I don’t have a lot to say about our newspaper today; the real news is just too much. I’m going to sit here and watch our nation’s Congress certify some electoral votes instead. I suspect all of you might benefit from today’s edition, about cozy babies, as a distraction.

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Records of Kina’s post-bedtime roaming suggest a near-total absence of enforcement of bedtime law by her parents, despite multiple edicts issued by the local Parental Sleep Board that forbid both repeated demands for post-story parental visitation and roaming to locations other than the potty. In one night alone, Kina was shown to have left the confines of her room on six separate occasions—of which only one was a sanctioned potty visit and in four cases was a direct and illegal incursion into the living room. The Daily Kina has uncovered multiple recordings of Daddy reciting the bedtime rules (which clearly prohibit any non-potty-based emergence from Kina’s bedroom before the light turns green at 6:24 AM) and videos of Kina mere minutes later being walked back to her bed. In no case was the prescribed penalty, a closing of the bedroom door and gate, levied; those same videos show, instead, that Daddy provided several hugs upon Kina’s return.

Sources close to the family say they’re baffled by the inconsistency and have privately put pressure on the parents to follow through on their promises, indicating that an unwillingness to do so might suggest to Kina that bedtime has no meaning at all. Less egregious transgressions, such as summoning Mommy to change her blanket “because [she] is sweaty”, are nonetheless even more frequent, which scientists probably think is even worse and might result in higher levels of delinquency and insomnia in adulthood. When contacted, actual scientists refused to comment, telling this paper to “chill out”, that Kina would “be fine”, and that it “is a pandemic, you have to remember.”

Some in the household have speculated that Kina’s increased and unsanctioned post-bedtime exits are related to Daddy’s recent acclaimed serial retelling of Paddington—a 2014 live-action animated comedy film starring, among others, Nicole Kidman. Forensic analysis of bedtime recordings has uncovered quiet demands from Kina to have her father release more of the story than scheduled on each of the last four evenings.

In any other year, I wouldn’t necessarily advocate for spending the last two weeks of the year at home, sans childcare, away from family, with no indoor spaces to escape to. This year, however, I can say it was quite nice. We watched a bunch of movies (including both Paddington and Paddington 2—only one of which features Nicole Kidman and has been adapted into a serial bedtime story), drove around the five boroughs, made lasagna, and visited countless playgrounds. We watched as Kina grew up a little bit, and I got to do a lot of writing. I already miss it, this staycation, and I know I’m lucky to have had it.

I promised myself I wouldn’t get the Sunday Scaries yesterday, knowing full well that a lot of people didn’t get to go back to work today—I don’t get to be picky about my first day back at work this year. Kina dealt well with her case of the Mondays, too, playing “I’m busy on my computer” with her mother but otherwise being pretty mature and cool with Hannah’s arrival. She is still wondering what leisurely wonders await us after she wakes up, but I think she’s starting to grasp that what we had at the end of December was special and unusual. What I don’t think she understands is just how unusual this holiday was, and what an outlier it has been for all of us. I’m so glad we had this time together, I enjoyed it immensely, I’ll remember it for the rest of my life, and I hope we never have to do it again. Does that make sense? Does anything these days?

She went to school this morning. It was Stuffie Club day, and she brought Cloisters the Unicorn. She was happy to see her teachers. The year begins.

We may have only a few weeks of data, but I think it’s safe to say that the conventional wisdom about four, as an age, being better than three has a lot going for it: more language, better conversation, fewer public tantrums, and increased self-reliance. All these things have made for an outstanding holiday interval, for the most part. The strange outlier is some vestigial maternal clinginess that seems to have ratcheted up in intensity over the last few days. Kina is, in her words, a little kleengy.

“Kleengy” made its first appearance in these pages way back in Easter, in reference to her then-dominant stuffie, Puppy, who had apparently spent all morning pestering Kina for love and attention. This complaint did not come out of nowhere, I imagine, but without more specific notes from the time, I can neither confirm nor deny that Laurea or I have ever used the language “Okaay okaaay whaaat” in the heat of the moment. Parenting is strange, in that one both craves a child’s attention and is annoyed by it; the sweet spot is slender, and so we ping-pong back and forth between sweeping our kid into our arms and looking for a quiet spot to hide.

