No real moral to this story besides “having a four year old when your body is forty-six is a real endeavor.” Motrin and snuggles, I’ll get through.

dad

There is a fine line between not enough choices and too many choices, and we trip over that line on a daily basis, usually in the snack category. We’re doing our best, kid! You can eat seaweed and grapes!

dad

Last July, I wrote about how the City had not yet turned on the sprinklers at our local playground—the tiny and bedraggled Rodney Park on the shores of the BQE, where the water feature (when it works) is four spray towers. By contrast, our Big Local Playground at McCarren Park is a majestic kid wonderland, with a host of stone turtles and frogs—a hallmark of former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe—that spit a steady stream clean water at neighborhood kids. Usually, the animals come alive at Memorial Day, but the City must be in a good mood, because The Turtles Were On in full force yesterday.

Aside from the sneak preview of summer water season, the big change yesterday was, really, all the kids. Kina has managed to accumulate a robust little cohort of small children, and they are all on a first name basis. Former classmates, birthday party kids, play date kids, kids from the same birthday month in the local parent Slack, friends of friends, children of parent friends—all gathered to celebrate the power of evaporative cooling. Last year, May was a cautious time; the playgrounds were still closed, and kids were tucked away like winter coats. This year, we trust in playgrounds as a space where these kids can let loose. The turtles are on because they know we need them. The turtles and the kids are all making up for lost time.

They—by which I mean “the kids”—are also collecting water balloons. This is a source of real drama on the local parent message board, because water balloons are legitimately a pain in the ass, and also kids will not ever stop whining until they get one. The way we deal with this is never, ever, to get Kina water balloons. Instead, she roams playgrounds in solitude, eyes pinned to the ground in front of her, looking for intact balloons that other parents and children (who are flush with balloons and obviously less bothered by the environmental impact of latex) have dropped. Yesterday, she found at least nine of them, which I dutifully filled only once Kina had agreed to share some of her winnings with the other kids whose parents didn’t believe in balloons. Like an internet book salesman, she hoarded her wealth on the bench beside me, periodically running back to me and rubbing two chubby little balloons on her face in ecstasy. She is a water balloon Scrooge McDuck.

The first time Laurea and I went to Governor’s Island was in July of 2005—the first year the island was open to the public1. At the time, very little of the island was safe and available to explore; the Coast Guard had left the island in 1996, and the buildings had since become decrepit and, in many cases, were being set alight by the fire department in trainings. Governor’s Island was overgrown with weeds, littered with burned buildings, and yet somehow the best thing we had ever seen in New York. From the parade ground at the top of the island, you could look out at Lower Manhattan and hear only the wind.

We’ve been back several times since then, as the island has undergone a slow (and brilliant) redevelopment. More or less the entire island is now available to explore, and it’s one of the city’s best places to ride a bike. Since Kina was quite small, we’ve plopped her into various pedal-driven vehicles—a bike surrey, when she was quite little, which looks more or less like a Flintstone golf cart, and whose bell she learned to ring as we passed adoring strangers; and more recently a bike seat on the back of a traditional mountain bike. She loves to stare at people sprawled out in the grass as we cruise around the border of the island, barking at me to “go faster” so that she can feel the wind in the fringes of her hair underneath her Hello Kitty bike helmet. The bike situation is exorbitant, but Kina has been looking forward to this all week, and her thrill makes the expense worth it.

Kina doesn’t punch her mother; that behavior is reserved only for me. It’s also true that Kina punches me only when nobody is looking, which makes it difficult for Laurea to understand why I’m being punched. It’s not clear that the punching is worse, in aggregate, than the sort of headbutting and scratching behavior Kina once subjected me to, but after a stretch of relative détente, this escalation of hostilities has not gone unnoticed. I’ve tried all the things—time out, prompting sympathy, ignorance. At this point, I’m just going to chalk it all up to being four and cover my face whenever possible. This, too, shall pass.

dad

Back in January, loyal readers will recall, a storyline emerged about a serial retelling of the critically-acclaimed Paddington cinematic universe. This was among the most challenging and rewarding parental duties I have performed, and I took it very seriously—because I take all my bedtime stories seriously. I never tell the same story twice (though almost all my stories now are about Baby Rainbow Unicorn and her friend Niki), and I take great pains to ensure that all my stories have funny endings, even if that means I have to tack on a little womp womp to underscore the punch line.

