It’s funny how Kina has independently landed on the truth we tend to forget about each other—the kind of revelation that used to be reserved for astronauts, in a moment called the “overview effect”. Taking the big view of our little Earth, from space, has the effect of collapsing our existence into a tiny, fragile space, in which national and social boundaries no longer make sense. Extreme childhood must feel similar, without the instant of radical realization; countries mean nothing, skin color means nothing, language means nothing. We’re all just here.

I wish it were that easy, and that we didn’t live in a society stratified by fear and insecurity. It shouldn’t be the case that we’re living through a news cycle centered around four Black and brown people—one of them just a child—either assaulted or killed by white police officers. George Floyd, Caron Nazario, Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo. The list of Black men killed and assaulted by police across the country has grown long enough for us to find strange connections among them. George Floyd’s girlfriend was Daunte Wright’s teacher. Eric Garner was Caron Nazario’s uncle. They are and were related to each other, as family and community.

At some distance of countless generations, all these people are actually related, not just to each other, but to me, and to the officers who brutalized them. That distance tells us a story, though, in race and privilege and the circumstances of our ancestral arrival in this country. We think these branches make us different, and Whiteness stacks that difference up against us, stranding us. None of us is from here. Nobody’s really at home.

It’s too detailed to explain, but nearly everybody Kina knows is invited to the pool someday this summer, where the adults will have beer and the children will have juice. Nobody will have soggy water. Only big girls are allowed to swim, so don’t bother with the swim trunks, unless you’re a princess or a kid.

dad

The funny thing, it turns out, about having your parents visit after a year in near-total isolation is that it is all much more normal feeling than you expect. This is probably because having Kina’s grandparents visit us in New York used to be normal, and the year we’ve just lived through (and continue to live through, in some ways) is the momentous part. The momentousness included weekly family Zoom calls conducted from our family’s four respective living rooms. The momentousness included three (maybe four, hard to say) of the eight people in my close family catching and surviving Covid. The momentousness included my barely seeing one of my siblings—who lives directly downstairs from me—and even more rarely seeing the other sibling—who nonetheless lives in Brooklyn. The momentousness included both of my parents getting extraordinarily effective vaccines that were initially designed within days of the sequencing of the virus that causes COVID-19, and then one sibling, and the other, and me.

And so, at the end of that moment, we found ourselves all sitting on a bench eating ice cream together, after a long weekend of extreme grandparental contact with Kina. The faces I’d seen on our Zoom calls were all more relaxed and happy, and Kina’s Yeh-Yeh was jogging around after her on the sidewalk—turns out he’s in better shape than I am now. We all had several opportunities to soak up some hugs and plan for summer, and it felt like a coda to the terrors. We were lucky to make it through, the eight of us, and we never said a word about it, but it was in the air.

On Saturday, we took my parents out for noodles at our favorite restaurant in Chinatown, and we covered the table with roast meats, dim sum, and soups. I watched them silently devour the first really great Chinese food they’d had in over a year (sorry, Northern Virginia), recognizing that this was a meal I’ve been meaning to order for them for a long time. We drank tea and made jokes as Kina ran off to the playground next to our outdoor table. Cars drove by and a table full of old folks next to us drained a bottle of cognac. It all felt, again, momentous in a fashion, but it mostly felt normal.

My parents are on their way home tomorrow after a beautiful long weekend. Kina punched me in the butt all morning. It all washes out in the end if we’re lucky. Good night.

dad

Two local parents were spotted sobbing yesterday in Manhattan as their child was attended to overnight by her paternal grandparents in Brooklyn. Sources claim to have seen them moving and moaning from location to location on a path through the city estimated to be nearly ten miles long. On the Hudson River bike path, the couple was said to be distraught as they rode north to a peaceful waterfront park. Having parked their bicycles, they were then seen walking south to the new Moynihan Train Hall, where they sullenly admired the architecture. Soon thereafter, the weeping parents were seen strolling through the West Village in search of both a book to read (easily obtained at Three Lives) and then a place to read it (more difficult, but ultimately at the smoky sidewalk tables at Hudson Bar and Books, where they wailed for nearly an hour). Having rested, the two of them were then seen whine-walking (again!) northeast to a fancy al fresco dinner, where they enjoyed five courses while bawling constantly. After pursuing the parents on their mournful sunset walk across town to a nice hotel suite, our sources lost track of them, but hotel workers claim that the couple were heard sniffling as they slept through the night and went to the bathroom uninterrupted. After a late checkout the next morning, the family was said to be reunited, and all were reportedly quite happy. “We will certainly never do this again,” claimed the parents, “in a month, when her other grandmother flies in. No way.”

dad

Today’s edition of The Sunday Kina was great edited and illustrated by her Yeh-Yeh, Harry Yee, who apparently spells his name “Ya-Ya”. He and Grandma spent their first full day with Kina in a year and a half yesterday, and her parents are grateful for it, and for the following newsletter.

