I highly recommend watching videos about how ink is made if you are trying to have a calm start to your day. Add a game of Wordle to get your brain moving. Cuddle your child because that’s the best. That is your morning ritual, and Kina’s.

dad

She said this so nonchalantly, looking absently into the middle distance, that I very nearly forgot just how much of every single day is consumed by Kina telling me exactly what to do.

dad

I suppose we are also the most sensible and loving parents she has had, if that is any consolation.

dad

On a couple of recent occasions, when Kina has been quite tired or just really wound up, she has marveled that she can’t really get her brain around… her brain. It’s not unrelated, I think, to situations when she’s gotten frustrated with us for talking while she’s thinking—her mind just gets away from her.

I know the feeling, I think. I remember being in my parents’ bed after an exhausting day when I was still really young, staring at the closet and being unsure how to explain to my family that everything was both so very big and so very small. In this way, being a child is like being on acid all the time, and there’s a moment when you become really self-aware all of a sudden, and you can express to others the miracle of consciousness.

They generally don’t get it.

Sometimes, there is good news.

dad

Today, as I was leaving the venue, I showed the conference organizer my video of The Joke from yesterday and explained how Kina was stunned I had told her joke onstage, and the organizer was like, “Oh, I actually thought that was your joke and I didn’t want to comment on how bad it was.”

My brand is strong.

dad

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Con.

The acting editor in chief has already taken a strange left turn.

dad

The tooth fairy is unsure whether or not the physical tooth must be present for reimbursement or not. She contemplates the possibility that Kina might mint an NFT of her first lost tooth, which would be far more valuable, potentially, depending on the continued implosion of late-stage capitalism. Teeth! Teeth! Teeth!

dad

None of the adults involved in this vignette have any idea what the many boring secrets actually are, which is a new and weird development in the area of kid secrets.

dad

When Kina helped me draw the very first Daily Kina, she was barely three years old, and now she is barely five—or almost five and a half, which is how five-year-olds work. One year ago, I wrote a long newsletter about what this paper meant to me at the moment of its first anniversary. I will admit that it felt like a little victory lap, since all of us were getting our vaccines and certainly the pandemic would be over soon; I remember telling Laurea that I’d either stop when Kina started kindergarten or when the pandemic was over, and while the first of those two deadlines has long passed, the second seems likely (as I suspected last year) never to come—which means I’ll be writing this newspaper for the rest of my natural, fully-boosted life. The uncertainty never quits here at The Daily Kina.

The pandemic played a slightly less prominent role in the last year of The Daily Kina than it had in 2020, which the exception of the aforementioned vaccines (including Kina’s own prompt vaccination amidst the very peak of Omicron. So, what took its place? Simple things happened. Kina started kindergarten. She turned five. Her cousin Otis turned zero. A land war broke out in Europe. Mostly, Kina grew up. Her toddler malapropisms gave way to sophisticated and often baffling interrogations about the inner workings of her big-girl mind and the universe.

Maybe the best thing about the last year (for the purposes of this publication) is that Kina learned to read. I introduced a “Young Reader’s Section” on May 28th, for two reasons: first, because I wanted Kina to spend more time reading; and second, because I was tired of coming up with four headlines every weekday (bet you didn’t notice that cost-saving measure). Every day I draw and write a newspaper entirely about Kina, and while that is in part selfish work, it is still fundamentally for her, and so it makes me happy that she can now directly consume the work that I do for her (or at least a little of it). For a long time, Kina could not be pestered to read the word of the day without my drawing a picture of it, but she eventually came around and started sounding things out—and now she is just shouting out the word of the day as she runs to the bathroom. Hooray for Ms. Chelsea and her reading lessons.

Kina swears up and down that the only reason she hissed “Go! Go!” at me yesterday morning, as I was doing a little Dad boogie on the sidewalk in front of her and her friends, was because she didn’t want me to take the tittering of her fellow kindergartners too personally. She underestimates my tolerance for ridicule. I almost certainly overestimate her tolerance for others’ ridicule of me.

I will get my dances in while I can, child.

dad

The child, as always, has it all figured out.

dad

You don’t gotta go home but you can’t stay here.

dad

It had never, in my many years of life, occurred to me that kindergarten was just a school that teaches you how to go to school, and that school is just teaching you how to go to work, and honestly now I’m slightly mad about kindergarten—but Kina really is a good listener, and that makes me really proud, because listening can be a subversive (and supportive) act in all the ways she will someday need to be subversive (and supportive).

dad

Five. The answer is five, if we assume that Laurea and my cousin Erica really do leave the swings after drinking all that beer.

dad

It is also the wisest question she has ever asked, which is what I thought she said until she very sternly corrected me.

dad

Upon inspection of today’s top headline, Kina pointed out that I had misrepresented the visual artifacts in the field of darkness inside her eyes, drew a giant purple “L” on the illustration, looked at it pensively, and declared the paper “okay”. She also painted the wiggly tooth bright pink.

Today’s Parade is a garden, as usual, of colors under a setting sun. It might seem coincidental that the palette is so similar to her eyelid landscape—but this is Kina’s brain, of course, so it’s all of a piece.

HOW COULD THIS POSSIBLY BE HAPPENING ALREADY?

dad

There are few things that casually frustrate me more than having a thought in my head and watching it evaporate as somebody utters even a single word. My brain requires silence to operate at full capacity!

Kina has clearly inherited this from me—or maybe it’s something that happens to literally everybody, not sure. In any case, she is on a very special planet of distraction where slurping is the loudest noise of all.

dad