A happy major birthday, indeed, to the esteemed mother of the publisher and boss of the family, who spent the last two days in Napa celebrating, eating, drinking, and getting full nights of sleep. Today is about Laurea, and all the things that make her the amazing woman she is.

Every day I’m grateful that Kina sees Laurea as that woman, so she knows what is possible for her as she grows up to become her own confident person, in turn. Maybe she, too, will find herself collapsed on a couch in the garden of a winery after a too-ambitious tasting, talking about mountains and grapes and happy that her own daughter is somewhere far away, drawing a daily newspaper with her grandmother.

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I have never seen a child bounce for so long.

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A little reminder that we have arrived, and that missives will be fully illustrated but sparsely narrated for the next few days. Greetings from next to Kina’s bunk bed!

I only brought seven sheets of construction paper for the Parade this coming week, and so I was a little disconcerted by how much Kina massacred in order to produce today’s cover. She is the art director, I suppose.

Our first flight together in two years was uncomfortable but largely uneventful, with the exception of a teenager who passed out in the aisle unexpectedly over Utah. Kina took that, and everything else that happened in our little airborne aluminum tube, very much in stride. She recommends Boss Baby 2 for the next time you, too, are stuffed into an airplane. Stay hydrated and keep your seatbelt secured this holiday. Expect more California-oriented news this week!

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A journey begins.

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The mutual admiration society that is Kina’s relationship with her kindergarten teacher continues unabated.

I hope you enjoy Kina’s many sad blueberries and her single joyous blueberry.

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I know it’s been roughly forty years since I last played Duck, Duck, Goose, but I have no recollection of a cookie jar, what said jar has to do with aquatic birds, or what happened after you got tapped on the head and started running. This has been your statutorily-mandated reminder that I am old. Kina had fun, tho!

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Even teachers deserve a secret joke.

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If you can remember the actual plot of “the Gingerbread Man”, you’re a better parent than I am, but joke’s on you, because Kina refuses to listen to bedtime stories from antiquity. Better stock up on goofy stories with no particular point, bucko, because Kina’s going shopping at the novelty story market.

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The people of this house signal social hierarchy and family membership with a complex lexicon of donut and unicorn stickers, applied daily to energy centers of their faces and hands. Their meaning, to outsiders, remains a mystery. We know only that the expense is astronomical.

Kina remains obsessed with our wedding. She always wants to know if she was in attendance, and we’ve reminded her several times now that she was a little egg in Mommy’s belly at the time. This is our wedding, is what I am trying to say. The trellis above us is decorated with blinding-hot suns. The letters at the top are, apparently, Kina’s name and “WRITE YOUR NAME”. It is drawn in pastels, with a very small Parade masthead at the bottom, per her instruction.

Mommy could not be reached for comment, due to the strenuous objections of her small security detail.

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Hannah bought Kina our friend Beardog for her very first birthday. Neither bear nor dog, Beardog has three “levels” of cheery songs that he sings when you press on one extremity or another. The songs are extremely infectious, and if you manage to “lose” Beardog for a couple years, you will eventually forget them and stop singing them as you walk around the house. If, however, your child finds Beardog and asks to have his batteries replaced, it will all come flooding back. Every parent has their Beardog. This is ours.

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Sometimes, at dinner, I will turn to Kina and ask her what she thinks of her meal. She will think carefully and look at the ceiling, then hold up her thumb and forefinger at an eighty degree angle and mumble “Check!” through a mouth full of food. At other times, when confronting a piece of fish, say, she will screw up her face and cross her fingers in front of her face. “X!” she declares, predictably, regarding the fish. “Check!” to Japanese snacks. “X!” to combing her hair. “Check!” to riding my bike to school. “X!” to J.S. Bach’s Partitas for Keyboard.

It is easy to be a citizen of the world when life is check and X, black and white. No regret-tinged indulgence, no Schadenfreude, nothing bittersweet. Everything is either amazing or intolerable.

I think I am slightly less obsessed with the clarity of Kina’s world view, though, and more fascinated by how much of her life is “Check!” I don’t know about all of you, but there’s a pretty sharp bias in my life these days to “X!” and this whole categorization exercise that Kina is on about has me looking for the “Check!” in my day. It is, I will admit, a little hard to pull off, but in an effort to hold myself accountable in this moment of vulnerability, I will now list four “Check!” items from the last day (not including the two obvious and astonishing “Check!” human beings in my apartment right now):

Laurea did an admirable job of securing Kina’s unruly mop of hair into two neat little braids for her unexpected photo day, and then, four hours later, Kina went to get her hair cut. Such is hair.

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You can shatter the tickle piñata again and again, and the tickles never stop coming, until the piñata has to get ready for work and you cling to him laughing and demanding more, and he really honestly would prefer instead to stay home and fall apart a million times while you laugh at silly jokes and cheap thrills, which is really what the piñata realizes is the point of living, after all. The tickle piñata adores you, but please punch him more gently.

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How do I tell her?

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Reader, it was exactly one hour after Kina spotted her full-size princess in the bathroom of El Vez, waiting patiently to float down upon the attendees of a random kid’s birthday and enjoying the compliments of a little girl at the sink, that I, too, spotted the very same princess, with the brilliant yellow flower still in her hair, sitting at a table outside the very same restaurant with her friends enjoying some nachos, which prompted me to turn my head and ask Kina if there was a princess there among the nachos, just long enough for the pedal on my bike to come around and whack me square in the little bulbous bit of my ankle bone and cause me to scream. I will never know if the princess was privy to my misery, or if she would have come to my aid had she known that I was related to the little girl who had said such nice things about her dress that morning, as she placed a little yellow flower in her hair.

This is a picture of the universe, and a metal bench from which we are meant to admire the universe. Kina wants you to know that she intentionally did not include Earth. There just wasn’t enough space.

Really just chose this one for the top headline so I could draw myself with disco balls for eyes. Nothing deep there.

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Life is dramatic these days, and Kina just wishes there were more of her parents, so that they could do everything together and not have to choose between dishes and baths. In other words: What if we shared our parenting duties, but at the exact same time?

This is all she asks. That will make her stop crying.

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This is my life with this child, in three acts.

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