“Ms Chelsea said tell your parents to take you along when they vote,” Kina told us the morning the polls opened, with schools closed (sort of1) for the day. We did that, as we had for the presidential election last year, and found that the precinct had a secret stash of “future voter” stickers that they could offer to Kina. Like us, she wore hers proudly. Unlike us, she didn’t wake to be disappointed by some of the outcomes, or by the generally perplexing somnolence of her political party machine. She will have plenty of time for that, I suppose.

Until then, stickers!

dad

Sometimes restraint is just about hiding the thing you most love behind a box of cereal.

dad

This year’s Halloween affair, very similar to the last. One small busted lip and two pounds of candy later, the child declares victory against the forces of tooth enamel. Hope yours was half as fun as Princess Mononoke’s.

dad

When Kina was younger, she would hand me a little horse figurine and instruct me to “paint” her with it, pretending that it was a magical brush filled with all the pigments and textures necessary to produce a realistic unicorn, kitten, or dinosaur. She would not allow me to stop at the pantomime of just a painted face, but insisted that I also add fur to her arms and legs, hooves to her feet and hands, a long golden horn to the very top of her head, and a luxurious rainbow mane to the back of it. When I finished, I’d brush her off and send her to look in the mirror and admire my work, after which she’d return to the couch and demand I start over and make her into—I don’t know—an Octonaut.

Face painting was a tradition born of the lockdown, but it drew on a chance encounter with a little street fair in September of 2019, when she was not yet three. Behind the bouncy castle at the center of the fair was a little set of tables with people painting kids’ faces—a craft whose existence stunned Kina. Before her speechless eyes sat children being recast as anthropomorphic rainbows, radiant butterflies, pale ice princesses, and rainbow unicorns. She asked us to wait, but the line was long and the weather was still hot, and surely there would be another street fair in the spring of 2020, no?

As it turned out, there would not. What there would be, two years later, is a birthday party with a hired clown, four puppets, a box of magic tricks, and a little palette of face paint. Kina was among the first kids at her friend Niki’s birthday party, and the clown, sensing his moment, asked if she wanted her face painted. She wasted no time at all in accepting his offer and commissioning a unicorn.

We are in fact completely off the rails of the Grand Snack Railroad, and our little locomotive driver is dragging us headlong towards Sugar Valley. Having said that, if you can find the little ice cream cone cookies shown in today’s edition at your local Japanese market, you, too, can be derailed by their crispy deliciousness.

On another topic entirely: You may have noticed that Kina has taken a greater interest in producing the masthead and various illustrations lately. I was really impressed by her realistic depiction of my hairy armpits and her own, stunned face at the bottom of the page. I hope you are as well, because I expect you will be seeing more of it. Her drawings, not my underarms, I mean.

dad

Honestly, I’m just glad we introduced Kina to the astonishingly bloody spectacle that is Princess Mononoke so that she could fixate on the main character’s ferocity and stylish forest attire as a viable Halloween outfit, and that I did not have to send yet another Elsa into the world. Thanks to Kina’s grown-up friend Maggee for the custom mask, and to Kina’s full-length witch outfit from two years ago for its now-thigh-length dress.

dad

We came up with this great joke for Filipinos last night in the wake of a huge tantrum. Beware the volcanic wrath of a child with specific preferences about which parent dresses her!!!

She wants a huuuuug!!!!

dad

Her new set is full of blue material, and I am expecting a call from the school any day now.

d

I suppose it does feel like a decade or so since this whole thing started. You can hardly blame her.

dad

Chinatown: most laissez-faire approach to child management; sometimes not apparent if parents are even present. Greatest variety of play equipment.

Bleecker Street: most hover-y. Parents deeply invested in toy equity. One Google dad ignoring his children. Scooter junkyard. One rusty trampoline.

West Side Pier: playground least welcoming to outsiders. Ideal vantage point to see white privilege take root. Nice squishy play surface.

I don’t have a big long essay to write about Kina and Futura’s annual trip to Governor’s Island, but I will note that the intervening year has made them significantly more independent and capable of climbing large and boulderous mountains without the assistance or permission of adults. They enjoyed themselves (and the multiple desserts they managed to connive us into buying for them) immensely.

Kina wasted no time in assembling today’s Parade, going so far as to produce our first landscape cover—which will make it difficult to blow in, but we will leave that to the press plant—and draw the masthead herself. The drawing, apparently, has something to do with a train of hearts. It is nice!

