Kina has been seeming extra big lately, and Laurea and I have been trying to imagine ways in which we could keep her small forever—a “smallening potion”, constant squeezing, the reversal of time—all of which are, just to get it out there, not particularly fair to Kina as a distinct and sovereign human being, but it’s what we want, and you subscribed to this newsletter, so I don’t know what else you expected.

I ascribe Kina’s sudden hugeness to our having met—for the very first time—my friend Jason’s new daughter, who was born at the dawn of the pandemic and yet somehow can already walk and appreciate balloons. This little girl has it all: the chubby cheeks, the sassy waddle, the uncritical view of her own parents. She was so cute, I wanted to eat her right up1, or at least draw her a newspaper. Kina was very kind and gentle with this child, which reminded me of all the sweet four year olds who once doted on my tiny fifteen month old, sassy waddle and all.

Anyhow, when you see just how small a cool baby can be, it turns out you want to make your slightly older baby as small as that baby. The conventional wisdom says that you want to turn back the clock and recover that time and youth—their newly born youth, your less exhausted youth, whatever. Part of me thinks it’s actually that the kid is just more compact and easier to snuggle (or eat). In fact, though, I think there’s something beautiful about being needed; it feels good to know that somebody depends on you so totally, and that you’ve evolved to understand (mostly) how to meet their needs. In the moment, with your first kid, that’s wildly difficult; in hindsight, it’s easy peasy. “Imagine,” I told Laurea the other night after Kina had gone to bed, “if we could raise Kina as a baby again. We would have all the answers! It would be simple!”

Every once in a while, your brain gets a little wingly, and that’s why you get super whiney at lunch with your dad’s good friends in Philly, foiling any potential observation on their part of your extremely sophisticated demeanor. Later, as you ride home, your wingly brain will ask you why, after such a long drive, you are still not yet in Brooklyn. Your wingly brain will insist that you join it in asking your father—who is navigating bumper-to-bumper traffic—that question, and you will concede. Once home, you will nibble briefly on a dumpling and claim that you are full. When your parents ask you why you are not eating, you will blame your wingly brain. Your mother and father will carry you to bed and tuck you in, all of you exhausted from a long trip away, and you will sleep like the baby you still are, to wake the next day with a refreshed brain and a ravenous hunger. Your parents will not hold your wingly brain against you, because they have spent many days of their lives with similar brains, and they hope their parents don’t hold it against them. We make space for each other’s wingly brains, because it is the human condition. Someday, you will make space for somebody else to be wingly, and you will quietly tell them that we are all so, so close to Brooklyn.

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I bet Ben Franklin didn’t care that his sundial couldn’t tell the time at night. “Early to bed”, etc. Who needs to know that it’s 3 A.M. anyhow? No good ever came from that. I wonder what he would have said to Kina if she’d asked him? I have no idea why I picked Ben Franklin for this imaginary conversation. I think I was going for the Philly angle.

We’re back now. The traffic was atrocious, but the trip was great, great fun. Thanks to Laurea for arranging it, and for our little Center City apartment for the marble table.

It’s probably a good sign that I don’t have time to write about being on a birthday trip to Philly at the moment. It is unspeakably good to see friends here, and Kina is having a total blast. Even taught her to say “wooder ice”, like the local I’m not.

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I caught Kina just after her nap yesterday, before I left to have dinner with Laurea and my siblings. Kina had left me a little construction paper birthday card and wandered into my bedroom, still rubbing her eyes, to show it to me. Afterwards, she gave me a long hug, and then another. I went to fetch a glass of water, and she gave me another hug. I passed by the living room, and she hugged me again. As I walked into my bedroom to get my wallet, she asked, “Do you want another hug?” I walked over to her, sat down on the floor as I always do after her nap, and waited for her to crawl onto my lap. She laid her head on my chest and nibbled on a Nilla wafer as I squeezed her shoulders. She stood up, turned to me, smiled, and went to finish her cookie snack. Nice birthday present from the small person. Highly recommend.

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It is my birthday, and the publisher has given me the day off work. This was generous of her, but she now has to reckon with the consequences of not staffing a more resilient newsroom. See you tomorrow!

