Dominoes without rules is just minimalist collage. Fight me.

dad

Once upon a time, a little girl met a bird sitting on a branch, minding its own business and eating some seeds, and the little girl asked the bird how she could find her friends, who had wandered off. The bird told her a story:

“Once upon a time, a little girl met a bird sitting on a branch, minding its own business and eating some seeds, and the little girl asked the bird how she could find her friends, who had wandered off. The bird told her a story:

‘Once upon a time, a little girl met a bird sitting on a branch, minding its own business and eating some seeds, and the little girl asked the bird how she could find her friends, who had wandered off. The bird told her a story:

It was May 21st, apparently, but feels like years ago, as with everything else.

dad

I don’t have a whole novel to write about Kina-as-perpetual-motion-machine, but she told me this morning that she “had energy with Kelli,” which seemed like a reasonably good hook for a headline, and now I’m wondering why I didn’t just write that instead of making weird generator references.

Anyway, it was late this morning when I wrote the paper, and so I drew the masthead myself—a simple red KINA as almost an afterthought—but it freaked her out that I didn’t ask her to draw a masthead (or “a middle”, as she calls it) of her own, and she demanded that I paste over it. I like hers better anyhow.

dad

Because Kina urged us, this morning, not to fast forward to the inevitable beginning of the work/school week (which, it should be noted, is a holiday from scholarly responsibility for her), we spent the day dwelling on family, the rain, and Kina’s grown-up friend Kelli—who brought us bagels and rugelach in the park, where the weather (as noted) vacillated between aggressive fog and passive-aggressive drizzle.

It can be handy to have a roommate who reliably reminds you not to get ahead of yourself with worry on a gray Sunday, who collects just the right wizard hat to impress your friends, who will run into somebody’s home to hug them when they just aren’t feeling up to lunch outside, who counts among her most kindred spirits of the day:

1. a small, excitable, and newly-met wooly dog named Brooks

2. her grown-up friend Kelli

3. a cousin, not yet counted among us, who is nonetheless making their presence known

Birthday parties have gotten far more adventurous today than when I was a kid, and now that Kina has eaten of the tree of extreme playspace knowledge, we are destined forever to harness her to various bridges and vertiginous walls whenever the spirit strikes her. Laurea could scarcely convince her to leave the hangar last night.

In this, she is very like I was as a child, when I would dream of vast treehouses connected by water slides. Who wouldn’t want to live out their days in the treetops, harnessed safely to a branch and celebrating a continuous flow of birthdays and with friends, eating pizza?

It’s a life.

This is your periodic reminder that I put Kina to bed every night by pretending to be a storytelling bird who perches on the edge of her bed and pulls brand new stories out of his imaginary satchel to lull her to sleep.

They all have funny endings.

dad

Kina longs to have silken braided tresses, like Elsa’s, that tumble down her back. She dreams of complex braid patterns that merge into each other like Celtic knots. She imagines, probably, that they will be blonde. We’ll see.

She’s been asking to grow it out, so it’s been two years since she had a really significant trim, and her hair still barely falls below her chin. I’ve talked about her curly hair before, and while I made the assessment last year that Kina was a 2B girl, I am now convinced that she’s made the leap to 2C, which Allure tells me is quintessentially Shakira hair, and she may get still curlier—the more Kina’s hair grows, the more twisty it gets, desperate at all costs to avoid her shoulders.

This is why I have kept my own hair so short for the last twenty years. Absent careful tending, my head will inevitably and slowly come to resemble a furry mushroom. The first time my parents picked me up from college, I hadn’t had a haircut in three months, and I had to turn sideways to get out of my dorm.

The one thing I did not remember about Pippi Longstocking from my encounters with her story as a kid was her giant suitcase full of cash and how casually the story treats her mysterious fortune. (“Pippi Longstocking is also rich”, says the narrator offhandedly.) Who is this horse-lifting billionaire, and who’s tracking her tax liabilities?!

dad

“Parabola” really is a hilarious word if you set aside all the memories of homework and calculators. She laughed about it, I kid you not, for thirty straight minutes this morning.

Also, can I tell you something? I really almost made Kina’s little poetic turn of phrase about my damp hands the top headline today, but I did not want people to think badly of me for not drying my hands like a person who has been alive for over four decades.

Being the assistant home page editor does have its privileges.