Because we have been fully vaccinated, Grandma and I are here to see our family for the first time in forever (as Kina would say). What a pleasure to be in the same space with Kina and her assorted fam. After such a long enforced absence we appreciate this opportunity more than ever. Thank you thank you to health workers and administrators who are managing the vax effort. 

Spending time with Kina is a gas and a smile a minute. Her vocabulary is surprising when multisyllabic utterings appear from nowhere. She apparently believes my Nationals curly W jacket is a promo for Walgreens. Thus: Bring out the Walgreens prisoner!  (Your guess is as good as mine). Also “ I prefer you in luggage”.

We will never take family for granted again. Stay safe. Hug someone you love. Wear the mask. Get the shot. 

Ya Ya

It took several attempts to get Kina to change out of her nubbly blue cotton dress and into a cute little strawberry number, and I felt guilty for denying her the pleasure of simplicity on the day of her pandemic school portrait, but we only get one chance to wear strawberries in the face of existential catastrophe, and I have no regrets. Laurea and I have snuck off to a hotel while my parents are here, and we are going to make the most of this evening, so good night! Tomorrow should bring you a guest-edited The Daily Kina—our very first in over a year. Let’s all hope for the best while Laurea and I drape ourselves across these vintage couches and drink Portuguese wine.

dad

It has been a Very Long Time since my parents were here, and now they are vaccinated and are here, and Kina is showing them all her new tricks and her new school and snuggling with them on her very own couch as though there really hadn’t been this long stretch that they were kept apart by a global pandemic. It’s all very natural and normal and wonderful. Thank you, modern science, for mRNA vaccines and spike proteins.

dad

Grandparents have arrived. You can all sing the name game as a healthy escape from your nightly reading of The Daily Kina. See you tomorrow—

dad

Kina’s friend Sloane is not yet four, but she’s about to be. She is definitely taller than Kina, though, and so she finds it hard to believe that Kina can be four when she herself is three. It seems that Sloane finds these facts so dissonant, in fact, that she’s now a Kina-is-four denialist. This is really troubling for Kina, because she is definitely four, and it’s weird to have to reconcile the strongly held beliefs of your best friend that you are three with your once-serene “I am four” worldview.

When Kina came home yesterday afternoon, she made a big stink about this, because she is fundamentally certain that Sloane is still three and therefore has no standing to make a statement on the Kina’s fourness. I promised Kina that she was, in fact, four years old and that, despite Sloane being slightly taller than Kina, she is still a little teensy bit older than her friend. In order to further assuage her, I measured her against the kitchen doorframe and showed her that she was, in fact, still growing (a full inch in the last four months) and therefore could not possibly be growing smaller and younger.

Age is weird. These two girls, if they remain friends, will someday say they are exactly the same age, and yet these four months at the edge of three years are an unfathomable chasm that is actually a little scary for each of them to contemplate. How far is three-and-two-thirds from four, really? Might as well be a different generation. I am comforted—and these two kids should be as well—by the fact that their ages will soon be in full alignment for another eight months, and that everybody that matters will be four for a good long while. Until Kina is five, depending on who you ask.

