It was also a humid summer day the last time we took Kina to the American Museum of Natural History, but things weren’t so hot that time around. It was almost exactly three years ago, Kina wasn’t yet two years old, and she was taking—for the most part—reliable and regular naps. That day, though, after visiting an amazing museum in which she exhibited no interest at all, she skipped her nap, and we spent two profusely sweaty hours walking through the Ramble in Central Park trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get her to sleep. It is no accident that we have not since returned to the Natural History Museum—the memory of screeching children and low-level panic is hard to put out of mind.

Still, as we muscled through the humid heat of this weekend, it became apparent that we had reached our emotional limits, and we masked up to visit a museum that, before Kina came, had been our very favorite to visit as a couple. And we were well compensated, this time, for our troubles. From the very second we walked through the doors, Kina dashed off to gaze at the massive slabs of igneous rock, with their layers folded in upon themselves, next to nubbly spires of sulfurous stone formed in undersea calderas. She gasped in amazement when the planetarium went dark, pointing out the planets as they soared into view overhead. She ran from diorama to diorama, asking questions about dead zebras and revealing her extensive knowledge of various bacteria and marine life.

When we first walked into the building, I told Kina, “This museum is so big that it will always surprise you. We’ll have to come back a lot to see it all.” She nodded, and when we ultimately did walk out the doors, Laurea and I were surprised by dioramas we’d never seen before, and we were enchanted by our own child, whose breathless curiosity had grown by an order of magnitude more than her own brain in the years since we last swore we’d never go back.

I don’t know enough about juvenile metabolisms to understand how it is that Kina can come home after a full day in the sun, with a dew point of like 212 degrees, and still jump around the house like she’s had four espressos. It is as if she sweats rubbing alcohol and feeds off the wilting adult souls pooled at her feet. She doesn’t even recognize how good she has it—youth wasted on the young, et cetera.

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This is the first newsletter I’ve ever sent in which I haven’t copied the morning headline exactly, for fear of triggering spam filters. Kina’s knowledge of human anatomy leaves something to be desired in its nuance and accuracy, and she has selected, from among all possible options—and despite our best efforts to dissuade and educate her—the single grossest word to describe any non-facial orifice. Cows, and their udders, apparently don’t fare any better.

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Kina loves nothing more than the white-hot sun of summer and her precious floaties. Also, she asked me to point out to all of you that she used three colors for the “A” in “Kina” this morning, and suggested that doing so was a pretty big deal.

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When you are four, an old joke is a joke you told two weeks ago. The standard for novelty is high in this family.

The Mommy joke is that she likes seafood towers so much that she wants to climb up a giant seafood tower to eat the enormous clams. The Daddy joke is that I spend all day typing.

That these decrepit jokes are hilarious to her is all that matters. The audience is just along for the ride.

Niki unexpectedly blew through town, and our intrepid friends since birth spent an hour making silly jokes, squeezing each other tight, and being sneaky. A nice Monday surprise.

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Laurea and I sometimes talk about the sort of Peter Pan effect that comes with growing up and growing older in New York City. The city is designed to keep you feeling as if you’re roughly twenty-six years old for as long as you need to be, offering a more or less constant stream of activities and communities to serenade you with an endless song of your own youth. Drink! Eat! Dance! Run! Travel! Rent! Gossip! Wake up late! Work at startups! Play difficult video games!

I’m not saying that having a kid ends that, per se, but it does make the illusion more difficult to maintain. Early morning wake-ups put a damper on late-night karaoke. The fear of distant college tuition payments makes one’s career decisions more conservative. Air travel is 50% more expensive with a kid, and mild cases of dysentery that one might write off as an adult induce more dread when one contemplates caring for a kid with travel-related illnesses. Don’t even get me started on the gossip.

It’s all fine and well to reminisce, of course. Laurea and I did have all that, and those experiences are fixed in our memories forever—they got us to where we are, and Kina is a direct result of our having lived them. We’ve largely gotten over the loss of our dear Peter Pan, and so we don’t talk about it much, but we started explaining to Kina last night how her Mommy and Daddy had lives before she came along—how they used to fly all over the world and go out all night with friends (friends who now also have kids and bring them to the beach so we can take turns watching them while the others take naps on the sand). I don’t know what we expected Kina to say, but she sort of glazed over a bit, took a bite of her breakfast, and delivered a fatal zinger.