That feeling when you are a brutal winner, but you also really love your mommy.

dad

Kina was not quite two years old the last time we went to Storm King—a sprawling Hudson Valley estate whose grounds are peppered with the kinds of massive outdoor sculptures that only seem to fit on sprawling Hudson Valley estates. At the time, she was roughly two feet tall. Mark DiSuvero’s Frog Legs, positioned at the top of a hill at the entrance of the museum, is, by contrast, roughly twenty-seven feet tall. Back then, before the pandemic, potty training, and much of her capacity for speech, she paid it little mind.

I have a theory, informed by this observation, that we tend to ignore things that are thirteen times larger than ourselves. Seven story buildings, for example, are not particularly interesting to the average adult. Small children take school buses for granted. Rats pay us little mind. Somewhere between my height and fifty times my height, I cease to care.

Casual observations of Kina’s interest in outdoor sculpture suggests that her interest can in fact be piqued by objects and earthworks that are at least twenty-five times her size, including DiSuvero’s E=MC21, which Kina called “the big sword” when we revisited Storm King yesterday for the first time in three years. It crept to her attention as we tooled around the campus together on a rented tag-along bike—a normal grown-up bike towing the back half of a smaller kid’s bike. We had, when we visited the little rental shack by the parking lot, asked for a bike with a kid’s seat, but Storm King is apparently too sophisticated for babies, and the attendant shot us the uniquely and unconvincingly disappointed look of a salesperson who is about to offer you the opportunity of a lifetime. She brought out this centaur of a bicycle, a liminal being, like a polyp growing out of a coral reef, and Kina was absolutely sold.

Kina is a consummate organizer, a frank critic, and very much the image of her mother.

dad

I can’t tell you a single thing that Kina learned yesterday, or who her favorite classmate is, or whether she played on the playground or not, but I can one hundred percent guarantee that I will know within seconds of her arrival home exactly what it is that she ate for lunch. That’s enough of a miracle, when viewed against the larger backdrop of what we don’t know about the universe, that I can sleep well at night.

dad

It is all very confusing, on a Wednesday, to find oneself incapable of expressing exactly how far away Saturday is. There is no time with Right Now vibes quite as strong as a Wednesday, and to see Kina reckoning with that realization so early in her life is humbling. You have plenty of Wednesdays left, little girl, and the weekend will always be the day after the day after the day after the day after yesterday. You’ll get there soon enough.

dad

The newsroom is fairly sure that tomorrow’s substitute teacher will be neither Ms. Donna, who teaches a whole other classroom, nor Ms. Olenick, who either works at a new school or is living on the roof, depending on which of us you ask.

dad

I dunno—you heard it here first.

dad

When babies turn one, a birthday party is essentially an excuse to drink and commiserate about lost sleep. Babies have no friends, which leads parents to believe that their child’s birthday parties will always be fun chat times to hang out with cool adults they already know.

When a baby turns two, they can be entertained, and so a parent may feel pressured to provide entertainment. A singalong might be convened, which makes fun chat times difficult, but is amusing enough to distract a parent from the fact that the party is not, this year, about them. It is also possible, and reasonable, not to hire entertainment, in which case you will mostly hear bored babies crying.

At three, a toddler absolutely requires entertainment. The singalong is now required, and the kids are fully mobile. Children will collide, which prompts crying, but they also have a reliable sense of what cake is, which stops the crying. Parents do not talk much at the third birthday, because they are pursuing three year olds to prevent collisions.

A few weeks back, we planned a secret trip to a pumpkin patch with Kina’s friend Niki, a friend who has spent more or less his whole life with Kina, and who moved out east during the pandemic. Despite this untimely move, we try to stay in touch and take periodic trips east and west across the glacial moraine of Long Island, traversing beaches and hills formed eons ago by the slow procession of ice in order to keep two very recently-born children familiar with each other.

And what geologic formation could be more notable and child-friendly at this time of year than an authentic pumpkin patch? What a vision I had—of twisted vines and varied gourds, of parents carrying hacksaws, of upturned earth. How poetic! I have never actually seen a pumpkin patch, and so my most relevant point of reference is It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, whose hero, Linus, is famous for his solemn recitation of the film’s core plot premise:

Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He's gotta pick this one. He's got to. I don't see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there's not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.

I don’t understand this berry hostility, but Kina is a full-on mango fiend these days, and maybe the traditional fruits of her parents’ generation just don’t cut it anymore. Alternately, I could be misreading her use of the term “basic”, and four year olds are just trafficking in different slang. Either way, new generation thinks strawberries are basic; deal with it.

dad