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

dad

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.

dad

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.

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.