I don’t think we’d ever noticed how Kina says “Sure!” when she means “yes”, or that she says “I’m good!” when she means “no”, but I can tell you for sure that people in California notice it, and so it must be a New York thing.

dad

This is a special time. No further comment.

Today’s Parade is a collaboration with Tita Cindy and Tito Giorgio, and just one of Kina’s many natural artworks from the last day.

Bonnie is really the only deer in Kina’s life, to be fair, but the two are fast friends and cautious neighbors here on the mountain. I do not think there is a human she was more excited to see this week. We woke up today to find Bonnie standing directly at our door, waiting for this girl who comes just once a year. Kina knew it would be like this, she reminded us—she had told us the night before.

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Off to the next stop. Farewell, hot tub.

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It is not that easy for me, but now she’s best friends with Jasper, a boy she met this morning, so I guess it’s Laurea’s side.

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She did ask the little girl her name, seeing as she had (according to Kina’s journal entry) “the igsact same birthday as me”, and yet she ultimately did not remember the little girl’s name, and so I cannot tell you more specifically about the child who was born at the same time (more or less) than Kina. I can tell you they got along well, and that her birthday twin did not at all want to go to day camp, having found one of the few people she will ever meet who shares her birthday. This is special stuff. Camp can wait.

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I don’t know that I know anybody who loves California as much as Kina does. It’s a fascination that seems to have cropped up in the past year, and it’s made up of equal parts novelty, Lala, ice cream, playgrounds, sunshine, princess dresses, and unimpeded time with her parents. The sense of discovery I see in her is dizzying—she really is just absorbing this place, and it’s pushed aside any other part of her life; friends are a distant memory, teachers living in wistful shadow, the subway a relic of another age. Instead: so many beautiful flowers, ripe avocados, hot tubs, and adoration. It’s a fair trade, I think. No space left in the brain. Just California.

dad

Honestly, I don’t even want to know.

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The first morning in California with Kina has traditionally been a real doozy, usually starting at 4 AM and requiring our full attention and commitment. It’s hard for us to stay asleep, too, of course, but we know better than to succumb to the instinct to get up and play with toys. This year is better than all previous years combined—not because she woke up any later today, which she did not, but because she didn’t come get us. We mainly laid here in the dark, listening to her sing Disney tunes and whack on a carpentry set, grateful that we didn’t have to entertain her for once. Things do get better, as it turns out.

So, this is the Parade. As you can see, it is Califo(r)nia themed. It was originally meant to read “CALIFORNIA HERE WE COME PARADE”

Was too jet-lagged to send this last night.

dad

I don’t invent the headlines, I just report them.

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The controversial First-Class Plane Dad in question. Charmingly, Kina declared that the whole family should sit in the big seat up front. Very fair.

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I spent an actual dollar on a breath-filled water balloon this morning, so Kina is definitely on track to be a billionaire.

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Kina has not been alive long enough to really contemplate what the ideal superpower would be, and so, with limited information, she has chosen a very specific power that maximizes the joy she hopes to feel in this exact moment. There is something to that initiative that I admire—that sense of focus. The right answer to the question of “which is the best superpower”, which she will discover at some point in her adulthood, is the manipulation of time. I have not yet developed that power, unfortunately, but I do have ready access to Fruit Roll-Ups, which is apparently a miracle in and of itself.

dad

When I was a little kid, younger than Kina, I would watch Spidey Super Stories, the first live-action Spider-Man show, which was basically an extended segment on The Electric Company—a show for kids that somehow had cast both Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman. It was the seventies.

Anyhow, Spider-Man could climb walls, which seemed like a huge win, and I was just old enough to recognize that this was an exclusive skill and just young enough not to know it was also an impossible skill. I would stand in the family room and grip the walls, hoping to figure out how it was done, to no avail.

Eventually, I found a bottle of Elmer’s glue and just slathered the whole thing on the palms of my hands and waited for it to soak into my skin, which I figured would make me permanently sticky. It made me sticky. It was not permanent.

If you are reading these daily newsletters and thinking “dang they are spending a lot of time at the beach this year,” you are not mistaken. Ever since Kina took to dunking in the ocean last year, we’ve realized that all her greatest strides in swimming and other forms of marine independence come in the waves—plus, it’s really nice when the air is thick and still and 88 degrees.

Yesterday, Kina swam between me and Laurea on our way out to the sandbar about 150 feet out from shore (It was low tide, so not actually that deep). We jumped around in the waves as they broke on the sandbar, then retreated to the deeper waters closer to the beach and swam in the swells. It was… it was swell.

After all these days in the ocean, some two years or so into wearing basically the same swimsuit every trip, her rash guard basically gave out, so Laurea tossed it in the trash can. Farewell, sweet rash guard.

May the gods preserve the MTA and its direct overland route to the best water feature in Brooklyn.

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The newsroom remains tense after yesterday’s unprecedented interference by our publisher, but she looked real cute on the teacup ride.

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The newsroom is livid.

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The thing about this family: We are weather nerds. I don’t leave the house without a thorough analysis of precipitation, temperature, and air quality for the day, and I take my probabilities seriously. We are also beach nerds, which means that we have a high hit rate for great, sunny beach days. Tuesday was meant to be that kind of beach day.

Yesterday, though, as we confronted a hot July 4th with a (broad, useless, emergent, nonspecific) “50% chance of rain”, we began to question our plan to spend the day at the beach, for fear of… getting wet? Rain and beach, no good—and if we flip a coin and it comes up rain half the time, those aren’t the kinds of odds we like.

However, faced with the alternatives—stay home, drive to New Jersey, watch three movies—we threw caution to the wind and rolled out to the beach. What if life isn’t black and white? What if you can spend two hours at the beach in the blazing sun before it starts sprinkling? That’s two hours of beach time I get to snatch from fate.