Welcome, new readers! Today, I will be talking about french fries, the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, and Kina. Hold onto your butts.

French fries are in many ways the ideal food, living as they do in the cozy overlap of a Venn diagram representing fried foods and foods best consumed in piles. Though I don’t have any data to back it up, it seems uncontroversial to say that French fries are a universally-beloved food (blame Ray Kroc) and should be kept at the ready in any culturally-ambiguous situation—say, while sitting at the FDR Four Freedoms Memorial on New Year’s Day with a bucket of fried chicken from Jollibee (the Philippines’ most famous culinary export). French fries are delicious, but they’re horrible, and so we do our best to save them for special and strange occasions like an outdoor fried chicken lunch on the first day of the year at an austere memorial to Freedom. They are, in short, indulgences.

The Medieval Catholic Church had indulgences right, in a way; they were good for you. A few extra prayers, a nice little pilgrimage, or some money to rebuild St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome could all buy you a few indulgences, good to reduce your wait time in the afterlife. They were to be pursued at all costs—the more indulgences, the better. Of course, as with so many things, the Protestant Reformation rolled through and turned everything on its head. The Ninety-five Theses get nailed to the door of a church, cast a shadow of shame over the notion of indulgences, and now we have to be conflicted about fries. The Catholics may have invented guilt, but Martin Luther ruined indulgences.

I, for one, do not make resolutions for the new year, for two reasons:

1. I don’t have the kind of naïve faith in myself to suggest that I’m capable of fulfilling a truly ambitious resolution.

2. I do not deal well with the feeling that I have failed to deliver on a promise.

But Kina hasn’t yet developed the pungent mélange of neuroses that I have, and so the idea that you might make yourself a reliable promise on the first day of the year seems fun and achievable. I still have it in me, I think, to feel that sense of resolve—to dare yourself to be better. Every year, at the cusp of January, we take stock of the things we didn’t do and haven’t become and, rather than curl up into a ball, stand up and proclaim to ourselves that IN THIS NEXT YEAR, I SHALL EXERCISE, BE MORE FORTHRIGHT, OR EAT LESS RED MEAT. It’s a completely irrational form of personal reflection, but it’s charming.

I have started, probably later than I ought to have, to mark Kina’s height against the frame of the door between our living room and our kitchen. The two marks I’ve made so far, from August and December, are a little less than an inch apart, which seems like a lot to me—a person who has not grown at all since he was in college. To Kina, growth is just one of those things one does to pass the time, a ritual that frequently leads to new shoes and astonished adults. The other day, Laurea mused out loud whether Kina would end up taller than her someday; Kina later wondered whether Laurea would ever be taller than me, to which we replied that no, probably she wouldn’t*, and that people do eventually stop growing—a strange thing, when you think about it.

Do you remember when you stopped growing? Do you remember what it felt like to outgrow your own shoes? It feels boring now not to grow, in a way, like I’ve been cheated out of that constant state of change. Growing up felt so mundane—I left school on the last day of eighth grade and came back three months later and four inches taller. Old folks would remark on how much I’d grown, and it felt like a real accomplishment. Good job, hormones! What does it mean, to a child, that we stop growing? You spend your whole childhood and adolescence in a state of evolution, and then… pfft.

What does it mean that things stop? How much of the drama we face as a civilization stems from our deep-seated need to create struggle and change for ourselves once our bones have settled? Reflecting on the year you’ve just survived (and congratulations, by the way), imagine what might have been different if everybody on earth was awkwardly lanky and wearing oversized sweatshirts, too preoccupied with the machinations of their own bodies to formulate elaborate schemes and executive orders to subjugate entire swaths of humanity to one person’s will. I suppose that’s basically middle school, which I do not recall being much fun, but at least I knew that everybody was confused, achy, and had horrible complexions.

Some days, less is more.