“Toasted out” is the kind of tired you get from a day at the beach getting twirled around by your dad. It is when you’re exhausted because you forgot to take a nap in the car while you were singing Stevie Nicks tunes at the top of your lungs. You are toasted out when you get to do gymnastics and singalong on the same day. If you have ever spent a whole summer day outside with friends eating snacks and laughing, you probably felt pretty toasted out when you got home. If you have a hilarious four year old who drags you around the beach, calling you “bruh”, and then rolls around on the sand commenting on everybody’s bathing suits, you probably spend most weekend evenings toasted out. It’s a good feeling, being toasted out, collapsed on your bed while your parents read you stories, distracted by the memories you keep replaying for yourself, half asleep and hoping your dreams will match your day. A nice thing to strive for, if you can get it.

On our little walk through Manhattan yesterday after the beach, we stopped at Casey Rubber Stamps and let Kina choose her own stamp for the road. After considering several cat options, she settled on a 2x2 heart and said “thank you” to John Casey. This morning, she and Laurea went to town with every stamp and stamp pad we own on this sheet of my newly-restocked favorite white construction paper1, a perfect Parade.

Life is ideal inside Kina’s skull, which makes her the perfect self-help guru. I had an unusually rosy outlook on life today after writing this morning’s paper, despite the many obvious causes for pessimism. Before she launches into a full-fledged guru practice, though, I’d probably get her to walk back her advocacy for using tap water as sunscreen, and she probably needs to clarify her little schtick on freedom. Live your life, says Kina, but get your vaccine!

The Earth is great.

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I wonder where she picked that line up from?

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On one hand, I am deeply offended by the insinuation that my stir fry is too saucy. On the other, my child eats broccoli.

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At my college, it was widely understood that students would encounter their own doppelgängers on campus at some point during Senior year, and that only one of these doubles would survive to matriculate. Clearly, I survived the battle, but Kina is onto me.

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Masthead: hey do you have a second

News Desk: Yes, what’s up?

Masthead: the top hed today about the whistling. does she actually know how to whistle

When Kina first met Ari the Singalong Guy, she could not yet walk. All the other kids were moshing (like Kina’s mother) in the middle of the literal Williamsburg bar that Ari played at on Thursdays, but Kina bounced contentedly (like her father) in the back of the room. When her friend Sloane turned one, Ari played the birthday party to a crowd of largely unaware infants, but Sloane’s older brother, Julian, who was the same age then as Kina is today, hyped up the crowd and sang all the hits as Ari strummed along.

Eventually, of course, a pandemic happened, which meant that Kina had no meaningful Ari interactions. He valiantly moved to Instagram, but it wasn’t the same. Kina, like all of us, put singalongs on the back burner while the chaos moved through town. Then, all of a sudden, Ari reappeared in McCarren Park. His arrival was unexpected and thrilling—this musical icon in his yellow headband walking through the playground as if he was a dream made manifest, as if nothing had ever changed. Kina watched him, rapt, and promised to return whenever she could.

The weird thing is, everything has in fact changed. Kina still knows all the songs, still loses it to “Everybody Jump”, still navigates Ari’s trademark tripartite Twinkle Twinkle / Baa Baa Black Sheep / ABC medley—but now Kina is the big kid among the toddlers, teaching them to bounce and jump at all the right moments, pointing out that little cats say “meow” and not “woof”, and chiding Ari for being too sweaty and not drinking enough water. Seeing the crowd of little waddling children was a reminder of just how much Kina has grown, and how close she is to outgrowing all the rituals that have gotten her through her babyhood.

I don’t remember going to many carnivals as a child, but I do remember riding on Dumbo. We went to Disney World when I was three, and all I really wanted to do was ride the Dumbo ride—a bog standard, slow twirling ride on one of a herd of Dumbos that you could raise or lower at your whim. My Dad stood in line for the Dumbo ride for hours in the hot Florida sun, as I presumably drank some juice in the shade and slowly decided I didn’t need to ride Dumbo. I remember riding in an elephant, though, so I was, at the end, convinced. I remember other rides pretty vaguely—tea cups, haunted roller coasters, small worlds—but that visit to Disney World stands out as one of the most carnivalesque days of my entire life. I’m not sure I ever rode as many rides as I did that day until I became an adult. I think I now know why.

