nation’s foremost expert on watering cans and rainbows—has converted her rainbow teapot into a watering can in which Laurea places two teaspoons of water every morning, and which Kina in turn decants onto the block of mushroom-inoculated coffee grounds. For the rest of the day, Kina asks us when the mushrooms will come, and we reply “in one or two weeks”, which the box guarantees will be the case.

While she’s generally pretty entertaining with language, there are moments that unlock a rush of dopamine and oxytocin as they give us a view of how she sees the universe—a version of the world that is not collapsing or frightening, rather nourishing and curious. It is this world, in which the sun and the moon work together to keep her baby mushrooms warm and help them grow, that I like to retreat when we write The Daily Kina every morning. Every day, it’s good to remind yourself that in a matter of weeks (maybe several weeks), the heavens will bring forth mushrooms.

I hope your mushrooms, too, will come, that your babysitters are safe, and that your rainbows are delicious. Tomorrow is one hundred.

dad

Regarding Witches

We are quickly running out of witch media. The kid spends every morning in witchy spaces: riding her broom, experimenting with runes, casting spells while cackling, admiring pointy hats, and watching witch shows for kids—which are not nearly as numerous as one might imagine, given the fixation kids have with witches. The Brits have the best options (of course), leading the pack with a fantastic animated version of Room on the Broom, acclaimed by my friends as probably the Best Witch Picture Book. The UK is also home to a book series called Winnie and Wilbur (Bookshop link to what appears to be only Spanish-language editions of W&W, which, sure!) whose short-lived series lasted only two episodes and can sometimes be found on YouTube. Aside from those two shows, one American entry that is so bad I won’t even link to it, and a surprising number of Japanese animated movies (Kiki’s Delivery Service, most notably), we’ve pretty much tapped the obvious candidates for witch things. With all this stuff on repeat for now—and Room on the Broom actually does hold up to repeat viewings—we either need the kid to find a new passion (ergo our recent unsealing of the Octonauts archive), or we need our community to send us more witchy media. All of which is to say: if you know of great witch books, witch TV, witch cinema—reply, reply.

Regarding Handsy Babies

Kina was legitimately alarmed.

Regarding Whispered Stories

I don’t know where she picked up the phrase “and so the days went by…”, but the unending barrage of days seems to be the entire plot of the stories she whispers to her friend the Unicorn, in a sort of fairytale ASMR, while gently combing her hair in the corner. When we inquire from across the room about the rest of the story, she screams “NO! STOP IT! THIS IS MY STORY!” and then immediately returns to the murmured passage of time. I find this alternately very charming and mildly irritating, as it reminds me that, yes, the days have so gone by, are so going by, will so for the foreseeable future go by.

We’re hoping for the best on the mushrooms. Will keep you in the loop.

dad

Regarding Pizza

I cannot for the life of me get this kid to eat pizza in any reasonable way, and maybe I need to just get over it. In addition to the chaotically evil “chomp it from the side” approach seen here, I have seen her consume a slice of pizza from the top down—picking off the pepperoni, eating all the cheese, and then literally scraping off the top layer of crust with her fingernails. At best, she eats it flat like a Californian—an abominal approach she shares with her mother. Kina seems only to enjoy pizza so long as the process of eating it entertains her, which means that Laurea and I often end up eating the damp crusts of deconstructed, ruinous slices of pizza. “This is the work of parenthood,” we say, as we clean up after her. “WASH MY SAUCEY HANDS,” she screams in response.

Regarding Trains

Kina has always been extremely into the wooden train sets at dentists’ offices and toy stores, so we bought her a box of train tracks at the New York Historical Society just before the pandemic. They came with a single subway car (we bought the N train), which we figured was just enough train for our apartment. Despite her passion for pre-assembled tracks, it’s only recently that Kina has developed an interest in building her own track layouts. She seems to prefer the “long, straight track” approach to route design, but today she built a more circuitous two-station line and asked me to be the train conductor. We decided between us that the first station would be Eldert Street—the home of a pool where she took swimming lessons a year ago—and the second one would be Avenue Street, which is by far her favorite imaginary train destination. In the midst of this transit crisis, the most soothing reminder of the Before Times is hearing Kina yell, “The next station is… Avenue Street! Stand clear of the closing doors, please! Ding, ding!” It’s so much cheaper than buying a MetroCard, and reminds me of what we ultimately are going to have to recover.

