You should all know that I did sleep ten hours last night, which makes up for the prior night’s insomniac debacle. I put this accomplishment largely on Kina, who is the world’s best nap nurse. Still too tired to write a long newsletter, but the weather is gorgeous and you probably want to get outside anyhow. Stay tuned for breaking news on caterpillars.

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It is hard to find another human being more energetic than Kina, but her Lala fits the bill. The two of them, together, make a cacophonous pairing. But this morning, after I suffered through a long sleepless night, Kina was at her very kindest, urging Lala to just take it easy as I rested in the bedroom, giving me a gentle kiss on the forehead before sliding out to some sweet grandparent time. They were very quiet, as promised. I’m doing better. The sugar helped.

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I feel extra old today, just like a real adult.

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I still don’t know what Kina had us all looking for yesterday on the Red Hook waterfront. Things there were plenty of: sticks, wet dogs, moist sand, Brooklynites. Things that seemed to be missing: shady trees, other fun children, mystery treasure. Six adults fanned out across the park, hunting for nothing in particular, while Kina stood at the fence overlooking the harbor and stared at the Statue of Liberty. Sometimes she just likes to keep us busy and out of her hair. It’s hard being the boss.

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A very small part of me believed that Kina might have made up today’s song, which she sang to me dozens of times in bed this morning as she woke me up:

I’ve got

a rilly good friend

and he likes

playin’ pretend

and we have

happy feelings

The meter was just too catchy, too well-structured to be hers, though, and she admitted to me later that it was from an episode of Clifford The Big Red Dog that she had watched while I writhed my way through an early-morning nightmare in which one of her caterpillars had escaped and was turning into an enormous chrysalis in front of my bedroom door. Happy feelings!

With the arrival of her maternal grandmother, Kina has ticked off another square in the bingo board of post-vaccinated family reunions. This morning, we leaned out the window and watched for her to arrive from her hotel. Kina spotted her at the corner at 9 am and hasn’t stopped playing with her ever since. It’s a joy to watch, and I can tell you that the maternal line of this extended family are extremely content today. The Daily Kina welcomes Lala to its newsroom.

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Kina likes to steal my headphones and pretend that she is working on a very important project with a bunch of people who just don’t understand how hard she is working. Sometimes, she lectures her invisible coworkers on the chocolate she sees them eating on her imaginary video call. At other times, she urges them to eat lunch at the proper time of day. Mostly, she insists that whatever they’re working on can’t be launched as planned and needs to launch tomorrow or whenever she’s not watching her baby. All of these vignettes draw on her intimate familiarity with her parents’ work lives, played out from behind a hollow-core door as she wakes up from her afternoon nap.

It is very strange to see yourself portrayed in brutal detail by a four-year-old. Her exasperation is impressive to behold, all squinty-eyed and head-cocked. Sometimes, she puts her chin in her hands, to signal that she is listening extra closely, and I see every career tic I’ve ever developed. She is a careful listener. She offers direct feedback.

We don’t really know what Kina’s job is. She’s definitely a member of the class Professional, genus Manager. Could be that she’s a consultant expert, like her mother, or supervisory, like her father, but it’s clear that her “job” is talking. It’s weird to have a kid whose only non-superhero career model is White Collar Yammer Drone. When I was her age, did I want to be a firefighter? I remember wanting to drive a bus. I never thought I’d be doing the job I’m currently doing; I wouldn’t have even known the job existed.1 I worry sometimes that society is collapsing in on itself, carving off the steady, organized labor in construction and manufacturing with robots and gig work, while touting a narrow class of keyboard jobs for college graduates. Not much room to role-play as a factory robot when you’re a kid. All that’s left is the headphones.

The time that Laurea and I have together every night is limited. We put Kina to bed at roughly eight o’clock every night, are summoned to her chambers multiple times and forced to reply to periodic voice checks, spend about thirty minutes on the couch as I write this newsletter, and can maybe get one good episode of Sex Education in before we toddle off to bed at 9:30.

Kina must think that we spend many hours together playing Legos or something, because she kindly gave us license last night to spend our time in the service of fitness as we while away the night without her. Why waste time relaxing when we can better ourselves as the child sleeps? Every minute of my day in this house is in some way governed by this kid.

She’s right that I should probably exercise, though. Maybe I’ll make this short tonight and do some jumping jacks instead.