Kina is a demanding listener, and she strives to protect the integrity of ongoing narratives, like a little continuity director watching for a misplaced hairbrush. Lately, without any new tricks to shake her, I’ve been stressed out about maintaining my streak. So, to keep things fresh, I’ve introduced a new narrator—the Story Bird, who flutters in every night from Jamaica. It is unclear if, by “Jamaica”, the Story Bird means the island nation or the Queens neighborhood, but the Story Bird (until recently) has had no particularly strong Un-daddy-like accent; the Story Bird is, by the time she lands on Kina’s chest, both exhausted and unplaceable.

In the last few days, however, Story Bird has been on vacation, and her backfill is “Joey Story Bird”, who is also from Jamaica but has a strong Brooklyn accent. So, too, do the characters of his stories—including Baby Rainbow Unicorn and Niki, who have become ten times more irascible and considerably ruder this week. In the “Joey Story Bird” regime, Baby Rainbow Unicorn and her friend Niki roam the planet looking for specific animals in various zoos and natural habitats. As they encounter their bumbling guides, Unicorn and Niki argue boisterously with each other and their hosts, declaring that lions are both “freakin’ great!” and “gonna bite my head off, are you crazy!?” Usually, by the end of the story, our loud protagonists have so annoyed the subject of their debate that they are both summarily devoured. This is usually when I make the womp womp sound and Kina—with eyes half closed—chuckles quietly. Funny ending.

I’m not saying Kina’s a creature of habit, but every time I have to negotiate a night without jitterbug1, it really throws things off.

dad

Kina’s been taking these dance classes with her little friend Sloane for the last several weeks. She wears a little leotard and ballet slippers and a sleek ponytail, then hops around and twirls in the ways you might expect a four year old to hop and twirl. Sometimes she comes home and sings little songs whose lyrics I end up having to look up online so that she can dance to them at home. One of them goes:

This is a special song

You hafta put your ears on

Listen for the magic word

S! T! O! P!

Says what you can do

It’s something that you may have heard

It’s a real earworm, lemme tell ya.

When Kina said this about me, it was with a sense of real resignation, that I might never be taught to think otherwise about whatever it is that my brain contemplates so habitually. On one hand, it seems unlikely that a four year old could understand the inner workings of her daddy’s brain. On the other, I may not be as complex a puzzle as I might like to believe. Maybe we’re all just open books, gears on display like neurotic automatons. In any case, Kina’s got your number, you better believe it.

dad

p.s. Super proud of today’s turbine illo, featuring our little goddess of the wind. Blow, child! Blow!

Of course they hatched while we were gone. The miracle of nature is once again concealed from city dwellers, despite our best intentions. The chief butterfly1 in this house, having returned from Long Island with her gauzy wings, remains unperturbed by the nastiness of birth and will make do with bug videos from YouTube.

dad

We drove out to Long Island yesterday to meet up with one of Kina’s oldest friends, Nikola. Kina has known Niki since she was only a few weeks old; I have photos of the two newborns—a tiny Kina nestled next to the relatively enormous Niki, each on their back, staring in fascination at the ceiling of his mother Melica’s apartment. Laurea has known Mel a little bit for a long time, an acquaintance who’s popped up nonchalantly in various corners of our lives over the years. It was only natural, then, that when Laurea and I told our friends at my birthday party in 2016 that Laurea was pregnant, Mel was there. And it was not terribly surprising to find that she was also expecting, a month before Laurea. They have since become really good friends, and their relationship both mirrors and explains Kina and Niki’s friendship.

