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

It feels somehow very Brooklyn for our kid to be really into a foundational Sanskrit epic before she is five, but I am not bragging.

dad

Listen, the dream is cool and all, and there’s a lot to be said for everybody in the family having their very own cake, and what if the whole world had the same birthday? But can I tell you one thing? You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Kina totally losing it over Grover running back and forth screaming “neaaaaar!!!! faaaaaar!!!!!”

I guess what I’m saying here is that I’m proud of my Grover.

dad

A couple months back, Kina’s friend Niki gave her a little three-minute sand timer he got at the dentist as a gift, which she left at the bottom of a bucket in her bedroom until yesterday, when she brought it out to measure her entire day. Whatever she was doing, or whoever she was talking to, if she saw the sand had run its course, she’d stop to turn it over before continuing. This proceeded until she went to bed, when she pulled out a stool and upturned the timer on it as I finished telling her a bedtime story.

Three minutes later, she didn’t call us back.

dad

When I got home today, Kina asked me if I did “safety drills” when I was as small as she is. The way she asked suggested there was more to safety than just leaving the building in an orderly fashion, and so I told her that I had learned about fires and tornadoes when I was young, and that I had never had to escape either a fire or a tornado, but it was good to learn how to, just in case. What I didn’t tell her was that there are so many more things that kids have to learn to protect themselves from now, and that it would not surprise me if it took all day to practice them all. God willing, she never has to escape from those things either, but good to spend all day on it, just in case.

dad

Our friend Ada and her little brother Julian cajoled their mother into driving to Williamsburg yesterday to see Ari the Singalong Guy—Kina’s favorite local children’s performer—and eat free cookies. Having enjoyed the performance and consumed the free cookies, the three kids decamped to the big playground nearby and encountered yet another of Kina’s park acquaintances, a little girl named Adele. Together, they all scooted around like old friends and glommed onto still more children, including a little boy whose grandfather was quietly reading him stories from Highlights magazine. The girls sat on the bench next to them and hovered uncomfortably close, eating pizza. I eventually offered the boy a slice just to make it less weird.

Childhood friendships are so easy! They appear to be based mostly on two kids being of similar heights and the shared availability of scooters, lacking all the senseless drama of adult friendships. That five kids who basically didn’t know each other three hours prior could end up all eating ice cream together in the middle of the afternoon feels like a miracle of human behavior to me, and it reminds me how much I owe my actual adult friends a call.

Give me a holler if you want to hang out and scoot, friends.

Yesterday morning, as we were making our way through Soho, we caught a glimpse of the San Gennaro festival on Mulberry Street, to Kina’s evident glee. Loyal readers will recall that Kina is a staunch supporter of all Italian saints feasts—most notably what Williamsburg folks call “the Giglio”, where Kina is a minor celebrity. So for the rest of the day, then, following her discovery of the existence of the San Gennaro feast, she pestered us to make our way back, to which we consented.

Later in the day, after returning home from various playgrounds, Kina immediately went to her room to select her costume—a sparkly blue wizard outfit, complete with pointy hat. She wore that outfit for the next several hours, on the train, as we walked down Mulberry (in which the presence of her pointy hat kept her from being trampled), on my shoulders down the rest of Mulberry (during which several thousand attendees swooned in amazement), on the unusually rickety ferris wheel, and on the stoop of the building where we ate our sausage and peppers.

The feast was busy. The outfit was a total hit. The sausage was okay. We were happy.

New York City’s public schools serve roughly a million kids two daily free meals. Every child in these schools walks up to the same counter every day and receives their lunch, regardless of need and without any indication of their capacity to pay. This program is profoundly beneficial in integrated schools like Kina’s, where over half the students live in poverty and would otherwise need to either volunteer their need or forgo meals out of necessity or shame.

Kina is fortunate that she can have Cheerios whenever she wants, but I am glad she and her classmates get them every morning in the classroom, together, for free. I am also glad she told us about this program herself, because I knew nothing about it, and it really explains why she hasn’t been eating all her breakfast at home since she started school and re-discovered Cheerios.

Once again, public schools demonstrate the power of socialist programs to protect the most vulnerable among us by providing for all of us; don’t take it for granted.

Unlike her father, Kina is particularly enamored of this cartoon retelling of the sudden obliteration of nearly all life on Earth. I don’t usually find mass extinction to be an uplifting start to the day, but it seems to have made an impact on Kina1. Not sure how she arrived at the conclusion that grouchy knees took down the non-avian dinosaurs, but I assume it has something to do with me, and I take mild offense.

dad

Such a power move. Your name is Finn.

dad

It’s definitely harder to gather headlines for the paper this week, as school dominates the news and Kina jealously guards her personal experiences. At least she’s bringing crafts home, which I took great pains to reproduce for you, dear reader—down to the ice cream sundae sticker on the spiky bit of the crown. I’m obsessed.

dad

Laurea insisted on drawing me standing with my face pressed against the fence as Kina waited to walk into school on her first day. I am pleased to inform you that I was only 40% as embarrassing at her second drop-off of the year.

dad

Vignettes from this morning’s first day of school:

1. She dons her new backpack and claims, “It fits me perfectly!”

2. She decorates her new shiny silver shoes with rainbow and unicorn stickers, muttering that her teacher “will love the hearts”.

3. She strikes a power pose, unprompted, at the front door of our building, waiting for me to take her photo.

4. Two blocks away, as we approach school, a line of children and their parents wraps around an entire city block; we are fortunate that Kina is in kindergarten and has a separate line and entrance, which is also slammed.

5. The health form website is down; I fill out a paper form, which has exactly four checkboxes on it and is made of paper, which never goes down.

6. Other parents from yesterday’s meetup are present; we greet them like fellow chauffeurs in a crowded parking lot, looking out over the crowd for our passengers.

7. People are desperate to rid themselves of any obligations to which they have no genetic relation; envelopes of money, rolls of paper towels, and boxes of tissue are handed to random teachers.

8. In the rush, I forget my traditional goodbye of “high five, fist bump, big hug” and just squeeze Kina close as people shuffle around us on the sidewalk; wanting to enter the building, she wriggles ferociously.

9. Parents are lined up along the wrought iron fence, watching as their children calmly meet their teachers and calling out like groupies; I join them and stare quietly at Kina as she clutches an unopened box of tissues and waits her turn.

10. I think about the first day of school, two years ago, when all the children wept as the parents slowly walked out of the classroom.

11. Today is very different.

    dad

I’m not sure what prompted Kina’s little observation about the past this morning, but it seemed timely and was extremely on brand. What happens today, what we try today, is all we have. The past, for example, is the last eighteen months of haphazard school in our living room. Today, by contrast, is the day we met eight kids from Kina’s new classroom on the playground and packed her backpack for the first day of school. We will not concern ourselves with tomorrow any more than we will the past. That’s what the newspaper is for.

Speaking of which, there remains a huge question hanging in the air in our household about the future of this paper, whose daily publication has relied heavily on not having to get out of the house by 8:15 every single morning. We will strive to keep the presses running, but things might get sloppy. I trust you all will understand.

Eternal best friends are reunited after a long summer of vacations. I know I’ve written a lot about kids coming home lately, but these reunions mean a lot to Kina now, and I want her to remember this summer, and how much she missed—and loved—her friends.

dad