There are two things I did not fully understand about being a parent at a carnival until yesterday:

1. It is tremendously fun to watch your kid have fun on a ride.

2. It is incredibly draining to stand in the direct summer sun while your child enjoys several carnival rides.

Sometimes, I just like to memorialize the subjects of her dreams.

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Kina came home yesterday and told me that she met some new friends at Rodney Playground, and that they had played together, and that she told them that she was the nicest girl in the world. This came as a surprise to me, since I don’t necessarily think of Kina as the nicest girl in the world, though it could be that, to the rest of the world, she is the nicest girl. It is comforting, nonetheless, to know that this is Kina’s personal brand, even as her private life suggests a slightly more brutish inner voice. I hear a lot about this Nice Kina when I meet the parents of kids she plays with—how polite Kina is, or how gentle. I even see it at the playground when she’s off on her own; she’s made a promise to be nice, and she lives by that promise.

I remember making a similar promise to myself in seventh grade. I’m not sure what prompted the thought, but I recall thinking to myself, “I choose to be a nice person”—a random and ambitious thought to have in music class at 9:30 in the morning, but it seems to have stuck. Whether or not I’ve lived up to that promise (and I have failed spectacularly at times), “I choose to be a nice person” has been my own private personal brand for most of my life.

I wonder if that’s really how it feels to Kina, like a choice, or if it’s what she sees reflected to her. I want her to feel nice and to understand that it can be powerful to be that way. I want her to understand that she doesn’t always have to be nice, if it isn’t reflective of how she feels inside. Mostly, I think it’s wonderful that this has value for her, and that she’s willing to celebrate it with others. Kina is much nicer, as a four year old, than many adults—even when I take her occasional foul moods into account; I hope she holds onto it, and that the people around her are the nicest people in the world, too.

A little bird sat on a little tree by a little pond on a little cliff on the side of a big mountain high above the clouds, looking out over the horizon and feeling very special. She had everything she could ever want—her little tree, her little pond, her little cliff, and her big, big mountain, whom she loved very much. But the little bird, who spent every day gazing far away over the field of clouds, sometimes wondered why the world was so wide and so open, and yet still so small.

She could see nothing beyond the mountain but colors—from the burning orange at the edge of the clouds to the rich, blue blackness in the very crown of the sky, scattered through with a cluster of brilliant stars. The little bird knew that she was more than a color herself, and she was not a little tree, or a little pond, or a little cliff, let alone a big, big mountain high above the clouds. So what was she?

And then, as if to answer, a little leaf fell from the branch of the little tree. The wind rushing down from the top of the mountain carried the leaf and twirled it across the pond and out over the cliff, where it caught the light of the sun and then dipped into the clouds. The little bird tilted her head to one side, hopped down from her little tree, flitted across her little pond, and stood at the edge of her little cliff, looking at the place where the leaf had been, and wondered what it was like where the leaf was now. Were the colors different there? Was there another little bird staring at her own big sky, on the other top of the mountain, below those clouds? The bird grew curious.

I wish you could have heard the way Kina sighed as she leaned back on my lap this morning to role-play a sunset. Languid and revelatory, it was a perfect encapsulation of what a four-year-old thinks luxury is—laying out on the grass and staring into an auburn sky, with your very favorite beverage at its ideal temperature, not far from a spa.

Oh my god it sounds wonderful.

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“Puppy Blanket” is the sort of puppy blanket that is of genus blanket shaped like a puppy, not genus blanket used by a puppy. Kina has had it since before she could walk; it used to be a spacious and cozy wrap for chilly babies that would make her look like a cartoon dog, and we love it. It is impressive and touching that we still have this blanket draped over the back of the rocking chair in our living room, and Kina still uses it every night when we read her books. Because the dog-eared hood of the blanket is too small for her head now, she puts her toes where her head should be, making a cushy little foot pocket for reading time. When she’s feeling boisterous, she drapes the blanket over my head and mocks me as I sit there in silence. But only Kina can mock Daddy in his puppy blanket raiment; no others may laugh at him—not even his coworkers, whom Kina presumably expects will ignore the spectacle. Zoom culture does strange things to all of us.

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