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There have been days this year in which I’ve wondered just how worse than average my days have become. As a person with forty-six years of life behind him, there is a lot to compete with: the deaths of people close to me, various breakups, business failures, three years of middle school. Kina, by contrast, has had none of this, and so it’s all the more surprising that yesterday was the best day of Kina’s short life, since so many of her days are, by our standards, outstanding.

While the rest of us have been living in a maelstrom of existential crises, our intrepid publisher has, for the most part, been doted on hand and foot—in part because her parents need somebody in the house to have a reasonably good year, and she claims to be having a good year, as it turns out, which is comforting. We know there are exceptions: the foreshortened first year of school, the second year of school experienced largely over Zoom, a dearth of playdates, less time with grandparents. But here we are, in the last days of 2020; Kina has her first Christmas tree, not one but two karaoke microphones, a selection of warm blankets, a car in which to ride around and nap, and two parents who adore her. On most days, she sees a playground, and we are lucky to be able to feed her a quantity and variety of food that even a hearty adult would find gluttonous. Kina, by most measures, is having the time of her life.

In some ways, I’m jealous. Imagine if yesterday had been the best day of your life. I suppose her standards are still comparatively low; when you’re only about fifteen hundred days into your life, any given day stands a real chance. She’s had so few truly exceptional days, when I think about the great days I’ve had: falling in love, getting hitched, hearing the Tallis Scholars in Berlin while riding trains solo through Europe, taking a nacho tour with friends, holding Kina for the first time. It stands to reason that a good Caesar salad and an hour in a playground with a trampoline would fly up the ratings, day-in-the-life wise.

Yesterday we had a little British afternoon, bringing home cakes and scones for tea and a good screening of Paddington, which none of us had ever seen before. I will allow that this might be the pandemic speaking, but I thought it was hilarious. Kina clearly agreed, laughing at all the appropriate slapstick moments, but was most taken by the evil taxidermist, played by Australia’s hottest limited-miniseries housewife-in-a-nervous-breakdown, Nicole Kidman. Viewers of Big Little Lies will be pleased to hear that somebody else gets shoved in this one! No spoilers.

Anyhow, today’s front page features the complete list of questions Kina asked us after the movie about Nicole Kidman, her career, and the likelihood that she might be nicer in person. Much of this is reflective of her naïveté about acting, generally. When we explained to Kina that Nicole Kidman is an actor, she didn’t register that acting was something somebody did, rather than, say, somebody’s nationality; she insisted that Nicole Kidman had to have one of the two jobs that Kina is actually aware of—coworker or stylist. It occurred to me after I drew the paper this morning that Kina doesn’t really understand that actors play roles, has not yet seen any actor play a second role—let alone Nicole Kidman—and so will for the rest of her life think of her principally as the power-hungry taxidermist from Paddington. Imagine the beauty of that. One day, Kina will watch Eyes Wide Shut and say to herself, “I preferred her with the animated bear.” Me too!

In celebration of Kina’s inquisitive streak, I busted out one of my many new calligraphy pens for Nicole Kidman’s trademark flowing locks, which I believe I convincingly brought to bear on Kina’s portrait. It might be the weird peaky eyebrows that make it, actually. Very sneaky-looking. No wonder you can never really trust her in those miniseries.

If you have small children, a subscription to Apple’s bespoke TV subscription service (whose name I refuse to utter), and a willingness to sit with your child in front of your subscription to Apple’s bespoke TV subscription service, allow me to offer my strong recommendation for Wolfwalkers—an animated movie about a little girl who lives with her father, a hunter, in County Kilkenny under the tyrannical rule of Oliver Cromwell, who tries to quell a rebellion by purging the nearby forest of wolves. The film is chock full of magic, girl friendship, wolves, chase scenes, and catchy tunes. It is beautifully drawn in the flat style of a woodblock print, and I have watched it repeatedly with Kina without growing sick of it. While I am unsure if I, in particular, have “wolf energy”, Kina definitely does (and she knows it). The top portrait today is Kina as Mebh Óg MacTírre, one of the two protagonists of the film; her line, “Those town tasties are mine!” has become one of Kina’s most frequent exclamations in the last week.