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If you know us, you know that Laurea and I did not plan for Kina to become the Pink Girl. For over a year, we defended the borders of Kina’s wardrobe and consciousness from the color pink, favoring a wider variety of hues and on-trend earth tones. Occasionally, somebody would offer us a pink gift, and we’d accept it, but it would be relegated to the back of a drawer, in hopes that Kina would quickly outgrow it.

Eventually, though, like water, pink found a way. Sometime early in 2020, Kina found herself drawn to pink clothing, a pink tutu, her pink cape, pink shoes, pink television characters. Kina has rubbed through every pink crayon in her collection and consumed every sheet of pink construction paper in the house. When I settled on a color for the masthead of The Daily Kina, I asked her what color I should use, and she pointed to a red marker and said “pink”, which was when I first realized that Kina thinks of the color red as just a very dark pink.

Yesterday was a notable shift for her, though. We were talking about everybody’s favorite colors, and Kina volunteered that her new favorite color was light blue, and that, while she used to love pink, she “changes color every year”, which feels about right. She does actually favor blue now, in the characters she loves (Elsa) and her choice of t-shirts. The tutu is still a favored costume, and the cape gets a lot of play, but she adores them less for their rose color than for their general sparkliness—another signature Kina look. While I worry about having to stock up on blue outfits, I do look forward to learning more about Kina’s blue period, and her further explorations of the rainbow1. Starting to miss the pink, though. Didn’t see that coming.

I remember when I first came to understand what the teachers’ lounge was. I remember the smell of coffee, the edge of a cork board, and a rickety, low table; it felt forbidden. It had not, before that moment, occurred to me that teachers had jobs. I do not remember what I thought it was that teachers did, or how they came to be teachers, or why they persisted in teaching. They felt forceful and eternal, like the laws of physics and my parents. A teacher was a teacher, and she must always have been a teacher, the classroom her inviolable domain. Most notably, they were—like snow leopards and cobras—solitary creatures. My devoted fourth grade teacher, who tutored me in math, may have had a clear sight line to my beloved third grade teacher, who debunked fortune tellers, but they were at best planets passing in orbit.

The teachers’ lounge was evidence that teachers were in fact more like lions than cobras, members (when not in their domain) of a powerful society of authority figures who shared a love of burnt coffee. Still, even with that glimpse into their community, I still assumed they were somehow physically bound to the campus, demons trapped in the cycle of attendance and lunch. It did not occur to me to ask why teachers existed, why the specific teachers shared that specific lounge, or if they were there by choice at all. All I knew, at that point, was that they were a group of powerful people who (perhaps begrudgingly) communed with each other. The language arts teachers in my middle school clearly had a shared agenda and an implied hierarchy. You could tell who among them were the leaders and the outsiders, the cliques and their enemies. The detention teacher, who coached football, shared little with the gauzy drama teacher in the adjacent room, but they drank from the same brew.

I did, of course, eventually figure out that teaching was a job, but I don’t think it really sank in until high school, when my French teacher quit and went to work in a call center.1 It was only then that it hit me, thirteen years older than Kina is today, having arrived at the same realization, that teachers had coworkers, and that the work they do is a choice they’ve made, and that they put up with their colleagues and (frequently) their students for the same variety of reasons that most working adults do: to pay the rent, to make a difference, to find community.

Kina had a very exciting day yesterday, and without going into too much detail, it’s safe to say that it included long-awaited family hangouts with two key kid friends. The first, with Sloane, involved countless water balloons; nobody from either family left the premises dry, and we all got to see these two kids—who’ve known each other since they were nine months old—engage in complex and mischievous play. The other, with Futura, involved too-hot bowls of arroz caldo at a table just the right size for kid friends. Daddy stood by officiously and announced an appetizer of chicken skin. Futura asked for eggs on the side. The kitchen allowed it. Everybody had popsicles.

Kina slept like a log.

