Long day, short post. Everybody in this house loves each other, which is the good news. Kina had a great dream about a COVID test. Nicole and Paddington have gotten closer and closer to Peru with the guidance of local royalty. Kina is “slurpy full” and topped up with tree juice. All is well, in the confines of this publication.

A brief correction: In yesterday’s edition, our top story referred to a local child on her first mention as “Kina de Ocampo-Yee”. On subsequent mentions, she was called “Ms. Yee”; those mentions should have referred to “Ms. de Ocampo-Yee”, which the author should have recalled was a flash point from parental conversations in the months leading up to Ms. de Ocampo-Yee’s birth. There is a reason and an order to things. We regret the error.

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Long-maligned, the humble Brassica oleracea has seen a recent resurgence in interest among local children in many of its most commonly-recognized forms—kale, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Of them all, though, the Brussels sprout has remained a lowly vegetable outcast; local children have, at best, paid this squat and unassuming leaf marble no mind, and at worst, have scorned it publicly.

In a shocking turn this weekend, though, one local child discovered that the little fella holds a delicious secret, invalidating theories—in some cases, dating back years—regarding its general disgustingness. While eating a roast chicken this Sunday, four-year-old Kina de Ocampo-Yee was challenged repeatedly by her father to try just a single Brussels sprout; despite Ms. Yee’s progressively more strident denials, her father insisted that “this is exactly what Daniel Tiger was talking about” and that “Katerina Kittycat would want you to have three bites, and I am only asking for one.” Kina’s mother, fearing a total meltdown, attempted to block further research, telling her husband to “cut it out” and “let her eat fruit”. Had he done so, this publication believes, science would have been done a disservice.

Instead, seeing an opportunity, Mr. Yee offered the younger Ms. Yee a full plate of melon, to be delivered only after a single bite of Brussels sprout. Ms. Yee, a self-described “melon fiend”, reluctantly consented to one final experiment. That experiment, surprisingly, demonstrated a full flavor profile, almost no disgusting squishiness, and a chompy texture—all in contradiction to the now-invalidated literature. The research was conducted a second time, yielding the same results, and further tests were run to ensure that the sprouts remained delicious both alone and in conjunction with chicken. With no ill effects observed, Ms. Yee declared Brussels sprouts both edible and delicious, and has submitted her paper for peer review.

We took a stroll yesterday through the East Village, hoping to take a break from playgrounds for a moment, and Kina made the best of the situation by doing what she loves best—making loud noises and amusing strangers. It is nice, in the middle of all this, to be happy and to make other people happy. It is also nice to eat a plate of pierogis, which we did in anticipation of our enchanted hokey pokey tour, and which gave us a very good reason to dance around vigorously in the freezing January air. That’s what it’s all about.

Kidman + Paddington Traverse Panama Canal

You must all be wondering, “How much longer can he sustain this serial fiction retelling of the contemporary holiday classic Paddington, starring Nicole Kidman?” The honest answer: I’m not sure. At this point, our heroes (former enemies) have spent more time in a submarine than anywhere near the plot of the original movie, and I frankly did not expect them to end up in the Pacific Ocean before heading home for the long-awaited dénouement. At this point, Paddington and Nicole Kidman are in the company of Paddington’s Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pastuso, the Octonauts, a friendly cat, an octopus named Coba, and three penguins with Brooklyn accents. They’ve all made their way through the Panama Canal, to which they gained access by answering a riddle (a requirement for passage, as you know, by all ships large and small), and are once again heading south. If I had to venture a guess, we have about four more chapters, but Kina is a demanding listener. I could be at this for years.

We have found snuggles immeasurably useful during the last eleven months, probably more than any other time since Kina was born. We dole these snuggles out liberally—especially on the edges of slumber and during important movies—and we’ve seen how Kina has come to recognize their value and energy. She understands that snuggles are something transmitted, as if by an invisible wire, between people who love each other. This is, in a way, something new; snuggles were not always thus.

I talked a little bit yesterday about the difference between Kina as a baby and Kina as a four-year-old, in terms of how we now collectively understand discipline, but snuggles live in that space, too. The gap, in this case, is between snuggles you get and snuggles you share. As a baby, closeness is a form of protection and nurture; you can’t live without it. Snuggles give life. At four, closeness is a signal of belonging, care, and nostalgia for the time when comfort was sustenance; it conveys information. Snuggles are a statement. Snuggles, at four, are a choice.