The first issue of The Daily Kina cost twenty-five cents. The second cost forty-seven cents. For a long time it was three dollars “because I’m three”. As early as April 9th of last year, the price was “$ANY YOU PICK”. On April 26th, it' was “$100 CUZ I SAID A HUNDRED”. It seems like the Sunday Kina last Mother’s Day had no price, but that was likely an accident. The “meow meow” edition cost exactly “$🐾”. June 19th inexplicably cost 3%—of what, I have no idea. From there, the prices bounce around chaotically in the set of all rational numbers. Near the end of July, the prices enter gasoline tax territory, with prices like $22.22²², eventually reaching eighteen decimal points, but still generating roughly thirty dollars at a pop. Then, suddenly, in August, it’s “$22 except you eat eggs w/ur butt” or “$22 or a sippy cup or it seems like I’m not dealing with you”. Heroes start to show up soon, with various exceptions to the retail price for She-Ra and Tunip from Octonauts. Further carve-outs appear soon, like “$22 except if sad or sick”. Variations on the price of twenty-two dollars seemingly stretch on for months, interrupted by a single “$I’M CUTTING” in late October. The Sunday Kina on October 25th cost exactly one dollar, but the next day was $22.21, and on October 28th, the price shoots up to $1,000,000,200,000,000,000,000,000. On November 18th, the price is “$NOT TELLING YOU”, and the very next day we see a note under the price of $22.21: “Just one more time don’t worry.” The next five days see an interesting pattern: $1, $2, $3, “$MOM”, $5. Following that, three straight variations on no price at all: “$FREE”, “$I DON’T WANT A PRICE”, and $0. After that, we begin to see the now-familiar conceptual prices: “$ONE BEAD”, “$STOP TALKING TO ME”, “$🥛”, and “$🍓”. We are charged “$DADDY PRICE”, “$PEN PRICE”, and “$SANTA PRICE”. Nicole Kidman makes a showing as a price in late December, after she watches Paddington. Kina’s teacher, Ms. Olenick, is a price twice in one week in early January. I am the price for several issues in late winter, and then we begin to see her interest tapering off. I imagine I’ll continue to extract pricing from her for a while, but our publisher has grown tired of charging for The Daily Kina. Don’t be surprised if this publication eventually costs nothing at all, but we hope you remain a subscriber nonetheless. Even at $1,000,000,200,000,000,000,000,000, this paper has always been a tremendous value.

dad

I had honestly forgotten that Kina had all of last week off until she leaned back in her chair at dinner last night and let loose this extremely validating headline over her baked pasta. I did not, to be clear, have all of last week off, and so I took her comment to mean that we had all done a reasonably good job at our respective workplaces and schoolplaces—and I mostly agreed. In hindsight, though, Kina had an outstanding week. She spent many hours barely supervised with her friend, splashed around in puddles while we ate brunch, celebrated her father’s vaccine shot, marked the first anniversary of her own newspaper, and ate a chocolate bunny. It did not hurt that her Easter Sunday was largely spent discovering “dozens” of plastic eggs (really just one dozen eggs, continually re-hidden as we marched down the West Side), though it did slightly hurt that she pet a cactus (and thank god for Laurea’s long fingernails and their ability to pluck nearly microscopic barbs from Kina’s hands). All told, not a bad week. Mommy didn’t work overnight even a single time, and we all got a fair amount of sleep. Sometimes, when your coach tells you “good game”, you just gotta take it.

dad

As we close out the anniversary weekend here at The Daily Kina, I’m going to file a shorty. We spent all day outside with the chimera of superheroes we call a daughter, gathering and re-hiding eggs so that she could experience a long rollercoaster of joy and surprise. People were charmed, Kina was pleased, jellybeans were eaten; it was a great day, and we are all now quite tired.

Yesterday was also a great day, because Kina scored a free cape and mask at a random kid’s birthday party and spent the whole day pretending she was Owlette from PJ Masks (another show I would never have chosen to watch, absent our small child, but now know quite well). She used that impressive costume to marshal a little army of small followers, waving a stick around to rally them to her cause; we ultimately had to convince her drop the stick, to prevent her from poking out the eyes of the various infants and toddlers in her entourage. Owlette was irritated, but we believe she understood the potential PR catastrophe.

The week ahead is exciting for her. Kina’s grandparents are coming, she has a one-on-one with her teachers, and there’s a musical theater class in the local park. The fun never sets on the empire of Kina. All hail.

Since I decided to write the big emotional piece yesterday, I figured I would use today’s newsletter as a collection of my—and your—favorite headlines in The Daily Kina this year. I took a moment to look back through all three hundred and sixty-five issues, watching the potty training unfold, seeing how we learned to work with Kina’s curly hair, appreciating the massive variation in pricing strategies (from random numbers to heroes to statements of refusal). I can’t possibly explain it all, and so, instead, I’ll just put a bunch of headlines here (linked, when there was a newsletter to accompany the headline), and follow it with a full documentation of the legendary Oakwul storyline. Enjoy.

My favorite thirty headlines of the last year

• “I Will Love Everybody Who Needs a Hug”

• “We Are Fake Adults”

• “Everything Is Useless For Everyone!”; Nihilist Makes Her Morning Rounds

• Toddler Plays Doctor; You Allergic to Veggie Sauce, Use Epi-Pen

• Toddler Demands Novelty

• It Is Going On a Napkin; You Say You Break a Egg

• Toe Stubbed; “Daddy Can You Buy a Fluffy Door?”

