It is absolutely one the best things to hear your kid singing herself to sleep with a song that includes the lyric “breathe in a bag”.

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I think you can probably tell from today’s edition that Kina is getting more curious about things that feel threatening. Tonight she asked if we could watch tsunami videos or maybe just videos of “people being hit by huge waves”, which is fortunately a search term with relatively underwhelming results on Youtube. In any case, this recent obsession with natural disaster hasn’t resulted in any commensurate increase in nightmares, and so I’m playing along by making bowls of oobleck for Kina in the minutes before bedtime and watching her figure out how to extract herself from quicksand—should she ever need to.

Short answer: it takes a long time to sink, but don’t get too comfortable.

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Happy continued New Year from the world’s most committed celebrant.

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In just two months, this newspaper will be the same age Kina was when I first starting drawing it. She still remembers that time, and the kids and teachers at her little preschool—where she looked down from the rooftop playground and smiled as she thought about me.

Hi to all the teachers from Small World!

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Still working on the new Kina figure. Posture is tricky when you add detail!

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The kid has started to show an interest in that part of our lives that predated her arrival, focusing largely on the bits after we met (Kina having traditionally believed that we were somehow always together.) We collectively spent a few hours yesterday filling her in on the things she wasn’t there to see about our relationship, all of which she listened to voraciously.

In her mind, everything about our lives as a couple—from the day Laurea first shook my hand—was aimed squarely at marriage (and really, squarely at a wedding day). This could not be further from the truth. What we didn’t talk to Kina about was how uncertain both of us were about pursuing a long-distance relationship back in 2002, how reticent Laurea was to get married, and how long it took for us to get our heads around having a baby.

With that long arc in mind, there were many stories with which to regale our darling daughter about our brilliant and carefree lives before she arrived. Laurea and I have often talked about those years, but always in the quiet hours after Kina goes to sleep—fearful, I suppose, that she’d feel both insulted by our nostalgia and left out by our stories. It felt good to be able to talk to Kina about the parties, the travel, the jobs, the friends, the wedding—and she was soaking it all up.

Thanks to Uncle Ken for the makings of a fort. Thanks to Mommy for tolerating a garish nylon mansion in the middle of Kina’s room.

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I have spent a not-insignificant part of my career explaining how Google Docs works, and so it is both a little impressive and a little scary that Kina just went for it this way, because she is six and has never used Google Docs.

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This is the “stop hitting yourself” of manipulative kid questions.

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As we reckon with this moment in which the child no longer wants her father to stand nearby at drop-off, sending him into a spiral of separation anxiety, I will direct you to the last two times I got stuck to the fence.

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I appreciate Kina’s concern for my well being, but I think it’s a bit early for the child to become the parent—even as I see myself in her this way.

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p.s. “Is there any, like, nineties day?”

Mommy comes back with trinkets, is exhausted, loved by daughter beyond measure.

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The problem with justice is that gymnastics always gets in the way. Aside: Still tinkering with figure stuff here, and introducing Wammawink from Centaurworld, which I will have to write about here someday.

To be fair, the mandarins were really small, but she ate another dozen later this evening. We agree that mandarins are really good and probably better than candy.

For fun, tried out a more detailed Kina figure today, but not sure I have the patience to work it out.

The orange is great, tho. Weekend energy.

I only have the one kid, so I can’t tell if Kina is more obsessed with danger and darkness than the average child, but this week’s emergent theme of harm and threat seems very much in line with Kina’s fascinations in general over the last year. She binge-watches videos about insect stings, fast-forwards her cartoons to the bits where a tornado sucks up all the main characters, and will calmly enjoy the bits from Princess Mononoke in which people’s limbs are sliced off as she eats kernels of popcorn.

I’m not particularly inclined to say she’s been desensitized to violence, so much as that she’s not yet sure what the violence signifies or leads to. Still, after a recent spate of nightmares, it seems that she’s starting to evaluate the risk of being near things that are dangerous, and that includes New York.

As she and I quietly drove back from her cousin’s birthday on Wednesday night, she randomly asked me whether or not there were things in the city that were dangerous, and drew as examples upon the things she’s most likely to think are dangerous: tornadoes and earthquakes principally, with a slightly less pointed curiosity about limb-slashing.

Happy birthday to Kina’s only cousin and spiritual brother, who could not bring himself to smash a cake specifically produced for that purpose. Otis, your sister-cousin enjoyed the unsmashed slice of cake she was able to eat as a result. Bless you, flower king.

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The funny thing about Truth or Dare for six year olds is that all the truth stuff is super factual, like “do birds fly?” and “do you love Mommy?”

Both, of course, truly yes answers.

I’m scared to go “dare”, but I will keep you informed as things unfold.

Strangely enough, I remember this feeling from when I was small—smaller, even, than I felt I ought to have been at the time. We never quite feel like the person we see in the mirror, which leads me to wonder who we think we are, and where that person comes from.

Lately, I look in the mirror and feel somewhat older than I ought to be—which has been an ongoing process, obviously, in ways that are different than simply being shorter than you might expect. I suspect my assumption about how old I am is shifting about as quickly as the person looking back at me (and out at all of you), but that’s likely a process of continual begrudging acceptance. I’m not thirty anymore, and I’m very quickly realizing that I’m not forty anymore, and that line of reasoning becomes increasingly untenable as a human being, and so I just don’t spend much time with mirrors.

So, who is this person who isn’t reflected in the mirror?

It’s kind of hard to explain how fun it was yesterday to take Kina to Central Park (which we are obligated by our Standards desk to call “Zentals Park”) and just let her tell us what to do. Having started at one of the Central Park East playgrounds, we found ourselves crowded out by billionaires and fled to the common fields, where Kina had a significantly better time climbing rando boulders for the next two hours in her frilly princess dress (complete with formal gloves). We traded tips on how to climb some of the more complex rocks, did some sketching in the ethereal golden light, and took in the unusually warm January air together—though I was probably underdressed for the occasion in ways that Kina and her mother were not, for which Kina fully roasted me.

At one point, after climbing a particularly tall boulder, Kina sat with me and mused quietly, “This is so fun.” I think I have never been happier as a parent than I was in that moment, sitting with a literal princess in Zentals Park and knowing that she recognized how special it was to be there.

I love this kid.

And with that, the end of the third calendar year of this cursed pandemic and the blessed publication of The Daily Kina. Kina is now six, and the year is now 2023, and the time she spends with her friends is more independent and sassy and full of nonsense drama that sometimes makes all the friends cry at the very same time.

Faithful readers will recall that we spent last New Year’s Eve with Futura, too. In that short newsletter, I offered the wish that “…this year (the third calendar year of this august publication) [might] be better, for all of us, than the last.” The good thing about Kina’s childhood, in the main, is that each year is a bit better than the last—in the sense that Kina has become something greater this year than she was a year ago (though she was no less cute in 2021 than today, I’d offer). Kids, in other words (if you are lucky), trend towards improvement.