There are forty of you now, and we are nearing the hundredth issue of The Daily Kina on Friday. Our subscriber growth is healthy, but if you want to give TDK as a gift, great—just remember that it’s free and totally not guaranteed to last a year. Tick, tick!

dad

Pandemic parenting is a double-edged sword, and while the extremely sharp and long edge is having to care for your child full-time at home while working, the other edge (which parents often cite, in an effort to make it all feel manageable) is being able to watch your child grow and learn in ways that would be otherwise largely the domain of teachers at their school. I feel privileged to be so heavily invested in helping my kid learn to read, and it’s clear that Kina is at an advantage in that I can work from home and that we do have the energy to read to her every night, but working on this is still just a slog. She’s supposed to be able to write her name when she starts school in September, but I have no recollection of being able to do the same at her age, and my capacity to get her to sit down and do anything more than draw a single vertical line (“I drew an ‘I’, Daddy!”) is pretty limited. So when we have a moment like last night, in which she slowly sounded out the letters that spell CAT in her favorite Richard Scarry book (an endless series of scenes and words that she often chooses in an effort to delay bedtime) I was overjoyed. It was—and longtime readers will understand what I mean here—easily as exciting as when she first took a crap in the toilet. It made the hard work worthwhile. We’re working on “dog” now.

Re: Jokes. I keep trying to teach Kina what a joke is—not in an academic way, but in terms she can understand, which means we are starting with knock-knock jokes. Every few months, I get her a little farther on the concept: First, you say “knock knock”, then the other person says “who’s there”, and that is about as far as we’ve gotten. The next bit is a hurdle—there’s nothing gratifying about saying “orange”—and the part after that is the crux of the conceptual challenge in a way that I’m really, really looking forward to introducing, but the moment I’m saving up for is when I can bring her to the payoff, when the whole thing comes together and she just collapses in guffaws. I seriously think about that moment a lot. If you had told me before a kid that I would be investing heavily in a multi-year exposition of the knock-knock form, I would honestly first be totally thrilled, but also slightly puzzled? Parenthood is about the long game. In this game, I’m in about the third inning, which has my toddler spitting out her food after telling a joke that has literally no form or comedic tension. I did laugh, though; you had to be there.

Today’s price is three dollars. Felt like you all needed a break on the pricing. Pay it forward, tell a friend a knock-knock joke (or pass the newsletter on if it helps).

dad

Longtime readers whose subscription to the Daily Kina predates the existence of this newsletter will recall that the family have rented what Kina calls “the Rice Car”—a domestic hybrid with unremarkable acceleration that we use to get out of the neighborhood and into isolated locations where Kina can scoot around and picnic. One of those locations, early on, was Jacob Riis Park—a beach at the southwestern end of the Rockaway Peninsula that’s just far enough away to be readily accessible and not terribly crowded. When we took first trip out there, at the very beginning of May, the beach was almost entirely empty—thousands of feet separated us and our nearest fellow beachgoers; Riis quickly became one of our favorite spots. The beach has grown gradually more populous, though not nearly so crowded as we’ve seen it in past years—there’s plenty of space to breathe and relax. Yesterday’s visit (our fourth this year) felt safe and comfortable enough for us to finally dip in the water, jumping together over the waves as she clung to us and taking the intermittent dunk, which she weathered like a champ. Kina loved the whole thing, and we stayed all day. I have a terrible sunburn.

The illustration I’m proudest of today is the twelve-foot boundary I’ve drawn around our spot on the sand, which I maintained religiously yesterday. Part of that impregnable boundary was an enormous hole, dug over the course of several hours and filled, ultimately, by me. Highly recommend being buried by a preschooler, if you ever get the opportunity. At the end of it, she placed a shell on my chest, which was touching.