We are here in this apartment together, the three of us, by no choice of our own. This is probably true of you, our readers, as well. I don’t mean to complain. We have not chosen to be this close, which can be a source of tremendous stress, in predictable and terrible ways for some parents—notably those who have lost family and employment this year (losses that we have fortunately been spared). We’ve navigated this fraught closeness, counterintuitively, by choosing more closeness. We literally cling closer to each other now than we have since Kina was little, and that choice to embrace closeness in a tight space has been a saving grace in the last eleven months. The strange coexistence of being unable to escape a place and feeling so far from all other places can leave us feeling as though we’re floating untethered. Snuggles remind us of the presence we have with each other—and of our own substance. Snuggles are how we choose to be close, so that we can forget that we did not choose this.

Kina hit me again the other day, square on the ear—I don’t know why; I did something she didn’t like, and her inner monster took a whirl at me. The rules of the house are clear on this; no warnings, even though it’s been a while since our last time out. Since that last one, I’ve taken off the baby gate we used to leave open in the door of her room. She’s four years old, and that gate had bordered on the absurd for at least six months, but there was meaning in its presence: It was the boundary between time out and time in. So when I carried Kina to her bedroom, surly and barking, and she saw there was no gate, she got extremely freaked out.

I closed the door behind me after leaving her in the room, and she raced to follow me out, begging for forgiveness in a tone I’d never heard her use before—“I’m so sorry, Daddy! I’m so sorry!!” As she wept behind the door, I held it shut, separated from her by only twelve inches, as I slowly fell apart inside. What happened?

I have talked before about Kina’s developmental spurts, and how great stretches of tantrums presage the unlocking of new potential in her mind. This potential is normally either amusing or impressive, but the burst I’ve come to understand she’s navigating now is different; Kina has developed a more sophisticated relationship with fear. The things she’s scared of have deeper meaning, threats have causes, danger has a face. The squeaky hinge isn’t a mystery, it’s the boogeyman. And so, as she contemplates the isolation of a closed door that was once just a gate, the closing means something bigger than it used to, the solitude becomes more ominous, the denial more vast. Why would I choose to inspire that kind of fear in my child? If my child is begging for mercy, I am clearly doing this wrong.

Welcome, new subscribers! I have no idea where you’re coming from (and would be happy to know! Please tell me!) but our publisher is always pleased by an influx of new readership. You may find our focus on a single random child you’ve never met slightly disorienting at first, but as you become accustomed to our obscure storylines and the running Nicole Kidman and Paddington serial fiction, we trust you will turn more and more often to The Daily Kina as your primary news source.

Let’s start with an obscure storyline, then: One term that recent subscribers may not quite grasp is “tree juice”, last referenced in our September 30th edition. Conventionally known as “apple juice”, Kina has long preferred her own nomenclature, since no bottle of farmstand apple juice actually depicts an apple, and “tree juice” is just more fun to say. Tree juice the beverage our publisher typically requests with dinner, and like all great media moguls, she refuses to let anybody eat before she launches off into a spirited and muscular toast. The result of this boisterous ritual, as often as not, is a puddle of apple juice and a muttered apology, but we’ve been dealing with that since Kina was two years old and running up to us with her sippy cup, screaming “Cheess!”

For a few weeks now, Kina’s toast has been “to the new year”, which I can tell you is great, because adults have this thing about not celebrating New Year’s for more than one day, and Kina has no such boring hangup. Every night is New Year’s Eve at dinner when your child is four—complete with spilled drinks, screaming, and people dancing on your bed. Tonight, though, and without prompting, Kina made a solemn toast “to democracy”; this was moderately surprising, given her general disinterest in yesterday’s smooth transfer of power, but she appears to have read the news by now and is fully on board with democracy as a concept. It’s clear that she recognizes something has changed, in the way you might notice a recently mown lawn or a new tube of toothpaste.

She was one month old when The Last One walked into the White House and was unaware of much besides her parents, let alone the desecration of the presidency. Today, she is forty-nine months old and somehow still blissfully ignorant of the import of this moment, of his departure. This is a blessing, in many ways; there are many injustices I’ll have to explain to Kina as she comes to recognize them, but the day-to-day insults of President The Last One are no longer among them.