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No sensible person would swim in the cold ocean water off the coast of New York at the beginning of June, but Kina is no sensible person. She is, however, endowed with the sort of metabolism that inures children to extreme temperatures, and with an abiding love of the sea. This is fine, and I am very happy for her, however, Kina cannot swim, which means that I must also be in the cold ocean water, and I, dear reader, am a sensible person.

We didn’t originally plan to go to the beach yesterday morning, but an early hitch in our plans for the day meant that Laurea and I were suddenly able to make up for our rainy Memorial Day weekend and catch some rays. We threw everything but our beach tent in the trunk, hit the BQE, realized that we hadn’t thrown the beach tent in the trunk, stopped to buy a beach umbrella, cursed the traffic, played several Broadway tunes at Kina’s request, and, finally, found a parking spot at Jacob Riis.

The first thing Kina wanted to do was jump in the water, but the waves were high and the water was cold. She was relentless, and we ended up carrying her past the shore break and into the icy chest-deep ocean. Every inch of my body hurt; she was thrilled. Over the course of the day, we performed that peculiar early June dance of walking back and forth between the shore to the sole-scalding beach six times. From the waves, Kina heckled the timid adults at the edge of the surf and squealed in glee as her teeth chattered. I held her aloft as the waves broke over my head and dragged my sunglasses into the murky depths. Kina pressed her cheek tightly to mine and squeezed my neck as we were carried up over the swells. I could only persuade her to leave the water by telling her that I would freeze to death. She complied.

A couple years back, I laid some wall-to-wall carpet in Kina’s room, covering the ugly linoleum that serves as flooring throughout our house. It has, since then, been my favorite floor to lie on, and we periodically go in there just to experience the joy of being on a carpet and talking. It is the homiest room in our home.

It is also, as of this week, the smelliest room in our home. Kina, as I last noted in February, is no longer enrobed in the floral scent of new humanity. She trods about the house, barefoot and pungent, marking her territory. Laurea and I, who are both sensitive about the smells that surround us, combat this to the best of our abilities1, but the battle is futile. Yesterday, after hosting a playdate with another little friend, her bedroom smelled—and I’m sorry to have to tell you this—like pickles.

I unleashed a full box of baking soda at the problem and vacuumed the place up while Kina was getting ready for bed, so I’m now satisfied that the room smells like room, and that the carpet is suitable once again to recline on. Tonight, Kina was wearing her rainbow unicorn slipper boots, which means the rug will live to fight another day. In the meantime, you should all invest in baking soda futures and invest in a home with hardwood floors.

I contemplated for a long while whether or not I should write out the word “purée” in today’s top headline the way Kina actually said it, which was poo-ray—a substantially much funnier pronunciation—but because it took me two minutes to figure out what she meant when she said this last night, I decided ultimately to go with the traditional spelling.

Kina eats what we eat these days, which is easy when nobody commutes, and we all sit down to identical plates at six o’clock. These days, Kina’s food has actual texture, but she appears to understand that she once ate nothing but smooth pastes. In those days, before Kina had teeth, Laurea and I would cook up sweet potatoes or avocado and blend it into an undifferentiated mush, which Kina would spread with great care all over her face and the walls. I can’t recall when we stopped feeding her purées, though mushy foods were a component of her menus well into her toothy period.

In 2019, Laurea and I would both come home from work at seven, and Kina’s nanny would already have gotten her ready for bed; our job, then, was to sit and read to her, shower her with affection, and put her to bed. I didn’t really appreciate the benefit of the shared dinners we weren’t having, because I didn’t appreciate the cost of staying late at work—it felt like the appropriate thing to do. I valued Hannah’s work in taking care of Kina in the evenings, but I didn’t understand what two hundred and sixty extra dinner hours a year with my kid might feel like. Now I do.

Laurea and I both realize that Kina’s snuggling is a non-renewable resource, and so whenever she is distracted by her favorite witch show, Little Witch Academia, we sidle up next to her and lean in for a little squeeze. With Kina’s defenses down, she is more readily receptive to patting us on the head and feeling our heads on her little shoulder. Laurea has an easier time of this than I do, and can get what I call the full reverse lap snuggle, placing her head on Kina’s lap while Kina strokes her hair. This is the ultimate snuggle. I never get this snuggle.

