Kina has spent much of the last year pretending to be a cat. On most mornings, she will wake me up by crawling into our bed and meowing plaintively. Her bedtime rituals are played out by her feline alter-ego, Baby Rainbow Cat. On the playground, when arguing with her friend Futura, the two of them will meow furiously back and forth. She briefly became obsessed with licking my arm, because we once mentioned that her former cat friend Gertie used to do it. Sometimes, Cat Kina crawls under the table in our living room and makes a little nest—it seems like a very cozy thing to do, and Gertie did, in fact, used to do it; to see Kina in there reminds me of when I was more compact, and would build forts that only my stuffies and I could occupy. At that age, I used to imagine what it would be like to be a cat, to have the freedom to do whatever I wanted, to sleep all day, to be worshipped by ancient Egyptians.1 A love of cats, and of cat identity, runs in the family. Gertie used to sneak up on me from her hiding places to bite my toes, which was super uncool of her, and I’ve told Kina about that once or twice. Gertie never, ever bit Kina, but she has nonetheless internalized this idea that a cat sometimes plays by nibbling at you. So it is, then, that Kina occasionally, when possessed by her cat spirit, will bite me on my leg—usually while ensconced in her nest under the table. It’s weirder than it is annoying, and more annoying than it is painful. Gertie, at least, never apologized for biting me, so this is a measurable improvement in being bitten by cats (real or feigned); as long as I don’t have to pick cat hair off myself all the time, I’m fine dealing with it. I just ask that I not be called by the school principal next year to answer for my surly cat child, that she remain snuggly in her less bitey moments, and that she finish her oatmeal before tucking into her fort. Good kitty.

dad

Honestly, after the last two weeks, I think we all deserve a special reword.

dad

On April 19th of last year, the sixteenth issue of The Daily Kina came out, with the top headline, “Toddler Demands Novelty”. Technically the second issue of The Sunday Kina, this issue was scribbled off in the minutes before tootling off in what Kina called “The Rice Car”, a white Ford Fusion that we rented during four early pandemic months—a doorway to new, safe, open spaces. This was, New Yorkers will recall, during the great playground outage of 2020, and we’d spent the prior weekend hiking around the abandoned grounds of the Cloisters; I remember looking out at the Palisades across the Hudson, my mask off, ignorant for just a moment of the grief at the bottom of the hill. Kina jumped from boulder to boulder, and we took a moment to be thankful for our own recovery. By the next weekend, Kina had come to believe that the various ramps and stoops around our house were provincial and trite, and so we drove her off to Greenwood Cemetery. There, as we peered into mausoleums and looked for walking sticks, we could hear sirens from all around the graveyard. We ate a little picnic and were quiet. We were lucky.

Throughout the last year, there were various moments in which Kina craved novelty. This publication ran an issue about how she wanted a new room early this February (which, in hindsight, was one of the first signs that her sleep was going sideways); in that night’s newsletter, I talked about how much I wished I could teach Kina how to find novelty in stillness. For a long time, I struggled to find new rituals for us as a family, and for Kina. Trips to weekend playgrounds and distant parks couldn’t make up for the distance of her friends and family, couldn’t give her four new walls. You can’t drive to the other side of this thing.

But the last couple of weeks have felt better, as Kina’s grandparents have gotten vaccinated, and the routines we’ve built—books at night, hugs after weekday naps, performances by Elsa, and the morning paper—have begun to feel comforting and familiar, things we might be sad to outgrow. I think today’s top headline recalls Kina’s response to my suggestion that we make a new tradition out of closing her door at night, rather than propping it open with the kitchen light on full blast. That old tradition, which had been in place for much of the year (since her last major sleep regression), feels good to her now—it’s all she really knows. I wonder if she realizes that all of this is passing, and the life she knows as normal will be replaced, in time, with some semblance of the normal life her parents thought they had before.

A non-comprehensive list of things Kina has said to compel us to return to her bedroom after putting her to bed:

• “I need a giant hug!”

• “The Play-Doh is backwards!”

• “Take this stuffie out of my bed!”

• “I want a big, big hug!”

• “What’s the stuffie with the orange foot?”

• “I can see a shadow!”

• “I’m sweaty!”

• “Turn the elephant around!”

• “The noise is too loud!”

• “The light is not bright enough!”

• “The watering can is broken!”

• “I want a large hug!”

• “I don’t want the pink unicorn!”

• “Can you move the tissues?”

• “I need another story!”

• “My puppy blanket isn’t on right!”

• “The door isn’t all the way open!”

• “I heard a noise!”