Kina is clearly not one of those children whose parents proudly post Instagram stories about how advanced their child’s memory processing and spatial awareness are. This is not to say that she is somehow deficient in her memory or spatial awareness, but maybe that she just pays a lot more attention to cats than she pays to her own fragile sense of patience.

Also, she wants you to know that cats are just little lions.

dad

Tall Kina will have her day.

dad

It’s a little hard to explain to a child that your job doesn’t look like anything in particular, and requires no particular tool. I can’t pantomime being in engineering management, as hard as I think about it. My job, if we’re being super honest, looks mostly like me hunched over a desk, staring at a screen full of rectangles and saying as little as absolutely necessary.

Late-stage capitalism makes for unfulfilling demonstrations of what it means to be a productive member of society, as it turns out, and it’s not entirely something that I care to model for my kid. I just want Kina’s answer to this same question someday to be a little more demonstrable and connected to the world around her in ways that she herself can understand.

I’m not saying that I want Kina to turn bowls for a living1 or become a steelworker2, but I do want her to feel a sense, in her job, of specific purpose and contribution that she can watch evolve, day by day. What that job might be, in twenty years, is both inscrutable and slightly frightening from this vantage point, but I’m hoping that we play our cards right in the near term (ahem Congress3) to retain some semblance of civilization in which there are still hammers to be swung—because I see Kina, in her essence, as a swinger of hammers. In that essence, I haven’t yet figured out if she’s tearing something down or building it up, but I’m confident she’ll have something to show for the work, either way.

I just realized how many crowns these kids make as part of their kindergarten curriculum.

dad

Our little daredevil had an incident in the hula hoop zone and skinned her elbow, which seems like a good cause for an introduction to the school nurse. It is also a good reason for Kina to have her very first normal phone call with her mother—an experience it seems like she would normally have had at least two years ago? Kina didn’t even realize it was Laurea—she thought it was her teacher. Why her teacher would have hopped on the phone to the school nurse is a mystery locked forever in Kina’s mind.

Anyhow, she’s totally fine.

Don’t worry.

The earliest video evidence I have of Kina in a swing is from July 20th, 2017. In the video in question, taken at our beloved Rodney (now “Strawberry”) Playground, a seven month old child—clearly too small for the little bucket swing in which she was sitting—rocks gently back and forth, hanging her arms over the front of the swing. It is my arm in the video, pushing her. She was very light.

A few months later, from almost exactly four years ago, another video: Kina, still small, laughing wildly as we push her to a reasonably normal height. She was still tiny enough that we had to stuff the swing with blankets to keep her from bonking her head. Laurea pushes her in this video.

In March of 2018, Kina was old enough to know how to hold the bars on the swing, and how to control her upper body in the swing so as not to be whipped wildly around as the swing went higher. Laurea pushes.

We are, genetically, a speedy little family. Laurea has always been a fast walker, and I spent more or less my entire childhood running wherever it was I had to go—whether or not it was permissible. Kina has mostly taken after us both, and is known by various neighborhood parents and caregivers as “the running girl”. Walking, for Kina, is a way for her to mock other, slower people. Running, to her, is how legs work.

I am forty-seven years old, though, having become one of those slower people now, and ill at ease with conventional exercise rituals; I have taken a trust-and-follow approach to walking with Kina, who can usually be found a full city block ahead of me on our strolls, as I plod dutifully after her. I usually manage to keep up with Laurea, at least, but a recent switch in my mid-pandemic footwear led to an unexpected bout of achy calves and a somewhat more predictable bout of whiny me.

This helps to explain how I could be seen slouching yesterday towards the local playground in a dismal third place, waving desperately to the rest of my light-footed nuclear family as they scampered into the distance. “Slow your roll!” I shouted after them in vain, perplexing the strangers who flowed around me like water around a stuck log.

Our anxieties about our children’s sense of abandonment is nothing but a shoddy proxy for our own. I would have stood there all day, hand raised over my head, waiting for her to turn around, just to give her every opportunity not to forget about me.

She noticed me! I survive another day!

dad

It is unclear whether Kina is actually far more popular among her classmates than I ever was, or if she simply believes that she is universally adored. Regardless, she is four, and she loves the kids at her school; let her be loved, or believe that she is loved—the benefit, to her (and us), is all the same.

dad