Kina is a genuine ruffian, but mostly with me. I have been stomped upon, scratched across the eyeballs, kicked with heels, dragged through the house, punched in delicate places, and strangled—all in the name of playtime. Meanwhile, she gives her mother a ponytail and delicately pats her head while making “hush hush” sounds. It did not occur to me that I would be the kind of father who inspires roughhousing, given my general neurosis about child safety1, and yet I find myself being tackled on a regular basis by a person half my height—she could put an eye out!

Most of our roughhousing occurs at two times of day: in the morning, when she is waking me up and wants to hop on my abdomen with her feet, and in the evening before her bath, when we perform a complicated dance routine to “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” that involves her both running at me full-speed from across the bed and hanging her entire body weight from ny neck. I could, if I wanted to, choose to guide her to calmer forms of entertainment at the edges of her day, but I think I probably enjoy being clobbered by my own child. I have no idea why this is, but I assume this is what it means to be a dad; it is our job to toss children in the air and to be kicked by them, in turn.

Here is the part of the newsletter where I muse wistfully about the day when Kina will no longer bite my shirt and attempt to drag me off the couch with her mouth. Here is where I worry that, if I stop roughhousing with the kid, she will grow up and lose interest in interacting with me at all. Here is the part where I decide to enjoy being beaten up, in a peculiar form of masochistic contentment, because isn’t it all about living in the moment?

I know very few people who enjoy talking about death and dying, but I would like to believe I am in the 99th percentile of people who dislike the topic and do everything they can to avoid it. I spent a considerable portion of my early teen years living with a deep sense of dread regarding oblivion and the hereafter, and I can manage even today to play out the smallest physical ailment to its most terminal cause, triggering a wave of panic that crashes on the shore of “your life is a pinprick in an endless fabric of nothingness”. I should probably get a therapist.

In any case, I knew that this phase of early childhood development was coming. My friends with kids had told me about it, and “Why Do 4-Year-Olds Love Talking About Death” was one of the NYT Parenting newsletters I read most avidly when it showed up in my inbox. In that newsletter, my Parenting cofounder Jess Grose writes about the four concepts that we all come to associate with death: your body doesn’t work, everybody dies, they don’t come back, and you can’t avoid it. If you ask me, these subconcepts get progressively more disturbing as the list unfolds. If you ask Kina, Hello Kitty is dead and she can’t come to the picnic.

It’s fine that Hello Kitty can’t come to the picnic if she’s just temporarily dead, which I assume is Kina’s current understanding of death. But after the last year of my life, and with all the loss suffered by the people around me, and with friends currently living through the unimaginable hellscape that is COVID-19 in India, I have a really hard time dealing with the notion that Hello Kitty, the most reliably immortal being in my house, has died. Kina doesn’t know that she’s freaking me out by making me tell bedtime stories about one of her friends dying, because she has no idea what it means. She will, eventually, though, and I am really not looking forward to that part.

First: The idea that we, as individual human beings, are a kind of way is an idea to which we are slowly adapted. Second: Knowing that we are a kind of way gives rise to a more troubling notion, that we should be another kind of way. This second concept is something that many of us spend the bulk of our adult lives puzzling through. This morning alone, I wrote down at least three kinds of ways in which I should be different; it is a profoundly exhausting realization to have, that you are not the kind of way that you should be.

Kina does not have this problem, because she is four. At some point, presumably, she didn’t realize that she was any kind of way at all, but she seems to have made the leap to the first key realization, because she called me out yesterday on some suggestion I had made that she had a “growth opportunity” (in the management parlance) in some area or another—probably related to how messily she was eating or how loudly she was jumping. Her fierce insistence that I was wrong about her caught me by surprise, but it shouldn’t have; four is not so young that you cannot know yourself. Kina, unlike me, recognizes that she is a kind of way and that it is kind of the way to be.

Though I would like her to make less of a bonkers mess at breakfast, I am actually fine with Kina telling me off here. I do not want Kina’s sense of self to be at odds with her sense of some idealized other self. The way she is is how she needs to be, she says, and I would call out the verb to need here—it’s not just that she is comfortable with herself, it is that being herself is non-negotiable. What a gift to know that about yourself! I think this must come from Laurea, who has a firmer sense of her essential rightness than I do, but it may also be a Daniel Tiger thing, which, if so, speaks highly of Daniel Tiger.

I have never seen dolphins in the wild before, and despite the occasional tragic news of an errant dolphin being trapped in the Gowanus Canal, it had not really occurred to me that one might expect to spot a pod of dolphins in the water a few hundred feet from shore at a New York City beach. This was likely also true of the five other parents at Jacob Riis Beach yesterday, all of whom were transfixed by the sight of four playful dolphins as their children dug blissfully in the sand.