Don’t go growing up too fast, any of you, and get some rest.

dad

Our neighborhood has not seen anywhere near the troubling number of sleep-depriving fireworks displays as other areas of the city in recent weeks, but we’ve become accustomed to the occasional concussive blast or whistling bottle rocket, and last night was for sure a real hoot. If this year is anything like the last twenty years I’ve lived in my building, we’ll see some smaller inventory-clearance shows over the course of the next week, but we are “on the other side of the mountain”, to use the absurd (and similarly wishful) language of the governor.

In other news, I got it in my head this week that I have to take Kina’s tangled mop of curls more seriously, having let it more or less go to seed between visits to Christina—a regular star of Kina’s role-playing games, and by far her favorite (and only) stylist. Casual Googling will suggest that people have “types” of hair, and that Kina’s is “type” 2B, for which brushing is strongly contraindicated and leave-in conditioner is a must. I learned all of this after brushing her hair for fifteen minutes while in the bathtub (a huge no-no) and washing with the same foofy apple cider vinegar wash that her mom and I use (an excellent choice). Left well enough alone, my hair would take on a puffy wave, and Laurea’s hair is super straight and heavy, so we’ve Mendel-squared Kina’s situation out to some combination of my wavy hair and Laurea’s mother’s mane and the inexplicable mysteries of childhood traits. Sometime in the next several months, Kina will go back to Christina for a cut, and it will look amazing. Until then, I’ll be trying not to brush her hair, drying it off with a t-shirt, leaving conditioner in it, and being one with the mess of it all.

Today’s Parade is a collaboration between Laurea and Kina, and depicts with some faithfulness the fireworks display from outside our window last night. It is probably my favorite so far.

Will leave you to your respective July fifths. We are going to find an isolated patch of sand and take a nap. Rest assured that the fish is fine. Take care.

dad

Kina is proof that nachos find a way. Truly, one of nature’s most fundamental foodstuffs. Keeping it short today, as we are out in the sun, stopping diligently at crosswalks and blowing bubbles.

Today’s logo comes to you courtesy of a diagram I saw yesterday that showed every Doritos logo in history.

I hope all your fish are safe and sound. Keep those fireworks at a distance tonight!

dad

“Gentle pushover” is a game Kina invented because I was being lazy one day and wouldn’t engage in more active games like “chase me, Daddy”, “swing me upside down, Daddy”, or “come, Horsey, eat in the kitchen”. It involves my sitting on the edge of the bed and allowing her to tip me over repeatedly, as long as she pushes me by a different part of my body each time. It’s a good way to teach basic anatomy and the names of various tiny parts of your face, and you can sit on your bed the whole time (quite nice, as games go). We haven’t played it in a while, which is the kind of thing she always remarks on—even if it’s only been a week. “We haven’t readed this one in a long tiiiiime!” she will say, or “Daddy, it’s been a long time since we played this game!” Her greatest thrill, though, is reserved for those moments in which we listen to songs she hasn’t heard in months or years. On the occasional break from the Moana Official Motion Picture Soundtrack, we will bust out a classic from one of the thousands of Sesame Street albums, or “In The Mountains” by Sarah Siskind (a reliable source of instant calm when Kina was a screaming newborn). When she was younger, songs filled an aural space that would otherwise be occupied by crying, but her relationship with music now is more nuanced and emotional—she knows that some songs are funny, while others are sad, and her sad dance is different from her funny dance. In her brain are lodged errant strands of lyrical DNA from random kids’ gospel songs that Spotify used to autoplay, and which Laurea and I would scream for Google to skip from across the apartment; now we play those songs for her out of nostalgia, and Kina absentmindedly mouths random syllables from them, like she’s dusting off old scrolls. If you want to hear the music of her youth, you, too, can dust off this poorly-sequenced Spotify playlist that we haven’t really changed since before she could walk (except to replace songs that were removed). Maybe it will keep you from crying, too.