The kids grew up together going to the local street fair, swinging in the bucket swings, blowing bubbles, visiting each others’ houses, celebrating each others’ birthdays in the same lumberjacky Brooklyn bar, and even spending their first year of school in the same classroom. But it was in the midst of that first year, unfortunately, that a pandemic blew into town, and Mel—who had the opportunity to move into the house of a family friend in the Hamptons—made the tough call to pack up her apartment and her kid and left town. We’ve kept in touch since, talked on the phone, seen them briefly when they stopped back in Brooklyn to pick up things, but the kids hadn’t really had the chance to cut loose for over a year. It was like a spigot had suddenly been shut, the most dramatic separation any of us really experienced last year.

With all the adults vaccinated, though, we decided it was time to reopen the tap. We rented a hotel room, piled Kina into the car, and drove out yesterday morning. Mel had kept the specifics of our visit a secret, and Niki was stunned at our arrival. As their parents tentatively unwound with each other, Kina and Niki just caught up. For the subsequent twenty-four hours, the two kids reclaimed every lost play date and every missing word. It was the most life-affirming and joyous encounter I’ve seen in a very long time, and it was a thrill to watch (from our chairs in the backyard as we drank wine).

Last night, we were urging Kina to pick a book as she dawdled in the corner of the living room, trying to prolong the bedtime ritual. Laurea and I were really double-teaming her, and I guess we didn’t think about the impact of two extremely intense adults trying to get a kid to do something simple like pick a book, as if it were some momentous decision. Eventually, Kina cracked and slouched over to the sofa, clasping her knees in her hands in resignation. This posture is a relatively recent development, and it’s been slightly humbling to observe; I don’t like to make Kina sad, and she’s becoming more familiar with trivial sadnesses, in very visible ways. And so, as she sat on the couch, Laurea and I both backed off suddenly, realizing that we’d overstepped Kina’s boundaries. When Laurea asked her what was wrong, Kina turned to her and said:

“If you be mean to me, I’m gonna go out of the family, and I’m not going to be anyone’s girl.”

Oof. She has never threatened, even idly, to abandon her family before, and the notion that she would choose a life of solitude over her badgering parents was a real punch to the gut. I have very little in life that I treasure, but Kina’s unflinching companionship is one of the greatest gifts I have. I think I’ve assumed that the ways in which I’m raising her, even when I’m stern, feel necessary and inclusive of her. Maybe I shouldn’t make so many assumptions.

A holdover from the sleepless months of last year, “Are you standing in the kitchen” is a reminder of the slow retreat from Kina’s bedside, conducted over nine days, in which I agreed to stand first in Kina’s doorway, then by the refrigerator, then by the stove, and finally “in the kitchen”—shorthand for “in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room”. In recent weeks, Kina has started to ask again if I am standing in the kitchen while she falls asleep, and I’ve started to take serious liberties with my position when I answer “yes”, because I am not going to stand sentry in a doorway over my child’s unconsciousness for the rest of her childhood. I mean, Kina must know that I am actually sitting on the couch when I tell her that I am standing in the kitchen, because it is considerably farther from her room, and my voice is muffled by the snuggly cushion. I find that I have to basically scream “yes!!!” in order for her to hear me clearly, and still she does not emerge from her bed to confirm that I am hovering by the stove. Kina and I have agreed to maintain this shared delusion in order to lull her to sleep every night. Nobody is kidding themselves, but the comfort is real.

I will always stand in the kitchen for you, my little one, no matter where I actually am. Good night, sleep tight.

dad

Kina is, in the way four year olds are, not very good at misdirection. She takes great pleasure in misbehaving while my back is turned, but only if she knows that I know that she is misbehaving. In general, that mischief is benign: throwing her dirty socks at my head, say, or hiding a rock underneath my pillow. I dutifully turn to face the window, waiting for her to scream “look!” before I spin around. Her pajamas are draped over my computer; she cackles wildly.