When I was a kid, I briefly wanted to become a marine biologist—mostly because of the presumed access to dolphins. Who doesn’t like a dolphin? They’re more socially sophisticated than us, communicate over great distances in chirps and whistles, blow bubble rings for kicks, and seem quite content not to have jobs. Despite all of that, I had until recently really lost track of dolphin news and, presumably, where they all lived. Most of my exposure to dolphins has been through YouTube videos, where I note that they can be seen from boats (where I seldom choose to spend my time) and in confinement (which I abhor). This is not, to be sure, the kind of exposure to marine biology that eleven-year-old me signed up for. He didn’t yet know about boats, probably.

And so it was with some nostalgia that I stared out at the waves yesterday and watched the dolphins surface and submerge, in no particular rush to go anywhere, just lolling about at Jacob Riis Park Bay #9 to amuse lapsed marine biologists and other parents with laughably ill-equipped iPhone cameras. For a moment, the four families spread out over an acre of beach were shouting back and forth to each other about the miracle dolphins, running down to the shore to get a better look. I was reaching for an adjective as I wrote the paper this morning to describe what it was like for me—something at the intersection of “inspiring” and “wistful”; I went for “moved”, which is close enough, but I can tell you here that the moment did have strong “nature is healing” vibes, and it really made my day.

Saturday mornings are always a whirlwind. It’s not that our schedule is much different; we still try to get out by ten in the morning, and all the same breakfasts and showers are required. The difference, really, is that Kina knows it is the weekend, doesn’t need to do school things, and desperately wants to play all morning.

We are comfortable playing, of course, and our play strategy is fairly comprehensive. On a Saturday morning like today’s, we might play:

1. Gentle Pushover

2. Hide and Seek

3. Baby Rainbow Cat Is Talking to the Chef

4. Roll That Ball

5. Baby Rainbow Cat Is in the Cave

6. Bee Facts Quiz

7. Eat My Face, It’s Spicy

I went to the archives of The Daily Kina, which are located in a temperature-controlled vault deep in the Pacific Ocean, to look for the last time we covered bee news. Turns out it was on August 15th of last year, at the bottom left of the page, the day after Kina and I had a little Daddy-Daughter breakfast at the local coffee shop that she calls “Cheddar Cheese and Bacon”, because we always get a breakfast sandwich when we go. At that Daddy-Daughter breakfast1, we found ourselves sitting next to a big lavender plant with a couple little bees hovering around it; Kina named them Becky and Joe, and our time with them really helped Kina come to understand the essential goodness of bugs at a time when she was deathly afraid even of ants.

As the cherry trees blossom, the bees are coming back (how symbolic!), and Kina’s school has conveniently done some quality bee programming this week—which Kina largely ignored. Conveniently, though, her father has been watching YouTube videos of beekeepers to help himself go to sleep at night. This nightly obsession has dragged on now for over a week, and I have no idea where it came from; I have never watched bee videos before, I do not enjoy a rich personal relationship with bees, and I have no interest in keeping them. Still, there’s something about watching extremely calm bee people—in many cases, wearing no protective gear at all—open and examine hives, gently brushing bees away with their fingers as they locate the queen. They apply a little smoke, mutter about bee bread and queen cells, and do whatever it is they were called in to do (usually to remove a swarm or split a crowded hive).

I think what I find so appealing about these videos is the idea that you can wade into the homes of these beings that are seemingly very dangerous and chaotic and willing to give their lives in defense of that home, and by being very calm and deliberate, make the bees’ lives better and the lives of the human beings who live with them better. Maybe there’s a metaphor there, not sure.

We bought Kina one of those battery-powered flickery candles, which means her rage can now burn as long as the little watch battery that powers it. All of which is to say: You should either invest in candles or watch batteries, at least until Kina is five.

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Baby Rainbow Cat is one of Kina’s more responsible avatars. She can always be counted on to do the right thing, whether that’s wearing a mask or getting the first dose of her vaccine (as Kina’s mother did today). Baby Rainbow Cat wants you to know that risk reduction is additive! Wear your masks even after you have all your antibody monsters!

And now, an editor’s note:

Our publisher would like to issue a correction to today’s morning edition. Lungs are a line and two BIG circles or maybe like a lot of little circles, but those are not lungs. Also I told you yesterday that you have to draw me with a neck! Tomorrow you have to draw me with neck. Our art department regrets the error.