Notes on the other two headlines: We were surprised yesterday to learn that remote school, recently ended, has simply become remote camp—an unexpected craft and dancing reprieve; it’s nice to have the teachers around again. And Kina came home yesterday saying that she’d met a boy in the park and that he was not quite big and not quite small and that, while he was capable of using a scooter, he was probably a baby. As it turns out, some of them can walk.

As always, our reporters and editors will be working through the holiday weekend, though my commentary here may be less elaborate. Remember that the safe thing to do this weekend is not to have too much fun, living instead vicariously through Kina. Hello, hello!

dad

It occurred to me recently that Kina’s been hitting me, and only me, whenever she gets angry lately. This, despite my best efforts to be a loving father and effective channel of strong Mister Rogers energy. I’m not really bothered by this, but I have been curious why it’s happening, and I chalk it up to this: When we’re angry at the world, it serves us best to find the thing it feels safest for us to be mad at. You can’t yell at SARS-CoV-2, but you can yell at the people who work alongside you or care for you (though you shouldn’t, obviously). I try as much as I can to check myself when I’m angry, to see if I’m accidentally redirecting my rage about [waves hands frantically everywhere] towards Laurea or Kina or the person working the desk at the car rental agency, and so I think I understand when Kina starts slapping my chest when her Lego tower falls down (which, careful readers will remember from yesterday, was quite tall and unstable), because she knows I get her, and that I’ve got her.

Notes on the two bits of food news: the bottom left headline refers to another weird thing that Kina’s gotten up to in the last few months, which is walking away from the dinner table halfway through her meal, turning into a cat, and demanding we muse out loud about where the cat is and whether or not she would like a spoonful of beans. It’s charming and slightly exhausting. Also, Laurea realized she could buy potato latkes for delivery from Russ & Daughters, for which she deserves (and repeatedly demanded) praise—you should all do likewise (buy latkes and praise Laurea).

There are now twenty-eight of you reading this. If you like it, find someone you love and punch them right in the gut. Ha ha just kidding, I mean share the newsletter with them.

dad

Themes that are emerging in the last week or so have included sudden storms and the end of school. I am trapped at the moment, in fact, in my car as another storm passes, reading an interview in the New York Times with a member of the American Association of Pediatricians, who have urged municipalities to provide in-person schooling in the fall. As much as Laurea and I are trying to figure out how best to care for and educate Kina in isolation from other children, we also recognize how privileged we are to be able to work from and near our home, to take parts of our day to work with Kina on lesson plans, to be able to afford safe and professional home care. Knowing how many people in New York City don’t have those privileges, it’s clear we have not fully reckoned with the enormous financial and educational impact on families (and particularly Black and brown families) of a decision not to provide in-person schooling this fall. The interview’s well worth reading—and gets into some of the tricky and scary issues of transmission and illness that make teachers and some families understandably nervous. (Including me!)

As a more specific comment on high-quality education, I’d like to thank the incomparable teachers at Small World—Ms. Mita, Ms. Ines, and Ms. Jamika (pictured above at top right)—who’ve helped Kina become a clever, radiant, and punchy 3.5-year-old kid. They taught her how to read her own name, how to share with others, how to be independent, and how to hold a pencil. Somehow, they also managed to adapt to a remote model of leading a group of three-year-olds better than we ever could have imagined. They’ve been amazing partners in care with us and Hannah (Kina’s amazing babysitter), and it’s super hard to say goodbye to them. Today’s teetering Lego tower goes out to them.

As always, love to each of you, who now number twenty-five. If you know fellow Kina fans or other individual potential subscribers, do feel free to invite them. Stay dry!

dad

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I can’t remember when the kid developed a fixation with rainbows—it’s been nearly as long as she’s been able to speak. She used to think anything curved was a rainbow, which meant that macaroni had strong rainbow energy, and that her dress with little macaronis on it was a rainbow dress. Her favorite color is rainbow. Her favorite story character, which she invented, is the Baby Rainbow Unicorn, whose Scheherazadean bedtime story titles make regular appearances on A1: “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Has All The Ice Cream”, “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Gets A Babysitter”, “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Goes To The Doctor”, “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Wants To Ride In The Car”. The houses in her bedtime stories have rainbow doors or rainbow windows. Her tea set is a rainbow tea set.