I realized as I drew the paper this morning that Kina isn’t even as crafty as the illustration here would suggest. She wouldn’t think to distract me with a pigeon or a balloon. She just says “look at something else”—really, anything other than her nonsense. “Something else,” meaning “away”. “Something else,” meaning “not what’s right in front of you”. “Something else,” meaning “not Kina”.

It’s always “something else”, because I don’t want to turn away from her. These days, it’s just hard for me not to look at Kina, which makes it hard for her to engage in surprising nonsense. But I do, because it makes her happy. I stare at the lamp on my dresser, and I know that Kina is somewhere else, doing something I probably don’t want her to do, even though I know she’s amused. And I think about all the time she’s going to spend doing exactly that in school and as a teenager and as an adult, while I just quietly tell myself that it’ll all work out. And then she screams “look!” and I turn around to see that, poof, she’s there again, a little kid wearing her pajama bottoms on her head, just pleased to have fooled me. And she’s always laughing.

In the continuing tradition of spending some part of our morning together watching “bug videos”—which has come to be a sort of shorthand for “science videos of all sorts”—Kina and I enjoyed a little jaunt yesterday through the “spiders” section of The Kid Should See This, and if you’re curious,

I think I had hoped to watch a video of a spider spinning a web or, I don’t know, living peacefully in the eaves of a barn like Charlotte the erudite spider. Kina, however, usually goes for the first video in the list, and that video was about how spiders fly. Because I have not read Charlotte’s Web in many years1, I had forgotten that spiders “balloon” by spinning out strands of silk. What I realized I had never known was that spiders use electrical fields to fly—which was an intriguing fact to add to my encyclopedic knowledge of spiders—and that they do so, often, by the thousands. This last bit is something I probably didn’t need to know.

Kina has clearly internalized all the important tenets of pandemic dining. Well-ventilated outdoor seating, check. Shelter from the rain, check. Advance reservation, check. Can’t say that I’d shoot for five p.m. as a brunch resy, but she’s the boss. Breakfast for dinner, etc. Wear your mask!

dad

Yesterday, at a playground in Washington Heights, where we had driven for an obscure Mother’s Day lunch, I looked up to find my daughter walking towards me. Kina was holding hands with a little girl she could only have met two minutes earlier, and she wanted to introduce us. Kina and Zoe discovered their shared interest in running while chasing each other around the playset, and they had become very dear friends, rolling down the hill and playing hide and seek as if they had known each other for days. In light of the seriousness of their friendship, it seemed only right for Kina to introduce Zoe to her parents, and I approved of the match.

Laurea and I have noticed how much more readily Kina befriends strange kids on playgrounds in the last month. For a long time, she was the most solitary kid in a crowd, content to amuse herself by pretending to be three Octonauts at the same time and leaping from the ends of slides. As a long-time solitary kid in a crowd, I didn’t find this troubling, but I have often wondered what might activate the social genes that she inherited from her mother. Lately, we’ve watched that evolution at work, as Kina hunts out willing playmates on strange playgrounds. As she develops her sense of tribe, she seems drawn to three archetypes: The Tall Boy, The Adoring Two-Year-Old, and The Girl Who Looks Like Her.

Zoe is a Girl Who Looks Like Her, though she is technically five. They wear similar clothes and share a gentle demeanor that belies mischievous intent. I watched as they ensnared an Adoring Two-Year-Old while running around the perimeter of the playground, both tending to the toddler carefully after she fell. They both shared space and tolerated distance well. Her mom was pretty chill, and if we lived anywhere near Washington Heights, we would have done the thing where you ask another kid’s parents for their email address, triggering a series of playdates and birthday parties and plans to send the kids to the same school. Alas, we do not live near Washington Heights, and after twenty minutes, Zoe and her mom said goodbye before leaving to have lunch. Kina gave her a hug and got slightly glum as they closed the gate. The flame that burns twice as bright lasts half as long. It was a tight match; Kina knows how to pick ‘em.