As I was drawing the paper today, I asked Kina if she wanted to tell a story about the new President. She didn’t so much as look up from her paper, because she had nothing to say about this event—today holds no meaning for her. She kept drawing, undeterred. “These are the stories I want to create, Daddy.”

I feel a little like we’ve all been dragged along on a story that wasn’t our own for the last four years, our own narratives held hostage by the most devastating case of toxic narcissism in American history. What stories might we have written for ourselves, had we not been spiraling around this particular drain? What I find refreshing about Kina’s refusal to acknowledge the importance of this moment is that she doesn’t have to gather escape velocity. Her stories, now that she’s writing them, are her own—and will reflect a mind just becoming aware of the society around it. When she turns eight, the stories she tells will include Black and South Asian women serving their country in the White House (and maybe even becoming President). She will have a model for what it means to be a leader that is constructive and not embarrassing. We can build on that.

The struggle to get Kina to nap on weekends continues unabated, as I (the stern librarian) unveil tactic after fruitless tactic to convince her to just lay down for just one second. Part of the reason I’ve been driving so much on weekends is because it’s the last remaining unchallenged nap zone in Kina’s life. I’ll drive twenty-five minutes away to grab lunch with her on a Sunday, because I know it will take twenty-five minutes to get home, and it only takes twelve for her to pass out if I’m driving on side streets. Stop looking at me.

Yesterday, though, I was not in the mood to drive. My movement situation is such that I either never leave the house in a day, or I drive for an hour at a shot; this is not at all how this city is meant to be lived in, and so we spent Monday morning just walking around the neighborhood, grabbing a sandwich to eat outside, and enjoying a good long swing. In so doing, I was also trying to exhaust my child so thoroughly that she’d find a good home nap irresistible. I ran around the playground with her, played hide-and-go-seek among a cluster of incongruous roadside yurts, and chased her as she scooted down countless long sidewalks. I got my exercise.

I did not get my nap.

Laurea occupies a role in Kina’s life that straddles accommodation and enforcement. Sitcoms teach us that in any parenting situation in which two adults can be played off each other, there will be a good cop and a bad cop, but in these times, I’m disinclined to identify either of us as any kind of cop—so I’d offer instead that in every parenting dyad, there is a nice librarian and the stern librarian (because librarians are saints, and I’d do that job in a minute if I didn’t live in this money pit of a city.)

Readers who know Kina’s parents may be mildly surprised to learn that Laurea is often the nice librarian, while I stake out the territory of stern librarian. It is Laurea to whom Kina goes for special treats and extra coddling; from me, she gets the rules. Laurea is usually the first to pick her up off the ground during a tantrum, while I am better known for standing silently over her as she screams on the sidewalk. Mommy nurtures, Daddy nudges. This divergence has surprised us both as it’s played out, since we both expected me to be a gigantic pushover with the offspring; it’s in my nature. Friends often joke about the intensity of purpose Laurea brings to her relationships, but her unfathomable kindness with Kina is a reminder that parenthood digs deep for the parts of your personality that you’ve been saving for a rainy day.

It’s not all cut and dried, though; Kina has been known to extract a bag or ten of gummy bears from me on a stroll through the grocery, and Laurea’s patience has limits. The nice librarian has all the same rules as the stern one, and when you cross her, the contrast is more notable. “You have judgement,” Kina told Laurea the other day, as Laurea put her foot down about the one thing she will not tolerate—a mess. Unwavering, Laurea insisted that Kina take care of her things and this apartment (a key component of our social contract), leading ultimately to a chastened but reluctant four-year-old picking up whatever it was that was out of place.

Many of the nicest things Kina says to us every day are delivered in the moments before she falls asleep, when her keen wit and fiery competitive instincts are tucking in for the night. It is in these waning minutes that Kina will tell us that we are her favorite parents in the world, that her mother has “good hair bangs”, or that she hopes I have a good dream about new Nicole Kidman stories. Kina delivered our top headline here just as Laurea built up a fortress of stuffies around her last night, draped in sycophants like a friendlier and less drooly Jabba the Hutt.

