Kina’s been attending the end-of-summer park bash since before she was two. There is music, dancing, food, and mud pies (the kids’ contribution). It is a major affair and we are glad it is back.

dad

This is not the first time Kina has showed up in this newspaper wearing my headphones and pretending to have a job. The last time we covered this topic was April of last year, when we were all busy getting vaccinated and feeling optimistic about the future, and I had a lot to say about humane workplaces and what it meant for Kina to be modeling the kind of work that fosters them. I would encourage you to go back and read that newsletter again, if you haven’t in a while.

What I guess I hadn’t realized is how frequently I emerge frantically from my room, still talking to whomever is presently staring at an empty chair and hearing me retrieve lunch. Neither had I ever said the words “WE ARE PLANNING TO MAKE MONEY” in the way that Kina is suggesting here.

What I can confirm is that I spend a lot of time talking, and on the focus we pay to talking. Does it all make a difference?

Sheesh!

dad

The story here is that yesterday was nothing new or stood out as a discovery of some childhood skill, but that so much happens on a Sunday for us that it doesn’t fit in the dek field of the post editor and I just have to tell you that she ate dumplings for dinner on top of everything else yesterday. Nothing special, sure, but an iconic August Sunday, which we will now always remember.

dad

Kina calls him “Jersey Julian” because Julian was already taken by Sloane’s brother. He is twelve years old and a boy, and every time Kina visits him in New Jersey (which is why he is called “Jersey Julian”), the two of them spend the entire day alone together talking and playing. Julian seems not just amused by Kina, but genuinely engaged and conversational. It is a strange and beautiful friendship that we revisit every year.

At Belmar Beach yesterday, the two of them dived and tumbled in the waves—Julian on his own, as a large kid, and Kina with me, as a small one. Both could have spent the entire day being swallowed up by the breakers and plucking stranded jellyfish from the high-tide line, except that one of the pair had a parent who was waterlogged and exhausted and needed to spend some time on the sand.

We did not, for the record, pick one way or the other, but Laurea and I are both thrilled to have the strong and clever daughter we got, all by chance. Kina caught her mother by surprise when she posed the question last night, which went a bit like, “Did you know whether you were gonna have a daughter?”

We did, and it was a daunting revelation—as it might have been in some other universe in which we were having a son. At the time, it felt specific to Kina and the challenges of gender she might someday face, but I think, in hindsight, that it’s just scary knowing that you’re responsible for bringing any human being of any gender into a world in which they might fall into its traps and habits.

Mommy is really into news about the global supply chain.

Also: Have you noticed how Kina is taking greater and greater control over the production of this publication? We welcome a hands-on, in-the-weeds publisher! What if this newsletter eventually became Kina’s own blog?!?! Stay tuned for the next eight years and find out!

dad (a recovering blogger)

For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to get Kina to count to three and take deep breaths when she is angry, to no avail. Repeated screenings of Daniel Tiger, gentle summonings of her inner Kina when she is enraged, practicing while calm—nothing reaches her when she’s in the zone.

Yesterday, though, as I responded huffily to a text from work, Kina walked up beside me and held my hand up into the air, slowly lowering it as she counted to four.

“Breathe in,” she said, as I breathed in.

Kina’s epic tour of the greater tri-state area continues, passing a block-long bouncy castle in midtown on her way back from Liberty Science Center. Fortunately, she was too hot and tired to drag Hannah through it, but I expect to see this caterpillar in a future issue.

dad

Have we talked about the fact that Kina no longer tolerates displays of affection between her parents? It’s the biggest flash point in our relationship with her now, and we can almost guarantee that a meltdown will follow even the slightest smooch between us. I thought we got away with this one. Don’t ask me how she knew we kissed—it is a total mystery to me.

dad

How can such a busy day not produce a pithy headline? Kina was on the back of my bike for most of it. She was probably being hilarious just out of earshot.

dad

Those of you who have been with us since before the days of the newsletter editions will remember Kina’s early trials with potty training, in which her parents connived to trick her into pooping in the toilet with all sorts of enticements. Ultimately, as the top headline of April 14, 2020 tells us, “Small Poop Seen In Potty”1, which suggests that nothing that either Laurea or I offered her in exchange for civil pooping did anything at all, and the thing we probably should have just committed to was… waiting.

So, too, it goes with swimming, apparently. We took Kina to swim lessons in the dank basement pool of a condo building in Ridgewood back in 2019, and boy did that not take. Year after year, I tried to get her to swim in the ocean while I held onto her, but it was only this year that she discovered the joys of dunking, which seems to have unlocked all the other skills necessary to actually propel herself through the water unaided (and without floaties!)

The child believes in the zen of archery and the uselessness of worry.

dad

A record three of three illustrations drawn by Kina today, in celebration of her interstate splash pad odyssey.

dad

Not a lot to add here. My apologies to all Swedish subscribers for what is admittedly a travesty of accent. She just won’t let me get her dressed if I am not Juergen. It will pass.

dad

It’s odd how parents latch onto things like class assignments in the days leading up to a new year of school, by which I mean: It is odd how I latch onto things like class assignments in the days leading up to a new year of school. I shouldn’t care about the species of tree my child’s first grade class is named after, but it has claimed a not-insignificant part of my day.

Also—look at all those illustrations by our publisher! I am kvelling!!!

dad

A little marine science for today’s edition. Also very proud of my apologetic nose.

dad

First of all, Kina, it’s an apartment, not a house. Apples and oranges.

dad

Back home from vacation. It was very possibly the longest drive I’ve taken from Maine to New York in the last twenty-five years, but the whole car was aglow with the memory of a great week at the beach with family, and none of us was the worse for the delay. Kina did poop in the Bronx; I’m sorry, the Bronx.

Two Parade covers today. This one up above is the first one that Kina wants you to see—the side of the paper that is signed—

I have decided that New York City does not have enough porches, sparklers, or beaches. Kina loves two of these things and hates the third—an exercise for the reader.

dad