Witches wear green.

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To be fair, it was nearly imperceptibly stinky yesterday. I would know, because she gets her sense of smell from me.

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2020 may as well have been the dawn of time, when I was once in first grade. Kina did all the illustrations today—first time in a while. I think they’re hilarious.

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Six years old, a teenager: a case study. (Not pictured here is Laurea, who is allowed to at least cross the street.)

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Here, Kina has drawn her own “Fudashins Bord”, which help her students to write their letters properly.

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Kina was, when she was younger, eerily at ease with having her blood drawn. This is convenient, as her allergies require an annual visit to the phlebotomist for tests, which was our morning occupation again yesterday.

The first time she had her blood drawn, it was in her doctor’s office, and we approached the process with the anticipation of certain doom, restraining her with all our might as she struggled and screamed, surrounded by three scowling nurses. It took hours for the adrenaline to wear off.

A year later, with a visit booked to a nondescript clinic on 14th Street, Laurea and I agreed to assume and expect nothing at all, and escorted our two-year-old child (whose long-term memory was still flimsy) through the door and into a fluorescent-lit back room festooned with Disney decals.

I love that Kina showed me her shady face and then was super shady to me in the same breath.

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School’s haunted.

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You know you’re six when the bus ride to midtown is as exciting as the musical you took the bus to see.

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I leave the house for one day and suddenly she can do a flip.

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Kina doesn’t like it when you clap before the show is over.

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Kina’s favorite food is pasta, and among her favorite places to go to eat it is a Roman restaurant down the street from us. She reliably orders either the rigatoni in tomato sauce or the carbonara, relishing every starchy bite. Reliably, I suppose, until last night, when she instead chose a mixed-greens salad.

This felt significant to me in a way that I hadn’t considered might be inspired by a bowl of lettuce. Kina has eaten pasta since she started eating food, really, and Laurea and I take great joy in serving it to her and building our restaurant visits around access to various pastas (when we aren’t completely burned out on pasta, which happens with increasing regularity). To hear her order salad instead was a shot across the bow of the S.S. Someday She’ll Be An Adult and All You Can Do Is Sit By and Watch.

Periodically, I stop to wonder when Kina will stop wearing princess dresses. The conventional wisdom, as I understand it, is “usually sometime between six and seven years old”. It felt charming, two years ago, to be perplexed and overwhelmed by Kina’s forest of taffeta—to muse out loud about how we hadn’t expected or facilitated this, or to roll our eyes in dramatic exasperation. We had, what, three years of this? Princess dresses, every single day.

I didn’t want to put her pukey day on blast in our last issue, but it felt notable that Kina had more or less no conscious interaction with the world—with the exception of a bite of breakfast and a spoon of soup at lunch—at all yesterday. This is classic Sick Kina, I should say; she stays almost entirely still for 24 hours, runs a steady fever, and then pops up suddenly like a marionette and asks for popsicles. It’s very worrisome, until it’s not.

Today she’s fine. Who knows.

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I wish we were available to go to a musical in the middle of the day with my kid and her entire first grade class. I mean, really, I really do. The outcome would either be devastatingly charming or pure chaos. It would be lovely, indeed.

A lot more lovely than what we endured last night. But that’s for tomorrow.

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I love the games that kids invent on playgrounds.

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According to this Paper of Record, Kina’s lower left incisor started wiggling on January 22, over a month ago. We would periodically forget that it was wiggly, then be reminded suddenly as Kina’s mouth squirmed on the couch while she fussed at the tooth with the tip of her tongue. Just over a week ago, we reported on the “good news” of Kina’s still-wiggly tooth (and the solemn end of carnival).

Yesterday, “just after pack-up”, Kina’s tooth finally fell out, as her jubilant classmates cheered her great accomplishment. The tooth came home in an envelope. The envelope came home in a backpack. The backpack came home on the back of a newly-untoothed child whose first question was where she would have to put the envelope in order to be found by the Tooth Fairy.

The Tooth Fairy is the one myth we have not shattered. I’m not sure why. It’s probably because the Tooth Fairy is the only imaginary creature whose sole interest is Kina—and Kina’s teeth, specifically.1 There’s something transactional about the Fairy that is fascinating, and I should by all accounts dislike the idea of the Fairy, but the Fairy delivered as expected. Having once delivered a million-dollar bill, she dropped her rate to a mere ten dollars (nine dollars more than I typically received from the same fairy, though that was over 40 years ago).

Playing Marco Polo inside the relatively confining passages of a New York City apartment is murder on the toes and not nearly as refreshing as when you play it in a cold swimming pool in the middle of a summer scorcher. I was heretofore unfamiliar with the whole pregame involving Eenie Meenie Miney Moe and all the players switching around like a game of human three-card Monte, but we take our joys where we can get them.

I will also note that Kina’s approach to Marco Polo is basically “Marco”, because she believes you shouldn’t have to yell “Polo”, and that the Marco just needs to use their superhuman sense of hearing to detect subtle movements from several feet away. Great idea for those whose ears have not been battered for years by city noise and poor choices regarding loud music.

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Kina has made a habit for weeks now of drawing elaborate pictures of rainbows and cats and pizza for any restaurant she visits. Invariably, whoever takes the picture from her puts it up on the pass in the kitchen or at the host’s stand at the entrance or next to the Heimlich instructions. It happens with such frequency now that I fully expect her drawings to become a topic of conversation among cooks and servers at the places that cooks and servers go after work—which, presumably, would be a restaurant with a Kina picture behind the bar.

Every card that Kina makes for her friends the servers is signed “FOR YOU FROM KINA”, which I like because it is not nearly as self-centered as an autograph, but rather conveys a sense of personal gratitude—which is the intended effect. It makes me want to eat out more often, and I hope it makes you want to draw little pictures for your servers at restaurants, too.

Tip well!

Spent the day with Kina yesterday, as Laurea spent a little time at the spa. This gave me the chance to watch her destroy a beef patty in order “to find the pudding”, to help her buy two completely non-princess dresses, and to convince her to let us converse in operatic recitative for over half an hour—probably the greatest triumph of them all.

Amidst all of this, I was clearly gazing at her lovingly, which she interpreted as having something to do with employment. It’s an oddball headline, but it’s Sunday and we’ll take it.

For a later Daily Kina, I’ll come back to this question of the fading interest in princess dresses. The feeling is subtle but present, and Kina’s dress purchase yesterday signified something to me that I’ll have to confirm in a few months. The end of an era, maybe.

Sound of one hand clapping.

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