Many have argued about whether it’s the parents or the single people who have had it worst during this most recent pandemic, but I think it’s very hard to argue that mothers have had it particularly good as the world has fallen apart, and so it merits a little holiday for them, in particular, and this second Mother’s Day of COVID-19 feels both more relaxed than last year and just well-deserved overall. Kudos to moms.

As a small sample of motherhood, let me highlight the work of Laurea de Ocampo, the mother of our esteemed publisher. She has owned most of the direct relationship with Kina’s school in this, the weirdest year of school. She has managed post-school mornings with Kina, sketching butterfly wings and making colorful potions as a demonstration of fluid dynamics. She has made lunch. She has wiped butts. She has managed to scramble together more work than any live event strategist probably could have expected to, and she then executed on it with admirable grace and skill—in one case, for thirty-five straight days. She has, throughout, remained patient and determined, and in reward for that determination, she has just enjoyed a full week with Lala and Kina. She has kept me (mostly) centered and patient, too, and I am certain that if I had been one of those aforementioned single people, I would not have done well at all this year.

She is a force of nature, Kina’s mother.

Among the many science videos that Kina and I have been watching in the morning have been a few storm chaser videos, which has given me the opportunity to talk to Kina about two things: tornadoes and “the country”. As somebody who spent a few years among the tornadoes and sort of in “the country”, I know a fair bit about them, and I’m quite happy to spend the rest of my life away from both. If you’ve had to hide in a closet during a proper tornado in Oklahoma, you’d likely agree.

There was something so matter-of-fact about the way that Kina asked if a tornado would take our house away, as thought it were not the kind of thing that would really ruin your day. Can I have the house back, Mr. Tornado? Drat. Really liked that house. I wonder when kids develop the sense of connection to their homes that gives us all the willies when we contemplate natural disaster. If you’ve always had the same home, do you only experience that anxiety when it’s taken from you?

There have been times when Kina has expressed her dissatisfaction with our current home, but she’s never proposed an alternative. Philly? Kingston? Oakland? She wants to move because her friend Sloane moved, but Sloane moved ten blocks north of her old house, and so maybe that’s what Kina thinks moving is. A country house might as well be a fairy tree, in her worldview; who’d live in the middle of a field? At some point, we’ll likely uproot from our current apartment, and I’d venture the destination is likely to look more like the ten blocks situation than the ten acres situation. Leave the tornadoes alone, I say, and let the greatest threat to my house be late-stage capitalism, just like everybody else.

Bonus late edition: I clicked “Publish” on this last night but didn’t click the second time, and so now you get this nice note about Lala a day late. Enjoy it!

Lala should be boarding a plane right about now, on her way back to California after a week spent in total adoration of our esteemed publisher. Yesterday, Laurea took her and Hannah out for an early Mother’s Day brunch, and Kina roamed the tables, offering wine and tea to everybody there, including the staff. This sophisticated behavior—and all of Kina’s rich four-year-oldness—made a deep impression on her Lala, and elicited numerous Instagram posts and breathless encomia in our living room later that evening. It has been like this every day for the last week, and I have relished it.

It’s been incredibly difficult for Laurea to be so far from her mother for the last sixteen months, and there was a moment in February when this week didn’t seem possible, and the distance began to feel like grief. We did a lot of coping and planning to give Laurea some sense of what it might mean to be with her mother again, hoping that the idea of her might create a space in which the real mother might slowly materialize. A few weeks later, Lala got her first shot. I want to be able to send a postcard from today to February Laurea, to show her the headlines from this last week and all the videos and ultra-cropped photos of Kina that her grandmother is posting, to celebrate the joyous normalcy of her first visit after the pandemic. I hope it would lighten her heart.