• Daddy Bakes a Different Cake

• “Ow, You Bingled My Eye”

• “Sometimes You Have a Problem and Sometimes You Don’t”

• Panda Deposed As Editor Following Nepotism Scandal

• Meow: Meow Meow Meow

• She Did It! Kid Poops in Potty Unbidden, Collects Treat [ed: this was the first major pivot point of The Daily Kina, obviously]

• Kid, Angry, Throws Stuff; With a Terrifying, Silent Vigor

• Naked Kid Leads Black Lives Matter Cheer From Window

• “Do You Have a Booboo, a Sickness, or a Sadness?”

• Witchy Vibes Intensify

• “What Do You Do During the Day and Night?” “During the day, with the sun, and during the night, with the moon?”

• On a Hot Day, a Story of Two Parks; How inequitable sprinkler access ruins summer

• “I Have a Frickin’ Booboo”; Trouble on the knee-knee; Daddy shouldn’t clean it

• “I Do Impressive Things To Scare People”

• “You Really Chunkin On That Mozzarella, Hot Stuff”

• Child Settles For Pudding

• Tough Ballerina Menaces Local Family; Pink tutu, black denim; she is real bad news

• The Opposite of Me Is You; Little Hegel over here

• “Mommy, Are You Doing a Happy Cry?” Her child will see a woman in the White House

• “If We Make Steak the Smoke Will Set Off the Smoke Detector and It Will Go Out and Fill Up the Neighborhood and We're Gonna Get In Trouble and We Will Have To Move Somewhere Else Where There's No Steak”; So let's not have steak I guess

• Kid Learns That The Daily Kina Has Readers; Publisher shocked to hear about subscribers, thought it was just for her

• “Okay I’m Done With All This Talking. Let’s Get This Over With.” Cut the chit-chat; kid is all business

• Simone Returns; Prodigal owl resurfaces after “long vacation”; she is surprisingly clean

Anniversaries mark time, but they are really about the intersection of two years—a celebration of the year you just finished, and a commitment to the next one. I had been thinking about how to write tomorrow’s anniversary post, but I realized this morning that this edition, which precedes the anniversary edition, is actually and officially the three hundred and sixty-fifth issue of The Daily Kina. In other words, today is the accomplishment, and tomorrow is the promise.

I didn’t set out to do this—I really was just trying to distract Kina on a Friday morning, because neither of us had anywhere to go. I drew the first edition of The Daily Kina on a piece of folded-up pink construction paper, using the same crayons I’d used to draw a fourteen-day quarantine calendar two weeks earlier. TDK was the first thing I’d drawn since I was allowed to leave my house, having recovered from a scary viral infection we didn’t know much about, with the stores still all locked up tight, knowing we’d all be holed up together for a while. We needed something to do.

I’ve talked before about hugs and their unique value to Kina in the midst of this pandemic, and I don’t have a whole lot to add here today. As we have reduced the frequency of bedtime and overnight hugs, Kina has begun to track hug equity overall, demanding compensation when she feels like Mommy and Daddy are being too affectionate. This has led to surreptitious hugs in the kitchen while Kina is getting dressed, extended post-bedtime hugs as Kina drifts off to sleep, and passing half-hugs to stay reasonably hug-hydrated. The way we mostly deal with hugs while Kina is watching is to call a “family hug”, which involves my picking Kina up and squishing her between the two of us. Saves time, maintains equity. This is all ridiculous and I can’t believe I’m writing it.

Mostly, what I want you to take away from today’s issue is how good I am now at drawing Hello Kitty, as well as the two “meow” puns at bottom right. Still got it!

dad

A few weeks ago, at our last parent-teacher conference, Kina’s beloved teacher—Ms. Olenick—told us that we should be very happy with Kina’s development, and that as long as she was able to, say, dress herself in the morning, she was basically on track. At this point, we nodded thoughtfully, noting silently that we had continued to dress Kina every morning since she was a baby, assuming somehow that the matter of dressing oneself would be brought to our attention by a pediatrician or other expert. Apparently, kids dress themselves!

It is not entirely true that Kina didn’t know how to dress herself already. I’ve watched from around corners as she very fluidly donned her own shoes and jacket on her way out the door with her nanny, Hannah. I told Hannah once that we were still putting Kina’s jacket on before we left the house, and that Kina seemed not to know how to do it; Hannah raised her eyebrows, which I always take as a sign that I have somehow failed to hit my mark as a parent. What we believed to be an inability to understand shoes was, as it turns out, actually a penchant for having her parents place shoes on her feet. The inability is contextual, and the context is us.