• “I don’t hear any noises!”

• “I didn’t get enough kisses!”

Tonight, she slept without calling us back to the room. I just blew her a kiss.

Every morning, as Kina gets ready for the day, I write down potential headlines for that day’s issue of The Daily Kina. Sometimes, I have notes from the day before, and putting together four stories is pretty straightforward; on other mornings, I have to listen carefully for ridiculous quotes and trenchant reflections. Once I’ve got between four and six headlines and sub-headlines (“you mean heds and deks”, says the editor who works at a grownup newspaper), I figure out what the right stories will be and where they will go on the page. I always put the most obvious illustration in the third position, on the right column. Weirdest headline usually goes in the bottom left, in the fourth position. Second headline, top of the left column, should always either complement the top headline or follow up on a storyline from earlier in the week.

The top headline itself, though—that’s always the hard choice. Should it be the most ridiculous thing Kina has said in the last twenty-four hours? An easily-illustrated hot news item? Since last June, I’ve usually made the top headline something that can serve as the foundation for that evening’s essay. This means that many of our top headlines for the last eight months have been extra poignant notions that help me explain something about parenting in the midst of a pandemic, which is very charming, but it means that we haven’t been able to spotlight such gems as:

• “Daddy Bakes a Different Cake”—May 6, 2020

• “Freaky Friday”—May 1, 2020

• “Toe Stubbed”—April 24, 2020

• “It Is Going On a Napkin”—April 22, 20201

It was just a little more than a year ago that the Canadian sleeping-kid-whisperer we lovingly call “Doctor Pam” told us to stop wandering into Kina’s room every time she whined at night, because it was keeping us all awake. Within a week, a five-month-long reign of sleep terror had ended. Why did it take five months for us to get somebody to tell us to do the obvious thing? Not sure! Why have I been writing headlines about sleep issues for a month and a half? Long story short: After a night of nearly infinite hugs, resulting in a general nervous breakdown, we played our Doctor Pam card yesterday and got the advice we knew was coming all along—stop going in and hugging her in the middle of the night, like she told us a year ago.

What’s old is new again. Kina’s rapid mental development keeps her up at night, it scares us both, we comfort her, nobody sleeps, Doctor Pam tells us to cut it out, and then things are better for a year. It all makes sense, but who would not want to spend the entire night hugging this child? Granted, it’s not great for going to work and being able to pay attention, but the snuggles are nice when you’re not weeping because you’re so exhausted.

The other thing that happened a year ago: We got COVID-19. I realized the other day that we were coming up on the first anniversary of The Main Event of Early 2020, when I woke up unable to smell anything after a night of violent chills and fever. On one hand, glad we got that out of the way, but hooboy was I terrified. All three daily caregivers of this publication’s esteemed publisher were simultaneously bedridden and confined to quarters for two weeks. Nobody would offer us a test, and our doctors all told us to just rest and drink fluids. I took my temperature and checked my blood oxygen every thirty minutes and spent the intervening eighteen hundred seconds reading Twitter. It was unenjoyable and boring. Twelve days later, I felt better, and I drew a newspaper for Kina.

It is strange to feel as though I am disappointing somebody who has spent all night keeping us awake and has barged into our bedroom at first light. To be fair, she has been waiting “weeks and weeks” for us to get out of bed. Someday, the tables will turn, but for now, we are all humungous lazy babies. Too exhausted to elaborate. Enjoy the headlines!

Today’s Parade was originally conceived as “a heart underneath a rainbow”, but by the time Kina finished, there was a lot more under the rainbow: Lala’s house, an “M” for “Mommy”, a world, and the aforementioned heart. There is also a letter “T”, but it’s lying down. Like me.

Kina learned about mistakes from Waffles and Mochi today, in the context of a felt yeti puppet accidentally dropping a satchel full of corn-based meals from a rudimentary airplane. In that episode, Michelle Obama—an unlikely but extremely charming host—gives Waffles the Yeti permission to extend herself some grace, with the understanding that mistakes are part of the process of being alive. This was a useful thing for Kina to hear, because we are not great about mistakes here at The Daily Kina HQ. We may not cry over spilled milk, but we don’t exactly let the spillage pass without comment. I’m not quite the ultra-chill dad I hoped I would be, which I think reflects a certain denial of my comfy relationship with shame and self-flagellation. I don’t extend myself a lot of grace for my mistakes, but I really try to be understanding when somebody whose body has grown two inches longer in the last four months accidentally kicks some juice off the coffee table. It happens; feet are weird.