I don’t know where in particular “go in peace and safety” came from. It could be from any number of formal farewells, a generic assurance that you should not expect to be ambushed around the pass by the people whose village you’re leaving—or at least an expression of concern and support regarding any potential ambush by other villages. Thoughts and prayers. As Kina launched into her benediction, she placed her palms on our heads, as if to cast a spell of protection upon us from whatever monsters lurked in the shadows outside her bedroom.

“Be cozy” is probably not as common a send-off in nomadic cultures, but it lands well. There have been many periods in the history of civilization—this one included, sadly—in which safety feels like a stretch goal; a prayer for one’s safety can be asking a lot in the present millennium. But Kina takes the long view, reminding us that we are safe right now, in this house (or at least in her bedroom), among family, and that we must aim for higher peaks—to coziness itself.

About ten years ago, we bought a little Danish table for our living room—the first time in my life I’ve ever owned a piece of furniture whose principle purpose is supporting food. This table comfortably seats two but conceals leaves that, when expanded, make space for four adults. In its current configuration, with one of two leaves out, we have a table for three. The math holds up. We have positioned this table up against the wall between the living room and the kitchen. Kina and I frame the table; Kina’s chair is closest to the kitchen door, and mine is next to the window. Laurea sits between us, facing the wall—which she continually reminds me should have some art on it. It is only now, as I write this, that I understand why she’s always so annoyed by the blank wall.

For months, Kina’s demanded a spot on Laurea’s lap (see the story in second position from our edition of January 12th), so her formal seat has gone unoccupied for most meals. Lately, though, she’s begun to understand how large a human being she actually is, and so has taken to sitting in the big girl chair like a normal person who speaks in full sentences. This means that she and I once more face each other while eating—nice for me, annoying for the girl who speaks in full sentences.

There is a protocol for asking questions at the dinner table in our household, as frequent readers will recall. Kina’s intricate dance of conversation—a question that yields to an answer before circling back to a new asker’s question—is elegant but fragile, and frequently feels more hokey-pokey, less quadrille. On a bad day, if you miss a step, the whole thing falls apart—and by “the whole thing”, I mean Kina.

I don’t remember what I did this morning that made Kina call off the deal, nor what the deal was that was called off, but I will for the rest of my life remember her dismissive hand wave and decisive march from the room. She didn’t come to play.

I have nothing philosophical to say about this headline. She is tough stuff.

Have a calm weekend. Stay tough. See you in the morning.

What can I tell you? It was tragic. The doctor—who had gently burned her own finger just minutes before while helping Mommy spoon out rainbow couscous into a glass container, prompting Daddy to immediately prescribe two minutes of cold running water over said finger, leaving the doctor’s hand “wet like snow” and in need of a band-aid (but a brown band-aid and not an actual Hello Kitty band-aid) that she would later show off to Ms. Olenick and Ms. Perez for morning meeting in a display of tremendous pathos, which in turn would vanish the second Ms. Olenick announced a scavenger hunt whose object was anything starting with the letter “D”, sending Kina off to her bedroom in search of her beloved Tiny Dog, who had not at all burned his butt and very much distracted Kina from the tragedy at hand—believes that Hello Kitty will be “okay”. There are few, if any, clues to suggest what might have prompted Hello Kitty to place her tail in a pot of boiling water. It’s 2021, I suppose, and we’ll take anything to break up the boredom.

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As parents, we have never been much into the question of which of us Kina looks like. Whenever somebody has brought up the topic, we have sort of shrugged it off, seeing as we mostly think Kina looks like Kina. From time to time, we unearth a photo of ourselves when we were two, but we always talk about how much we look like Kina in those pictures, rather than the other way around. Kina has, from her first sonogram, always looked like Kina, and parts of us are there with her, but on her own terms.

At breakfast this morning, Kina was exploring those parts of us that are part of her, because I got to talking about which of us donated her outstanding eyebrows (me, I would say, though Laurea may differ) and Kina decided to run with the idea. Here is where she landed:

• Eyebrows: Daddy

• Eyes: Daddy

• Nose: Mommy

• High Lip: Daddy

• Chin: Mommy

• Neck: Mommy

• Ears: “All the ears look the same”

Kina and I periodically “play sports”, which is a very loosely-defined activity for two people who are not particularly good at sports. “Playing sports”, in this house, means throwing a ball back and forth—seldom directly at each other—and going “oh nooooo”. By contrast, “playing basketball” means walking up to Daddy and chucking the ball directly into his outstretched arms and saying “yessss”. Neither game is a particularly skillful endeavor, but both are very funny, because Kina spends the entire time guffawing and falling over.