So, having learned about Kina’s extremely typical development, I took the matter directly to her. “Ms. Olenick says you gotta dress yourself,” I said, “like a big girl. It’s big girl time.” Knowing, as I said, that she was fully capable of this, I acted as though I was an Olympic judge for self-dressing, taking copious notes on an invisible notepad (all to be processed, presumably, by Ms. Olenick) about the particular nuances of how Kina puts on leggings. With an arched eyebrow, I’d mutter to myself as she reluctantly pulled on her shirt: “Ms… Olenick… Kina… can’t put on… her own… sleeves.” Kina would promptly slide her arm into her left sleeve. “Kina… can’t put on… the other… sleeve.” Kina shoved her right arm into its sleeve. In this fashion, continually taking and correcting notes on Kina’s clothes-wearing skills, I would watch her reveal this talent that she had hidden, apparently, only from her parents. Every day in the last few weeks has been like this, until today.

At breakfast this morning, Kina really seemed into last night’s dream—a vision clearly drawn both from the stories her mother told her about space yesterday and from the tulips for which Kina traded some of her art. As noted in our last edition, and in on older issue, we have no way of really knowing if this dream really happened, but it seems fanciful enough that I want to believe it did, and I can only pray that I one day dream about pink space flowers. It would be a lot more enjoyable than the chaotic abandoned water park dream I actually had last night. You had to be there, but you’re glad you weren’t.

Here’s hoping you all get galactic tulips and highly efficacious vaccines in the coming days. I got one of those two things this afternoon and I’m already mildly beat, so a short one today. Enjoy the Bert portrait!

dad

For a long time, I wondered what it might be like for Kina to realize that her thoughts are her own, and only hers. It’s a weird notion, really, that everything we believe and understand can only truly be experienced by each of us, alone. There is no streaming button behind our mind’s eye that will allow another person to know exactly what we know, to reckon with our confusion, to help us make sense of it all. It’s just us, and that must have taken some getting used to, if you think about it.

We have spent so much of Kina’s life learning to watch for her nonverbal signals that it probably seems to her as though we might be able to read her mind, but reality suggests that we fall short. Case in point: One of Kina’s signature tantrums in the last year has been the enraged pantomime, in which she becomes angrier and angrier that we cannot know exactly what it is that she secretly wants (a particular snack, say, or a specific hug). Even though we built up all those skills, when she was small, to discern between hungry Kina and sleepy Kina, we still somehow end up playing this absurd game of angry charades for long stretches at dinner. “We cannot read your mind, Kina,” I’ll tell her. “You simply have to tell us what you are thinking.”

Easy enough for me to say.

This publication has borne witness to several key developments in Kina’s life of the last year: potty training, writing her own name, being sensitive to other people’s emotions—the list is impressive, given the stasis of the world outside her door. And so, as we approach the one-year anniversary of The Daily Kina, it feels fitting to add “true playground independence”. Even before the pandemic, our visits to the playground were most often about family; other kids were of at best secondary interest, and Kina expressed no interest in their games. This meant that I spent a lot of time actually playing with, rather than observing, my three-year-old daughter on the playset. This was, to be super clear with you, very entertaining and mildly good exercise, and I was very flattered by her attention, but I have long wondered when she’d run off on her own.

As it turns out, that time is now. Yesterday, Kina spent hours exploring the Brooklyn waterfront with her good friend Futura, hopping around on the various architectural flourishes of our local parks, gossiping about smaller children, collecting rocks to throw in the water, collecting sticks to throw in the water, and throwing rocks and sticks into the water. From time to time, one or the other of them would run over to where the four parents were sitting and complain about some petty injustice, then—having filed her grievance—return to the play task at hand. After pizza lunch, ice cream snack, and five hours in the sunshine, we said goodbye and skipped off. The girls had all the play and exploration they could possibly have wanted, the parents talked about punk culture and vacations and obscure accents, and nobody really seemed to recall the moment, just eight months prior, when the kids were principally invested in the attentions of their parents.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I am conflicted about this, and I won’t rehash past newsletters in which I dread her looming disinterest. In fact, I think it’s worth noting that I did not find yesterday’s experience unpleasant at all; it is the culmination of a wish Laurea and I had over four years ago, as we whispered to each other in bed, fearful of waking the newborn. In various permutations, that whispering asked, when will we ever be the same again? I’ve spent much of those four years—and even a good chunk of this last year identifying as an appendage of my own child. I literally live to serve. To what extent this is actually Stockholm Syndrome seems up for debate, but I have been very clear-eyed about my investment in Kina’s life. It is not an accident, and not even really a sacrifice.