Yesterday, as she watched a particularly riveting episode of Little Witch Academia, in which our heroine Akko Kagari is cast into her friend Sucy’s medicated mushroom dreamscape, where she finds all of Sucy’s alter egos and memories wandering aimlessly through a field of amanita, Kina was so distracted that I was able to pull off the full reverse lap snuggle myself for nearly five minutes. It wasn’t until she spotted her mother standing in the kitchen doorway that I got the boot. Kina scolded me, but I am unrepentant.

To be fair to Kina, she has been a little more snuggly with me in the last week, because of my janky back (which, dear reader, is feeling much better), and I have really been milking it. Ever since Kina has been aware of the value of snuggles, she has been incredibly stingy in their distribution, and yet she appears to be dishing them out more frequently lately. Is it because she knows that she’ll only be small for a little while longer? Are they rewards for the ice pops Laurea and I have been giving her as after-work snacks? Is it all an elaborate scheme? Whatever it is, I’ll take all the snuggles she wants to offer, and then some. It’s worth all the ice pops and witch shows we have.

Sent last night’s edition super late, because I went out to actually meet up with a human being for drinks and then came home and went to bed, before awakening with a start and dashing off a quick note to all of you. It was a stark reminder of how much this nightly newsletter has benefitted from our collective solitude, and I honestly don’t know what will happen to it once we all agree to spend time together again. I’m trying not to think about it, and I am at the very least committed to doing this newsletter thing for a solid year—which is sometime this month. How much of The Daily Kina is about Kina, and how much is it about the pandemic? Let’s find out! Sooner or later!

In any case, today’s edition: Laurea woke up this morning to find Kina in her room, staring down with concern at her fan. Upon closer observation, Laurea then noted that Kina’s fan had ceased to function. Further investigation showed that the fan had consumed one of Kina’s cheap little capes1 and had hopelessly entangled it into its own motor, burning itself out.2 I found this surprising, because the fan was kind of expensive, and you would imagine that a company that celebrates its well-made fans might at least test them to ensure they could outmatch a cheap polyester cape.

I digress.

Kina doesn’t understand prestige dramas, but maybe crime thrillers would be better with more animals.

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I remember some of the dreams I had when I was very young, and how realistic their absurdity was; when you’re still a kid, everything new feels ridiculous. At that age, when we hold the novelty of real life up against the random murmurings of our unconscious brain stems, it’s hard to say which is which. Kina’s dreams, which I’ve written about here before, are a mishmash of anthropomorphized stuffies and her parents, set frequently in playgrounds. It’s always recess in Kina’s dreams, an unusual time in a familiar space.

Last night, for example, Kina dreamt that Laurea was babysitting Hello Kitty at McCarren Park, and she needed to call me to take over for her so that Kina and Laurea could run an urgent errand or play Baby Lucy or something. Hello Kitty was being a little troublesome, and I was running late, but it all worked out in the end. She told us breathlessly about this dream over breakfast and then immediately asked Laurea if she had been in the same dream. She had not, of course, because we are eventually raised in adulthood to believe that we have little hermit brains that cannot share in some shared consciousness. Kids, however, assume otherwise, and I’m inclined to go along with that. Kina finishes my sentences, guesses my intentions, and can communicate clearly with me in simple grunts; why would we not dream together? Why would Laurea not recall handing off Hello Kitty in the playground as she and Kina sprinted off to their ice castle? She was there, after all.

We are, to be fair to Kina, for the most part always there. The last fifteen months have been a story of nearly continuous coexistence with our esteemed publisher—and we’re grateful for it. Her life, in ways that we had not expected, is still an outcropping of our own. She still experiences the world through us, and we, in turn, have the world reframed to us in her words. We know Hello Kitty, and we know Kina’s other stuffie and human friends. We know where she’s been and what she’s learning. We know all her games. We know what she’s afraid of.1 In a sense, we know her dreams, because we are familiar with their ingredients. We may as well be in there with her; sounds like fun.

