On Kina’s community board, you will find:

• Kelvin, the dry cleaner on the corner to whom Kina waves every day on her way to school. On the board, he is depicted giving her some of the leftover Halloween candy.

• Lighthouse, a local restaurant. The owner, Naama, is depicted serving Kina pasta.

• Rockin’ Locks, where Kina gets her haircut. On the board, Kina’s stylist, Christina, is depicted taking a little of the weight off.

• Lilia, another nearby restaurant. Kina is shown eating tortellini with an enormous braid.

• Tribeca Pediatrics is where Kina sees her doctor, Stephanie Desgrottes, who is seen handing Kina a lollipop for being so good during her shots.

In all of these vignettes, Kina is beloved of the proprietor and happy. In all of them, I have four strands of spiky hair. This is our community.

Ah, to be five years old, arriving home from a full day with your school friends to the smell of a delicious dinner you take for granted but cannot yet recognize.

dad

That feeling when you realize that every week, every day, every year just starts over and over and over. Good luck, small normal time traveler, and may every week begin anew.

dad

“Daddy, how do you spell soup? Wait, never mind.”

dad

As an avid consumer and creator of habit charts, including Kina’s legendary “patience chart”, I feel slightly bereft at the thought that she will not let me track her rapidly-improving habit of brushing teeth twice a day and not hitting me. But I remain steadfast! I shall keep this chart in my mind, child, and check it every day!

dad

I do not like that we are living through yet another cautious winter under the auspices of the world’s most tenacious pandemic, but I am glad we get to flex our newfound skills in keeping a small child entertained while temperatures fall into the teens—without staying in our apartment. No indoor play spaces? Parkas and playgrounds. No singalongs? Bring a bluetooth speaker to the park so the kids can dance. No movie theaters? Hop in the car and park on the Greenpoint waterfront for a drive-in screening of WALL-E (which, by the way, absolutely holds up after fourteen years). Throw some watermelon to on the roof of the car to crisp up, eat a pizza on the folded-down backseat, and gaze at the skyline as the snow begins to fall. It’s almost like things aren’t totally falling apart, which is the least we owe this kid, and occasionally ourselves.

dad

We visited Kina’s new cousin, Otis, yesterday, unsure how she might take to a family member younger than her. Short version: She did great, holding and entertaining her newborn relative as if she had known him for years.

Otis’s parents were weathering the first two weeks of their first child’s life with about as much grace as I can recall myself having at a similar moment in Kina’s life—a veiled sense of lingering shock and displacement from their own home hung in the air as we ate lunch; I vibrated in remembered sympathy.

Compared to Kina, Otis barely weighs anything at all, but as I laid him in Kina’s arms, I felt her muscles firm up underneath him to keep him safe. She knelt on the couch and looked down at him, then began to sing him lullabies, which I like to think is the one thing she remembers about being two weeks old.

The mullet of kindergarten fashion choices. Party in the front, business in back.

dad

Kina and I play Wordle now every morning, working out the relative positions of letters and ruminating on the absence of certain vowels. She enjoys the suspense of getting progressively closer to an answer each day, but it’s clearly bothering her that there is no larger game to win, other than the glory of everybody posting their scores on Twitter.

I tried to explain the concept of Twitter glory to her, but she didn’t get it, which is likely less of a comment about her than it is about Twitter, generally.

dad

Brushing teeth remains by far the most controversial personal care task in this household, and twenty minutes of unbridled screaming is all it takes to win your case in this house (as in most workplaces).

dad

Alternate hed: Child forced to sport mismatched gloves to class as missing mitten cavorts with condiments.

dad

In the year of our lord 2022, we have decided that we cannot impose sartorial purity on this kindergartner, and we formally apologize to the public education system for embarking on that slippery slope. It is the only release valve we have left, and we hope the rainbow unicorns make life in the classroom even slightly more frivolous.

dad

For her first time on ice, Kina proved a real natural at the sport. She’s no Daddy, of course, with his devil-may-care gliding style, but she is definitely catching up to Mommy, who really made use of the plastic skating aid to get her ice legs on. By the end of an hour on the rink, I was holding just one of Kina’s hands as we skated side by side. A good showing all around!

dad

With a quick visit to her doctor yesterday—twenty minutes and a lollipop—Kina finally managed to get in the second of her two shots for Covid-19, just days after dodging her own second dance with the coronavirus of the century. In two weeks, she’ll be considered fully vaccinated (for now, and for her age group, at least), but she celebrated her jab by strutting out onto Flatbush Avenue and screaming “I’M FULLY VACCINATED!!!” which was, to be honest, the best news of the day for everybody within earshot.

It’s bonkers that I’ve been drawing this newspaper since vaccines were at best a pipe dream (“Eighteen months” is what Fauci once said when asked what he hoped the turnaround time for a widely-available and effective vaccine would be.) Now my own daughter has antibodies in her blood that target the very reason this publication exists.

The world is unbearable but still sometimes astonishing if you step back far enough.

A little snow day action in the parking lot across the street to lighten the mood this year.

dad

The email says negative, which means that what I now have is likely also the common cold. Life goes on.

dad

Our editorial board sends their love to Des and Andrew, parents of Kina’s cousin Otis, new to the world and to this publication. It is very refreshing, in the midst of everything happening, to be able to draw a little swaddled baby next to my favorite big kid—who has, as noted, tested negative with respect to her little cough. It happens.

dad

Still negative! For now! This year sucks!

dad

Meow meow bedtime meow stories meow meow routine. Meow meow Kina meow cats meow meow pretend. Meow meow meow two birds meow one stone meow meow kinda fun meow meow. Meow Kina meow happy meow sleepy. Meow Daddy meow meow something meow different. Meow meow happily ever meow.

dad

Kina’s beloved Uncle Ken is off to China to work at the Olympics for the next two months(!) but Kina still thinks he is a competitor and hopes he wins all the medals and has a nice time. She gave him her hardest stuffie for good luck, which I am sure will help.

dad