I remember taking Kina to the doctor and listing off all the words she knew how to say, and being proud, at the time, that she was in command of twenty words. Now her vocabulary is so vast and strange that she can pair them all off by how they sound and make me laugh. “Tommy Salami” is a real beauty, and significantly more inventive than whatever I might have come up with, whether at four or forty. Liberal arts poetry degree, here we come! Bring on the book advances—Daddy needs a new house!

dad

I have watched my friend Genevieve’s kids grow up, each from a mewling babe to—for the the first of them—adulthood. They are great kids (even the new adult) and Kina adores them. But as with all of the objects of Kina’s affection, she ultimately put them to hard labor yesterday, when we visited their house for the first time in two years, dragging the whole family through their own house to find stuffies, pet cats, distract dogs, push her on the swing, and inflate balloons. If you’ve ever wanted to see an eleven year old boy trail a kindergartner like a personal assistant, I suggest you spend a little time with Kina. It appeared to be fun to all parties involved, which comes as no surprise, as Kina is a barrel of laughs. It can be very easy to spend all day with a kid who finds you endlessly fascinating and useful. A few days in a row might drain you, but teenagers—like four year olds—have a lot of emotional energy, and they’re seemingly content to be bossed around, as long as the boss is half their height and chuckles like a maniac at every joke you tell.

Today’s Parade is potty-themed, because Kina (as noted in today’s paper) demanded a second watching of her new favorite video—a brief history of sanitation systems—and can’t get potties out of her head. As today’s top headline might suggest, Kina did very little of the actual drawing work here, but all of the art direction. Laurea picked up the slack, while Kina contributed the green hand towels.

The aliens in question made her laugh, just a little bit.

dad

There were three pairs of heart-shaped sunglasses in the package that arrive yesterday: red frames with rose lenses, blue frames with purple lenses, and pink frames with blue lenses. After some careful deliberation, despite Kina’s preference for the color blue, it was decided that her go-to pair would be the pink ones, because then her whole world would be blue. Satisfied with her decision, she strolled the azure rooms of her house in pajamas and shades, a little grin on her face, too chic for words.

dad

I went to the office yesterday. It was a huge change in my weekday proximity to Kina. I still drew the newspaper. I didn’t embarrass my family. Turns out we can have it all.

dad

I was stern with Kina yesterday. She’s been, for lack of a better term, bratty to the people who love her—in person and on the phone—and I just got fed up with it. “This is not acceptable,” I told her. “When you act this way, you make other people feel bad. The next time you behave like this, you will need to spend some time in your room.” As I said it, I realized instantly what would follow: Kina glared at me for eight long seconds, dropped her head slowly, and finally dissolved in sobs.

In situations like this, it is often the case that I make the ultimatum, and Laurea comes in to offer comfort, but we had agreed that Kina needed to really contemplate what it meant for her to be cruel to those who care about her. I’m not a fan of the “good cop / bad cop” concept—mostly because I’m not a fan of introducing cops into parenting—but I can’t really say that we’ve actually gained much from the (to pick a different analogy) “honey / vinegar” approach to child development. Even as Laurea sat by impassively, Kina clung to her, looking for absolution, and we calmly reiterated that this was not the kind of behavior that our family could demonstrate to others. Dejected and weeping, she marched into her room and plopped down on her bed.

This has happened a lot lately, and it’s been frustrating for all parties involved—not least for Kina herself. I don’t want these moments for her any more than I want them for myself, and so I went in to offer a “let’s start over” (Laurea’s brilliant phrase), once she was calmer. I walked into Kina’s bedroom and got down at eye level with her, dipping my head just below hers. “I feel like you’ve been extra sad and frustrated with me lately,” I told her, “and I want you to tell me why that is.” She blinked a bit, then grabbed one of her blankets and draped it over our heads, as if to create our own little confessional. She looked me in the eye and said, “When you talk like that, you don’t tell me ‘I love you,’ and it makes me sad.”

The Story Bird is probably the most stressful role in my life, because he must each night invent a new story, and I feel that I have set myself up to eventually disappoint Kina by lowering the standard of tension in the tales that the bird carries in every evening by (long story) helicopter. Kina’s requests, in turn, become more and more arcane and existential. “Tell me a medium story”1 is hard enough, but “tell me a medium story that will impress me” is literally the kind of creative prompt that Scheherazade had to live with for almost three years. Writing programs are the worst.

dad

Laurea is very excited to go to space. She has been tracking the efforts of various billionaire egomaniacs for at least fifteen years, mentally scheduling her inevitable first visit to the stars for whatever birthday seems most likely to coincide with commercial availability. No earthly destination can compete with the sunny climes of fifty-five miles above sea level; it has been impressed upon me that our one true luxury investment must be the achievement of low-earth orbit.