Kina has been really leaning into her life of leisure this last weekend, perhaps in celebration of summer’s impending arrival. The posture you see in the illustration for today’s top story depicts with astonishing accuracy the barefoot pose she’s struck on various couches this weekend, as she’s reminded the adults (and dogs) around her that we should all strive to exert more energy in the service of fun. Cast off the bonds of labor! Forgo worry! Live life like a four year old!

Fancy the Dog Really Likes Chompin’ on that Sock

Kina befriended two dogs in one fell swoop this weekend—Pearl the Older Dog, and Fancy the Puppy. She’s still not entirely sure what to do around dogs, since she both craves their attention and fears their tongues. Fancy gave her plenty of both, and Kina made a sincere effort to direct young Fancy’s formidable energies towards chomping on an old stuffed sock tied up with string. Eventually, they found their stride, prancing back and forth from our friend’s bedroom to her living room, two bouncy smallies connected by drool and twine.

How do you explain traditions to a kid who barely knows routines? All I know is that I ate pasta tonight with Kina for Daddy-Daughter Time, read a special book that only the two of us read, and tucked her in with a story about Baby Rainbow Unicorn and Nicola, as told by a bird. Traditions she can live with, as long as you don’t talk about ‘em.

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p.s. Working on reading skills, so we might start to see relatively inconsequential headlines in the bottom left. Use them with your pre-literate child or other small animal!

When Kina started her pre-kindergarten year, we bought her a little computer of her own that, while relatively inexpensive, has an actual touchscreen. This has made it much easier for her to navigate her way into class every morning, by actually touching the various pixels on the screen that correspond to the digital analogues of “going to school” (Zoom icon), “entering the classroom” (turning on video), “saying hi to the teacher” (unmuting), and “going home for the day” (leaving the chat). At the start of it, I was concerned that we’d have to hover over Kina all day to mute and unmute her, but she picked up pretty quickly on how to handle her own audio/video needs and has now become sufficiently expert in video chat that she knows how to put her teacher in “full screen” mode.

It is uncanny how similar Kina’s video chat concerns are to my own. She is constantly checking to make sure she’s muted when she asks me for a snack. She has intermittent video issues. She notes when other kids on screen are frozen. She asks her teacher to fix her mic. There’s something very peculiar about how much both our days have changed in the midst of this pandemic, and how central a role video chat plays in our lives. When the internet goes out, school and work both grind to a halt. With Kina’s tappable approach to navigating school, though, she’s further challenged by Zoom’s teensy buttons, and accidentally logged herself off yesterday when she smeary-fingered her way onto the “close” button (the digital equivalent of taking a bathroom break? Skipping school?) when trying to hit the “full screen” button

Close the other window, hit the icon, wait for the teacher, turn on your video, unmute, remute, full screen. Reasonable excuse, hit the wrong button.

Sometimes, Kina will walk up to me and yell “Say what I say!” and I have to pay extremely close attention and stop whatever I’m doing, because what follows is that I need to say exactly what she says at exactly the same time she’s saying it, regardless of what it is she is saying. This is hard, because she is not speaking from a script, and I am not—regrettably—linked directly to her brain (which is often a problem for other reasons, if you ask Kina).

What I have to do instead is read Kina’s lips, which I sort of know how to do, because my mother is hard of hearing, and I’ve had to think a lot over the years about how my mouth looks when I talk. The easy part is that her speech always starts with four slowly enunciated words: “SAY… WHAT… IIIIII… SAAAAY”, which gives me a few seconds to get into the right frame of mind. The next sentence almost always starts with the word “MOMMY”, and then everything from there goes wild—a barrage of phonemes and mouth shapes that I copy like a tourist in a foreign country, with every strange Kina-esque mispronunciation emerging dutifully from my mouth. Eventually, her monologue descends into chaos, pure onomatopoeic1 nonsense spilling from our lips.

All of this is very much like the Mirror Game that you learn in high school acting class, except instead of goofy stoned arm movements, it’s full-on sentences and loud noises. Also, you can’t mess up without making the mirror angry and needing to console it at the foot of your bed. Thank you, Mom, for teaching me to lip-read; it saves me a lot of consoling.