Hannah came to our house this morning, as she has on most weekdays since before Kina’s first birthday, and Kina gave her a card that she drew herself. “HAPPE BRTHDAY,” it read. This is not Hannah’s actual birthday, but it’s near enough to it that Kina felt a card would be warranted, along with a hearty performance of “Happy Birthday To You”. We have celebrated Hannah’s birthdays during this pandemic with the same intensity as Kina’s and Laurea’s and my own, because she’s special, and because this moment is unusual and intense, and frankly because we’ve all had to cling to each other this year in ways we didn’t expect to. A year ago, Kina couldn’t write “Happy Birthday”, even poorly, and she certainly couldn’t have counted up to the proper ages of the people who care for her—even though this year she guessed that Hannah’s proper age was eleven.

Together, we’ve all lived through this pandemic, watched tragedy unfold and get (partially) folded back up, and seen this child grow. Hannah is uniquely responsible for much of what has kept Kina whole as that has all happened, and I hope we’ve helped to keep each other whole, too. We’re all a year older now—and Hannah would offer that she’s a little older than eleven, at least—and closer, and more protective of each other. Kina doesn’t draw cards for just anybody, and she certainly doesn’t like writing letters so much that she would fill a sheet of paper with them just to wish any normal person a specific happy birthday, but she very patiently wrote HAPPE BRTHDAY HANNAH KNIA in big green letters (Hannah’s very favorite color) on this card today, and that’s love, if you ask her.

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While I love to come up with nicknames for the child, I think Laurea has captured Kina’s true essence here, and I have to hand it to her.

“Tell Daddy He’s Acting Like a Real Man”

I was mansplaining ribollita to Laurea, who was planning to make ribollita for dinner. It was delicious, though I think understanding the historical context played a significant role in that.

I have really tried to restrain myself from various “nature is healing” jokes about the return to normalcy, but I did go to an actual, in-person kid’s fifth birthday party at a nearby park yesterday, and boy oh boy is nature healing. I haven’t seen so many children (ten? twelve? I lost count) in one place for the same reason in considerably more than a year. One of the last events to be cancelled before the lockdown in 2020 was another of Kina’s friends’ birthday parties, and every birthday celebration since then has been either Zoom or nonexistent. So yesterday, as I stood in the corner of the park pavilion, holding Kina’s half-eaten slice of pizza as she argued with various tall children about her age, I recognized the moment for what it was—a return to the kind of social event I have dreaded for my entire life, another one of which Kina will nonetheless demand of me just nine months from now.

It’s all coming back to me now, and the kids are growing again. All for the best, even if it’s awkward.

Just to confirm your suspicions, Kina is definitely not allergic to breath—mine or hers or anybody else’s, though she does have a tendency to sneeze lately when she stumbles into our bed in the morning, which I chalk up to seasonal allergies or an embarrassing surfeit of mystery dust in our bedroom. She has always been hyperconscious of breathy behaviors, admonishing us for “breathing too hard” or commenting on the excessive breathiness of a room upon entering it, but it’s never risen to the level of an allergic reaction. She’s just thinking a lot about breath lately, which I suppose is true of all of us.

One of the things I think I’ve forgotten in the last year is what it means to be in a room with a bunch of other mouth-breathers. Sharing breath, a behavior to which I had never really given any thought before, has become A Real Scary Thing. Over the years, I have found myself sitting in poorly-ventilated office conference rooms with air so heavy that I’ve had to slink out for a deep breath of my own, diving back in once I’d cleared my lungs of carbon dioxide. How was this ever acceptable? Like trysts and talk therapy, breathing together now feels like an intimate act to be conducted with strangers only when absolutely necessary. This thing we never noticed has become a privilege and a responsibility—the former we grant only to the ones we love, the latter we undertake under duress.

I feel incredibly vulnerable now when I take off my mask with other people; its removal signals an acceptance of our shared condition and our willingness to risk illness to have a more personal connection with one another. We cannot smile at each other, eat with each other, whisper to each other with our masks on, which makes any decision to form an emotional connection with another person visibly explicit. Outdoors, these gestures have a certain significance, but to be so vulnerable indoors requires a lot more calculation, and it’s exhausting (no pun intended). Taking off my mask at home among my family here—Laurea, Kina, and Kina’s nanny, Hannah—is a source of deep relief; I know I can be among these people, and I care about them. It’s not that I don’t think about the air they breathe; in fact, it’s that I’ve made a conscious decision to share that air with them.