Kina, for her part, both atones for her mistakes and holds others accountable for their own. There have been nights when Kina stomps around behind me after I’ve dropped some eggs in the kitchen or shattered a glass, barking, “You made a mistake, Daddy! Say! You’re! Sorry!” To be scolded so persistently by somebody one tenth your age is deeply humiliating, but she’s just giving voice to my internal monologue; it’s like being seen singing karaoke in your underwear through an open bedroom window—you did it, it’s normal, now everybody knows, move on. Waffles the Yeti didn’t have to tell Michelle Obama that she dropped all the corn from the airplane, but in doing so, she gives herself the kind of closure she needs to go on and make some bangin’ cornbread with Rashida Jones (as it happens).

Maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad about the eggs, or the glass, or misplacing Kina’s socks, or all the other things. Michelle Obama and Kina are now in firm agreement that mistakes are okay, and I probably should get on board with that. The recognition of a mistake can come from anywhere, and we beat ourselves up about them, obsess over them, when that recognition comes from within—but a mistake is just a gap between what we are taught to believe is correct and necessary and what we accomplish, despite that knowledge.

Kina finally stood up for her right to speak freely today, ending a months-long campaign of suppression on the part of her tyrannical family. Repeated efforts by her father to silence her litany of poop comments at the breakfast table, demands for more frozen mango during school Zooms, and observations regarding butts finally reached an end as this local hero put her foot down, insisting on her right to free expression. Muttered under her breath, this cry for open debate ultimately went unheeded, as her inconsiderate audience went about their chatty business, seemingly insensitive to the brilliant emerging voice living right under their noses. “You don’t ever give me time to talk!” complained Kina, citing several instances in which her parents discussed matters as trivial as their dreams from the night before—featuring, in many cases, extremely boring passages about college, subways, worm-filled oceans, mystery roommates, sideways elevators, forgotten locker combinations, children lost in crowds, muddy boots, childhood homes, elbow handshakes, dropped masks, ice cream eaten while naked, and empty office towers. “I am just trying to tell you about She-Ra! Sssssh!!!!!” she noted, bristling at the censorship of a topic near and dear to her own heart. When contacted for comment on both the matter of She-Ra, Princess of Power, and the broader environment of forbidden speech in their household, Kina’s parents offered no response, which is pretty funny when you think about it, because they absolutely never shut up.

dad

The thing about having a four-year-old kid in the house is that we always have a really effervescent coach around. Laurea and I watched Ted Lasso earlier this year; it is the kind of show we would never have watched, absent a global pandemic—a cavalcade of feel-good moments marching down a road paved with encouragement. At the end of the show, we cried it out and went about our business for the next few days, buoyed by Coach Lasso’s player-first leadership style. After a while, though, the halo dissipated, and while we didn’t have an inspirational television trainer to carry us through, we did have Kina.

There are many things that make Kina upset, but very few of them are true catastrophes. In the moments that are true catastrophes, however, Kina truly shines as an inspirational figure. Got COVID? Kina’s there to pull you through with a silly dance. Stressed out at work? All good—Kina’s shirtless and wearing a bow tie. Struggling to face the state of the world? It happens; Kina can tell you about how the Octonauts saved a herd of sea pigs. They worked together and made it happen. The Octonauts, like our family, are the perfect team. There’s nothing that a little cooperation and dancing can’t help.

We were a little worried at the start of the pandemic about letting Kina watch TV. Like most of the idealistic perspectives we had on parenting, television was just a domino waiting to fall. But the shows she’s chosen have helped to shape her worldview—collaborative, loving, silly—and I don’t think we’d choose to do it differently, if we had to (and god I hope we don’t have to). We all crave a little feel-good show right now, I think, and we’re lucky to have a full-time, all-singing, all-dancing little Ted Lasso living in the room next door. If you know some sea pigs that need saving, I can point them in the right direction.

One of Kina’s pet peeves is when we eat too fast. This applies to both real and pretend eating. Sometimes, I like to freak her out when we’re playing “tea party” or “ice cream” by bringing the dish very close to my mouth and pretending to shovel the food in—like Garfield eating lasagna. Invariably, she gets a very stern look on her face and grabs my hand, telling me that I will “choke” or “get a tummyache”, and to take it slow.1 The sad truth is that Laurea and I also eat our real food quickly, because we are very hungry after work, and that also annoys Kina. Sometimes we have a more leisurely dinner, and Kina will finish first, after which she shouts that she “won the food game”. This is also how I treated dinner when I was a kid, and it took me years to realize that dinner didn’t have to be competitive. I don’t particularly like to think of Kina living with that view of dining as a race, and so I simply eat faster, so that she never wins.