Despite learning (relatively recently) that civilian astronauts are likely only to flirt with the edge of space for fifteen buoyant minutes, Laurea believes in her heart of hearts that the six-figure cost of a trip to the universe is well worth being able to lord it over everybody else. It is a frequent topic of conversation in our household. So, then, has Kina begun to ask us when she will be permitted to visit space—a locale she knows only through cartoons, which means she is likely imagining a vast expanse full of lasers, sword-wielding heroines, and chic jumpsuits.1

In the car yesterday, Laurea was beginning to doubt (for the first time) the value of a fifteen-minute jaunt to weightlessness, even as she outlined the amenities space tourists could expect: seventeen large windows, an array of high-definition video cameras filming one’s every twirl, jumpsuits. Kina’s first question, in response, was whether we would be permitted to hold hands in space, which warmed my “wasn’t really planning to go to space, really” heart and seeded in my mind an image of the three of us floating around in the cabin of a billionaire’s rocket ship, resplendent in matching jumpsuits2, gazing down upon the earth and holding hands the entire time. I can feel Kina’s warm little palm in my own even now, which will help to ameliorate the sense of nausea that I’m sure weightlessness will induce in me.3

There’s something at the intersection of today’s top headline, “Producer Strikes Movie Deal”, and the “UNFAIR!” headline that perfectly describes this weekend with Kina. Kina has been both very particular and very crafty about how she spends her time lately, demanding very specific conditions for her existence and structuring elaborate deals with us to ensure those conditions come to pass. We did this, of course, to ourselves; we’ve been striking bargains with Kina since before she could understand the options, and now she’s developed an acumen for negotiation on par with that of a high-end divorce lawyer.

Here’s roughly how yesterday’s bargaining looked:

Kina: Daddy, can we watch a movie when we go home?

Me: Not sure; you’ve been watching a lot of TV, and we should probably just play.

Kina: I wanna watch a movie. Can we make a deal?

Me: Hit me. What are you offering?

Kina: If IIIIIIII watch a movie, yooooouuuuu can take a nap.

Me: …

Kina: And I won’t bother you.

Me: …

Kina: And you can sleep on the couch OR on the bed, and I will give you a soft, soft blanket.

Me: So, I let you watch a movie, you will let me take a nap anywhere I want, on a soft, soft blanket.

Kina: Deal?

Me: Deal.

Clearly, Kina inherited Laurea’s extrovert gene. What a great time to have a chatty kid in New York City, as the city comes alive. The city is lucky.

dad

It was almost exactly a year ago that I sent the first edition of the newsletter version of this imaginary newspaper that I illustrate every morning for our daughter1, with the top headline of “Kid Bids Hyped Farewell to Teachers”. This exercise started just as school ended, and now it is ending again. Having already written the long, maudlin thing a few days back, I will not go into sepia-toned detail about what the year meant to us, and to her, but I did want to note at least one difference between last year’s (mid-pandemic) news and today’s:

This time, she got a graduation.

Kina strutted around the corner yesterday morning to her actual schoolyard (which has been here all along, as it turns out) to celebrate her commencement—from a year of school that technically predates her formal education. With her, in real life actual person, were seven or so of her twelve classmates, most of whom had never actually seen each other’s feet. These kids, who’d spent the entire school year together, hovered around each other with vaguely awkward-first-date vibes, dancing the same dances and singing the same songs in perfect synchrony and contentment (though all at a distance of six feet). In another version of this last year, they’d have formed noisy clusters, but here they orbited each other like timid little stars in the firmament of the playground. It was all very tentative, but still sweetly charming.

Had a little daddy-daughter time with Kina yesterday, and the weather was nice, so we ate outside at the popular restaurant across the street—where Kina can always get a table without a reservation. She was dressed in an Elsa costume (natch) and carrying one of her many makeshift magic wands, which is a good way to keep her occupied while we wait for food. As our pasta was being prepared, we toasted each other with orange juice (her) and wine (me), and she cast spells on the people walking by: tough Dominican dudes, stylish Israeli women, small dogs, kids on scooters. One by one, all were transformed into chatty princesses and happy subjects, twirling and grinning. Once she had them in her thrall, Kina would talk to her new friends about their scooters, the ladybug on our table, or their chic (her word) pink-handled shopping bags. She learned about how to buy presents for long-lost friends1, who was gonna wash all the clothes at the dry cleaner2, why one lady’s body was “very small”3, and all the names of another person’s many birds4. Kina was the embodiment of summer in a shouty little package, casting rays of light across the mismatched crowd of Brooklyn residents, all recently escaped from their caves.

Witches are good! We should all be so transformed! Kina is taking appointments.

dad

Somebody find this kid’s heart sweatshirt, for god’s sake!

dad

What I remember most, strangely, is having to buy my four-year-old child her own computer. All the other kids had gone to school weeks before, which had resulted in a run on cheap Chromebooks—not just the Wirecutter recommendation, but the runner-up, the runner-runner-up, and every competing recommendation on every site that recommended cheap Chromebooks for students. Every student in America was learning remotely, and they all immediately needed screens. I found a refurbished third-runner-up Chromebook at a local electronics concern and paid too much for it.1 Kina was ready for her first day of school.

We had thought a lot about where to send Kina for pre-kindergarten—toured the grounds, talked pedagogy, considered her friends from threes. At the end, we decided to send her to the school around the corner from us, which happens to be the kind of public school that parents from other neighborhoods attempt to bribe to get their kids into: an enormous gym, spacious classrooms, devoted teachers, and gardens. How lucky, we thought, to be able to walk Kina two blocks to the front door of a school in such high demand. How much easier my commute will be, said I! I should have been more careful with my wishes.