So, yesterday, after we met up with her teacher, Ms. Mita, in Jackson Heights to say a sad goodbye and exchange gifts, after climbing back into the car to head home, after the clouds opened up for an appropriate and timely bout of sobbing, after driving fifteen minutes down a flooded Queens Boulevard, the sun came out—and with the sun, a brilliant rainbow. We pulled over into a parking lot and unbuckled Kina from her seat so we could stand outside and show her a real, wild rainbow. She adored it.

And then she asked to listen to Moana.

dad

The early editions of the Daily Kina don’t go into the sordid details of the reason for its existence—namely, the crushing boredom and anxiety occasioned by a virus whose infectious properties were largely obscure. “KID DEMANDS NOVELTY”, read one headline, conveniently leaving unsaid the context that the kid had not really left the house in days (and that when she did, it was to run the sidewalks of a ghost town). I haven’t minded really being trapped in my home in a city I love so badly that it breaks my heart. On the other hand, I am constantly enraged that this pandemic is depriving my kid of her early childhood—school, playgrounds, friends, human contact. So today’s top headline was a joy to write, as it reflects a precious (if temporary, but I hope not) opportunity to bring these two kids together at a distance and watch them explode with the thrill of seeing each other. Futura and Sloanie make frequent appearances in these pages, for good reason, and I’m glad to get them to the top of A1 from time to time.

On a completely unrelated note, today’s logo is a take on the Frozen title. I’m proud of it, and of the profile portrait I’ve drawn of Kina, which is the first profile that hasn’t looked like a weird bean.

As always, glad to see you here in the funny pages. Tell those who love Kina that they’re welcome to subscribe, and take care of yourselves.

dad

Sleep plays a major role in this Sunday’s edition, with naps re-entering the report and night friends taking a break for some deep cleaning. Trust that they were disgusting. The kid’s chant in solidarity with the BLM bike protest was a particular highlight of the day, and would otherwise have made the top of A1, but yeah the stuffies were gross.

Today’s special section is a collage of Highlights magazine cutouts, curated by the kid and glued by Mom. As always, both Sunday pages are full sheets of construction paper—a fact that tends to get lost in the Instagram posts.

Kina sends good wishes for the week ahead. Send those wishes, or this newsletter, to the ones you love.

dad

This is the eighty-sixth edition of the Daily Kina. The first edition was published on April 3, 2020, just as we were emerging from a family-wide bout of COVID-19. It was drawn entire in blue crayon, cost twenty-five cents, and led with the headline “YOU A CHEESE FIEND HUH”. Today’s edition, like every one of the preceding ninety-five, took shape in about thirty minutes while Kina was running around asking for “special treats” and stealing markers from me. I ripped it out of the notebook, took a picture of it on the trunk in our bedroom, and taped it up on the cabinets so Kina would know what the news of the day was without having to spend [checks image] $22.20 on a personal copy.

Kina is three and a half years old, New York is in a strange lull in course of this pandemic, and these daily editions are probably the things I’ve most enjoyed while it’s all been unfolding. Someday we’ll make a book of them so she can remember.

In the meantime, I am not exactly being deliberate about this newsletter, which exists for basically two reasons: First, and most importantly, I want you to have this in your email inbox so it’s not all horrible in there. Secondly, the Venn diagram of “people who love Kina” and “people who use Facebook products” is not a circle, so to whatever extent you know people who like Kina, and who also want email inboxes that are less horrible, let them know.

I may never write this much actual text in the newsletter again, so I’ll leave you with this note: Today, there are three of you reading this. None of you follows the others on Instagram, which makes Kina the one thing holding you together.

See you tomorrow!

dad