Still, we should take our time. The closer we get to a sense of things being somehow “better”, the faster I want this time to run. Laurea and I want to just fast-forward through the weeks between now and when Kina’s grandparents visit, in a blur of vaccinations, playgrounds, and absurdly rushed meals. But there is so much happening that is amazing right now—which this newspaper will, of course, cover in great detail—that lives in the interstices between the rushing, and I want to give space to that goodness. So does Kina. Can you savor the dinner and still crave the dessert? We’re all trying—even our little fork cop, who religiously takes her time at the table, as long as you don’t remind her of the treats to come.

I always said I wanted raise a little girl who felt comfortable taking risks, but this soup thing is a bridge too far. Find joy in the small thrills, kid—you have your whole life ahead of you!

dad

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Kina’s approach to playgrounds has changed dramatically in just the last week. Once a mere dabbler in playground society, she has suddenly become the loudest kid on the playset, running headlong into battle with a guttural scream that seems never to let up. We hit up two “weekend playgrounds” during our time off this week, and Kina terrorized them both.

“Weekend playground” is a term coined by Kina last summer, when we first got our car. As we tried to find more outdoor places to escape to, Kina quickly learned that weekends meant “new playgrounds” in other neighborhoods. Before the car, all playgrounds were the same, and there were only four of them—all located within walking distance of our home. Now we see barely any of our old-fashioned weekday playgrounds as a family, which has put a huge dent in our advocacy for the Rodney Playground.

Kina and I both like weekends, but for different reasons. I get to spend some time away from the dresser and kitchen chair that I call my desk, and Kina gets to eat special treats, run around on “weekend playgrounds”, and hang out with her amazing parents. In the middle of this Venn diagram is Time Spent Together, which we all enjoy.

I learned the term “Sunday Scaries” during the pandemic, which made them extra scary; the anticipation of a week of Covid-tinged remote work put an emotional damper on my Sundays, cheating me of a psychological free day. Kina, by contrast, is thrilled by the mere idea of a Sunday—a second weekend, she figures, like a bonus Saturday. I imagine it takes a few years before the novelty wears off and the reality (albeit fairly recent, in the history of civilization) of the two-day weekend sets in. In the meantime, it’s fun to see somebody who gets 48 full hours of joy from their days away from preschool.

It was a good weekend, overall. We ate well, ran around in the sunshine, visited a weekend playground (in Nolita), and took zero naps. As a result, on this traditionally fraught first day of Daylight Saving Time, Kina is fast asleep at 7:30 and I am pooh-poohing the ol’ Sunday Scaries for a change. It is, after all, still the weekend.

We have not spoken extensively here about the vaccines, because we have not been trying to jinx things, and it seems that our superstition has paid off, as four of Kina’s grandparents are at least partially vaccinated against COVID-19—and two of them now fully protected (or at least twice-jabbed). This has really added a hopeful note to the texts and video chats around these parts, as those grandparents begin to plan for their reunion with a Kina who is substantially larger, chattier, and more sophisticated. The United States dispensed 4.5 million shots yesterday, which means that lots of grandparents out there have a healthy dose of hope in their upper arms. Good luck to all of them, and to the other Kinas of the world, who are all about to be showered with love and gifts. It’s a very different March 13th from last year; if you’re reading this, I’m happy you’ve made it this far, and I hope you get to see the ones you love so soon.

dad

Almost forgot to send this! I owe you all an essay about how small children’s anger is adorable. Until next time, then.

dad

A year ago today, I stopped going into work and set up shop in my bedroom, with my laptop propped up on two cookbooks in front of a window. The other day, I tried to find a single unfamiliar detail in the landscape I can see from that window, and I gave up after ten minutes; I have literally seen it all.

At the same time, Kina has been attending school remotely, and I’ve taken an unusually visible role in her day; we play games, tell stories, and exchange jokes as I pass through the living room—our day has a rhythm. Sometimes, that rhythm feels to both of us more like a routine, in ways that remind us both that we’ve been at this for a while. The other night, Kina asked to play a game, and I offered up one of her old favorites—“Burlingame Wakes Up Baby Rainbow Cat”. No, she said. I offered to play “Elsa Flies Around”. No. I suggested “Daddy Gets a Checkup”. Kina stared at me pathetically and asked if I had any new ideas, and I just… didn’t.