Instead, my commute was to the bedroom, hers to the couch. We tried to get Kina to sit in a chair, but the whole affair was strange enough, and so Kina attended school this entire year surrounded by cushions and plied with snacks. The rules, otherwise, were clear: You gotta get dressed, and you gotta pay attention. Class was fifteen minutes each morning, with interest supplements throughout the day (stuffie club, science club, movement club). Laurea and I studiously avoided the couch during those times, and we tried not to look Kina in the eye, lest—like a feral cat—she would stalk us. It took a few tries, but I set up her laptop so that she could launch Zoom on her own, and she quickly took to it. Starting Zoom isn’t the kind of thing you expect to say that your four year old does very naturally, but here we are.

We have been expanding our musical horizons lately, and none too soon. As Moana gave way to Elsa, so has Elsa given way to arbitrary Broadway tunes sung by the performers who brought you Elsa (think: Wicked, which I had never heard before, and is quite good). So, in turn, does Wicked give way to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”, a huge boost to my driving mood ever since Kina learned about it.

A recent emphasis on playlist turn-taking while on trips around the city has given our esteemed publisher better access to the musical tastes of her parents, which includes not just the aforementioned Cyndi Lauper catalog, but also one of Daddy’s favorite musical artists, Prince—or, as Kina calls him, “King”. I had to wade in carefully with Prince, because some of his best early tunes are not Kina-friendly, but “Let’s Go Crazy” seemed like a good place to start, and Kina seems to appreciate the tonal arc of the song (including the dramatic intro). It’s still unclear whether Kina is interested in the rest of Prince’s substantial catalog, but there’s plenty of time to find out, since I get every third song we play in the car. I can sit through just about all of Frozen, one song at a time, if I get to play her “Purple Rain”—a tune that Kina once said was “very, very long”.

This is why Daddy always sings it at karaoke; this family loves the limelight. Kid comes by it honestly.

Rare are the situations in which Kina actually prefers my company to Laurea’s, and so I’m always on the lookout for my edge. As fate would have it, being in the ocean is among those situations—a theory in development since earlier this month, now considered valid among Kinologists and other interested observers. When given the option to leap over the waves with one or the other of her parents, Kina demands me, which is a huge boost to my ego (especially in the weekend adjacent to Father’s Day). Unfortunately, this attention also means that I have very little solo floating time and am required to throw Kina in the air at least once every minute1. Still, with all the effort and my half-drownings as I hold her high above the crashing waves, I am grateful to have found a pocket of preference with her. Neither Laurea nor I understands why the ocean is my domain, or what evolutionary quirk has led to my parental advantage in the briny deep; Laurea seems only mildly troubled, though, so we’ve run with it2. I knew there was a reason I bought the beach pass this year—with unlimited parking, I’d really invest heavily in the ocean-bobbing—absent the minor hypothermia issue. The things we do for our children’s love.

Yesterday, when Laurea and I went out on a date, we stopped at Casey Rubber Stamps to buy some absurd new pieces for Kina’s growing collection of ink stamps, ultimately settling on a lobster and a cat playing a tuba. Keen-eyed observers will spot both in today’s issue of Parade, along with some fiddly little flowers and their pollinating bees. Kina drew a golden heart for me at the top left for Father’s Day. Everything else is a beehive. Kina resisted the addition of the lobster, claiming (as you will see in today’s headlines) that crustaceans cut the stems of flowers and get them soggy; accordingly, I have placed today’s shellfish out of harm’s way—a reminder to tend our gardens carefully, lest the lobster come.

Kina has been through several phases with eggs, vacillating back and forth over the last four years between loving eggs and loathing them. Laurea and I, in the meantime, have developed real expertise in the art of the cheesy scrambled egg, and I can guarantee that you would love them, but I cannot make the same promise for Kina, who currently favors the egg, but only if it is “burning hot”—the kind of temperature that requires you keep your mouth open while you chew. Heat like that is a limited engagement, of course, and so the rare egg breakfast we share is extremely quiet and urgent. When the eggs are no longer scalding hot, Kina stands down, regardless of how much egg remains. Yesterday, she made it all the wat through, extremely proud and mildly burned—but in precisely the fashion she signed up for. You should join her sometime, but leave your mouth open. The eggs are hot.

dad

And the good questions continue.

dad

It has been ZERO days since Kina kicked me in the face. I keep telling her not to whack me with the bony part of her heel, and while this is obviously because I do not want her to break my nose, it is also because I want her as an adult to remember that, in a pinch, she can use the bony part of her heel to break somebody’s nose. Build the skill, regulate the behavior. Parenting!

dad

I could probably do a whole week of good questions, which—if you ask Kina—all require a response of, “That’s a good question!” This is a quirk in my rhetoric that she’s picked up on, and now I am forced to use it all the time. They are good questions, though. What is on top of space? Oh boy.

dad

p.s. The young reader is making real inroads on simple words lately, though she complained this evening about my “tracey line” pictures. So noted.