I have—and perhaps here you will sympathize—had a really bad week.* Laurea and I started talking about current events at 9 o’clock last night, and it quickly devolved into me hiding under a blanket; I did not sleep well. So, as Kina and I worked through her daily agenda this morning, we took a detour after “get dressed” to “play sports”. She and I sat five feet apart in her bedroom and chucked the ball back and forth at each other, knocking over Legos, bonking each other in the head, and falling on our butts until both of us were losing our breath with laughter. The only reason I took leave of our game, after about twenty minutes, was because school was starting. I sometimes take pleasure in watching Kina have fun, but I think I needed the extra endorphins generated by destructive play this morning in order to approach the day. I think we both appreciated this interlude of chaos, a break in our ritual with absolutely no purpose—a close cousin to my other favorite part of the day: the prescribed choreographed pre-bath performance of Wham’s seminal lazy-party-kid anthem, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”.

I think there are two things that I have been missing in my life lately, to which I would suggest you also pay attention: the license to throw things at people, and prolonged laughter. I get both of these by playing sports with my child, though I don’t presume you have a child around at whom you feel comfortable throwing things. For us, the match works. I aim for her squishy belly and can protect my own head in a pinch. She has, as they say in sports, a good arm.

Kina is a plan-oriented leader, and routinely sketches out detailed agendas for the day ahead, following in the footsteps of her mother, who would never embark on a day without a clear vision for how it might unfold. Today’s plan, according to Kina:

1. Have breakfast

2. Get dressed

3. Pre-K with friends

4. One-on-one with Ms. Olenick and Ms. Perez

5. Hannah comes

6. Go to playground

7. Have lunch

8. Take a nap

9. Say hi to Daddy

10. Eat a snack

11. Say hi to Mommy

12. Eat dinner

13. “Wake me up before you go go”

14. Daddy gives me a bath

15. Books

16. Nicole Kidman story

17. Go to sleep

At the end of every one of these lists, Kina asks “Good plan?” and we have to say “Good plan.” (Most of Kina’s days are very similar, and so it’s easy to agree to the plan.) Having a little person who walks around the house shedding light on routine is both charming and dispiriting. We spend so much of our time in this house, at least, in a state of mindless ritual, trying to keep our eyes fixed forward on the distant goal of “shots in arms, then leave the house”. What does my plan look like?

When I was roughly Kina’s age, my family went to a July 4th celebration on a big plaza in town—a 70s-era landscape of yellow-brick ramps and shallow ziggurats, anchored by a fountain and ringed with trees. (Why we stopped building plazas as a civilization eludes me, but I digress.) A brass band played marches somewhere outside the view of my long-term memory as I ran heedlessly across the plaza. I remember the entire episode today from the geographic perspective of where my parents were sitting, because in this episode, I fell, skinned my knee, and couldn’t find my family. I remember a stranger carrying me or walking me across the plaza as the band played “Stars and Stripes Forever” (a march that still triggers anxiety in me, for this reason). I imagine we found my parents quickly, since the crowd in my memory was sparse—and the park must have been quite small—but that sense of being apart and being in need is something that is now firmly affixed in my brain.

I tell you all of this because Kina, yesterday, took her scooter across the playground at our local park while Laurea and I were talking. We paid it no mind, as she’s been getting more and more independent, but it soon became apparent that Kina had gone farther afield than any of us are used to. The two of us fanned out across the playground to look for her—on the swings, under the playsets, by the concrete turtles. Nada. It was only after I walked out of the only entrance to the playground and took a survey of the area that I saw her standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by friendly adults, bereft and weeping inconsolably. As I shouted her name and sprinted towards her, I found myself immediately the picture of a parent whose child has been lost.