It’s not that I don’t have the capacity to deliver a new game, or to imagine a novel story, but it really is a slog these days. It’s easier for me in a way to walk the path we’ve been walking all year, because it helps me ignore how much work it’s taken to beat that path through the brush. I don’t want to have new ideas right now; I just want to walk through this last bit of the tunnel and go outside. Kina, at the same time, is having the opposite experience. She is simultaneously less exhausted by this whole affair and more tortured with the boredom. Somehow, we have to meet in the middle. I am sure that Baby Rainbow Unicorn has another exciting story ahead of her, but I’ll need to think about it. I have to think about it.

Give a girl one day of false spring and she’ll spend every ounce of energy she’s saved for the last three months. Hope springs eternal. Child hopes for spring.

Good night, adventurers.

dad

In September, I wrote about Kina’s pink tutu, a mid-pandemic acquisition that was originally meant to be worn for a dance recital last June. I didn’t have a lot of visibility into those dance classes; Kina’s nanny, Hannah, would take her to the sessions on afternoons after school. From time to time, Kina would demonstrate to us the ways in which she and her classmates were learning to position their feet and leap around, and we understood that the kids would eventually learn enough about dance to perform in a recital. I had all sorts of visions in my head of how that recital would play out—kids picking their noses, Kina making terrifying faces, children running into each other, parents all holding their phones high in the air to film this masterpiece of juvenile choreography. As it turned out, what we got was a tutu wrapped in plastic and a kid who desperately wants to go to dance class.

For most of the pandemic, I’ve wondered why Kina’s interpretive dance performances seem so often to involve a strange sort of jump-running. She didn’t do that until lockdown, and so I’ve assumed this was just her way of working out her excess energy, but it’s totally conceivable to me now that this is the last thing she learned in dance class, and that one of Kina’s final collective experiences in 2020 was leaping up and down as she and her classmates bounced around a dance studio to a jaunty little tune. Every dance she’s done in the last year has recalled that moment, and while she’s developed a whole spectrum of highly dramatic dance moves since then, that dance class will forever be etched in her memory, and in her performance practice.

She wore her tutu for two straight weeks in September, but it hadn’t really played much of a role in Kina’s varied costume life until last week, when I woke to find her bedazzled in pink sequins and demanding to hear “Let It Go”. I don’t know if her latent memories of that dance class prompted her to bust out the tutu, or if the tutu reminded her of her truncated ballet instruction, but the class is clearly on her mind. When she asked me yesterday, over dinner, whether she could go to dance class if she wore her mask, it kind of broke my heart. I have no idea how classes like that will work in the coming months; they won’t be testing vaccines on children Kina’s age before late fall, at least, and while I feel somewhat confident that she’ll be back in a classroom by September, I don’t know how we’ll reflect on an enclosed studio full of jumping children—or if the studio will even still be there for her to jump in.

Laurea and I have been talking about middle school lately, and the varied injustices that children between the ages of eleven and fourteen mete out to each other in service of their own developing egos. Most of those conversations are about our own experiences navigating our early teens—about how I would run from class to class to avoid being noticed by the bullies, and about how Laurea herself ventured in and out of mean girl territory. As we reminisce, though, we are both peering off into the distance at Kina’s future experience of adolescent cruelty.

We tend to see the future in the exchanges Kina has with other kids on the playground, reading between the lines as they play games, cut in front of one another on the slide, and variously accept and rebuff each others’ advances. I probably read too much into the benign emotional tools that four-year-old children are learning to use, but it’s because I know how tools can be misused once we’ve mastered them. I tell myself that I can see the teenagers in this kids: the introverts and extroverts, the jocks, the cool girls, the quiet schemers, the tough defenders. None of this, of course, holds any water at all, because these children have the prefrontal cortices of puppies. There is no destiny encoded in the kid who won’t share her soccer ball; that is how kids and soccer balls work.

Yesterday, Kina encountered a mean little kid on the playground. Kina was dressed as Elsa (surprise), and this small child told her, “I hate your dress.” The two of them were playing with a mutual friend underneath a tree, and Kina stood there quietly. Laurea, who was standing nearby and heard this exchange, walked over and told the little girl that it was unkind to say things like that, but the kid barely registered the scolding. Kina seemed not to care, and the code of the playground is to refrain from lecturing others’ children in the absence of imminent physical harm, and so that was that. Later on, that exact same kid walked up to Kina while she was eating her popcorn and stuck her hand in the bag to take a fistful of her own. Kina scowled at her, told her she needed to ask, and pulled the bag away. The parents of this child, who were standing three feet away, offered their kid a snack but said nothing else. Reader, I had thoughts.