Being untethered from the part of yourself that you most cherish is an unsettling thing at the best of times, but there is little, it turns out, that is more anxiety-inducing than thinking your child has vanished—as unlikely as that actually is. I grew up roaming freely through my neighborhoods at an age not that different from Kina’s, and I rarely felt the sense of separation I did yesterday for those three minutes looking for my daughter, with the crucial exception of that moment on the yellow-brick plaza with the tubas and a skinned knee. We do not actually know, as children, how fragile and precious the connections to our parents are, until we need them. As parents today, we are cognizant all the time of that connection, knowing that the force of our protection weakens exponentially with distance. I still feel that it’s important to allow Kina to define and protect her own boundaries, but in a world so governed by fear and vigilance, it takes real effort. She will be all right. We will be all right. “Give me space,” she’s been saying lately. I’m trying.

The latest news in Kina’s mental development—and in the hot new trend of conversational turn-taking—is questions at the dinner table. This is Kina’s idea, the exploration of our collective ignorance over a meal, and she’s as interested in the asking of a question as she is in its answer; since a true aficionado of questions knows that the best compliment one can receive is “Good question!”, she insists that every question we ask each other be accorded that respect. This is not necessarily to say that every one of her questions seems that sophisticated at first blush. Some of Kina’s more recent questions, for example, include:

• “Why is there not adobo in this rice?”

• “Why is there not light for my eyes in the doctor kit?”

• and the classic, “Why are clams spicy?”

Other questions are slightly more probing:

There is no person on earth whom Kina idolizes more than her pediatrician, Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes. Whenever we play “checkup” (which is all the time) Kina immediately identifies herself as “Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes”. If you mistakenly address her as “Doctor Desgrottes”, she will promptly correct you; it is “Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes”. Kina’s hands on the side of your face. Eyes front. Doctor. Stephanie. Desgrottes.

One of our longstanding (and most frequently-requested) bedtime stories is “Baby Rainbow Unicorn Meets Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes”, in which our protagonist visits the pediatrician. There is a scene in the waiting room, a summoning by the receptionist, some niceties with the nurse, and an extended slapstick bout of confusion over where to sit with the good Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes. This story is inspired by Kina’s actual behavior when she was a baby, in which she would sit literally anywhere but on the examination table. Guess who sits right on the exam table now? Hint: She is a big girl.

Yesterday, Kina painted a picture for Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes in honor of her annual well visit—a portrait of her pediatrician in blue, standing in front a giant mountain. At the top of the page, with guidance, she wrote DR STEEPHANIIE, before giving up for lack of space. She is allowed to do this, because she and Doctor Stephanie Desgrottes are on a professional title and first name basis.

I’m not sure what to say, in the context of this newsletter, to you, today. Ever since I woke up this morning, I’ve been spooked by normalcy—the normalcy of a day following a literal armed insurrection, a takeover of the halls of the Capitol by white supremacist groups incited by the current President of the United States, and a quasi-Constitutional debate over the admissibility of electoral votes to a purely ministerial Congress. Those debates only glancingly referenced a brief and failed coup attempt, a slight awkwardness that also characterized my totally normal meetings at my totally normal job today. What does normal feel like on the day after a coup? I drew a newspaper for my pre-literate child and tried to figure out what the headline should be, is what it feels like.

Last night, with dinner on the table and the tear gas in DC still lingering in the Capitol rotunda, Kina was crying. Laurea had made a delicious dinner of chicken and mushrooms in lettuce cups—a great distraction for cook and diners alike—and Kina’s lettuce was falling apart, to her evident dismay. I sat there watching the tears flow down her cheeks as my phone buzzed on the windowsill next to me, knowing that there was a lot to be sad about, in various chicken- and non-chicken-related areas, in the world. How much was our fear on her mind? Would she have burst into tears over a messy taco had democracy not been falling apart?

There are times when Kina’s sadness is indistinguishable from our own, but her sadness and mine are often at least distantly related. Often, I’m blue because she’s blue, or vice versa. At other times, we’re sad for different reasons and the whole house becomes a confusing maelstrom of rage and grief. It’s like that in marriage, too, but a kid can’t yet reason that somebody needs to step back from the brink if you want the bad vibes to go away. This means that you find yourself, as a parent, accepting that the only way to de-escalate is to let your petulant four-year-old weep over a floppy piece of lettuce while you take a deep breath and smile as the fascists take a stroll. It is surreal.