Real-world Kina also has strong pug, scallion pancake, and llama energy. It’s been quite a weekend. She misses her teachers at Small World, and sends her love to all of them (and the two, in particular, who subscribe to this newsletter).

Kina has never been a particular fan of Mister Rogers, which is a slight blow for her father, who tries very hard to convey Fred Vibes in his day-to-day parenting. I am comforted somewhat, of course, by her love for Daniel Tiger, a subsidiary of Big Fred who delivers the same energy in a more approachable short and furry package. When we have put on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in the past, she’s demanded that we skip past all the human stuff until we get to the tattered puppets in a constitutional monarchy part—and even then, the clock is ticking; I’m not sure we’ve ever seen more than five minutes of an episode of Mister Rogers. So it comes as a bit of a mystery to me that Kina has become obsessed with figuring out what happened to Mister Rogers and, tangentially, what it means to have died.

She asked Laurea first, about our cats Gertie and Licorice. She never met Licorice, Laurea’s childhood cat, but we’ve been telling lots of stories about her lately (often delivered as bribes between bites of dinner). Kina can recall Gertie, who died nearly two years ago, only slightly; we sometimes look at pictures of the two of them together on my phone—Kina rolling on her back and holding her feet as an infant, while Gertie cleans herself on the couch beside her. Laurea bought two cat ornaments this year, each resembling one of our dear departed feline friends, and it must have lit something up in Kina’s brain.

“Where are Gertie and Licorice?” she asked Laurea the other day.

In case you were wondering, Kina woke up at the normal human hour of 6:25 this morning and hauled us out to the living room to gaze upon Santa’s bounty. She got a Baby Rainbow Cat and a silk cape. Mommy got some custom emojis and I got a pile of nice calligraphy pens, which I put to work on today’s issue. Kina had lots of questions about Santa—a public figure we have almost never mentioned in this house, and whose role in Christmas we have been ambivalent about discussing. We decided in the moment to roll with it, because you only get to believe in things until you don’t.

Today was an unexpectedly beautiful day. It was one of those days, as a parent, when you feel the outlines of your family being etched more deeply. We are good here, the three of us. At the same time, I finally understand my own parents better, and how much it must have meant for them to celebrate Christmas with us kids when we were all living out in middle of nowhere, far from my grandparents. Today felt like new rituals for us, hopeful and small. It was one of the best days of this entire year, and probably the best Christmas of my life. I cannot express how lucky we feel to be Kina’s parents, or how utterly, blissfully exhausted we are right now.

We will be together again.

I’ve lost track of which stories I’ve told you by now, so just tune me out if this sounds familiar.

When I was a kid, I was always very excited about Christmas; I would wake in the middle of the night, anxious to find presents under the tree where there had been none the night before. Every year until I was a teenager brought this yuletide-induced insomnia, but by far the most excited I’ve ever been about Christmas was the very first one I can remember, when I was Kina’s age. I recall bits and pieces of that night—waking in my bed in a silent house, tiptoeing out to the living room, seeing the presents laid out under the branches in the harlequin light of the tree, kneeling down next to a sled I’d never seen before (and that I knew was mine), and methodically tearing open every last present in the solitude of night. My parents, bleary-eyed, found me there and walked me back to my bed, letting me keep a glow-in-the-dark Superman watch (or was it Mickey Mouse?) which I stared at in wonder until I fell asleep. It was glorious.

This is the first Christmas we’ve ever celebrated as a small nuclear family, with our own tree, and so we’ve been really building up the hype this year. In light of that—and keeping my own personal history in mind—I’ve made a real point of hammering home to Kina in recent days that she should wait for us before she opens any presents this year, and she’s taken the matter under advisement. From time to time, I check in with her to see where she stands on the issue, and overall, she’s ambivalent, though in the last hour—as I put her to bed—she assured me that she’s capable of self-restraint. As a preventative measure, we let her open a present tonight that our neighbor gave her: a bag full of pink things that should keep Kina preoccupied for at least twenty minutes in the wee hours of the morning, if she wakes. I’ll likely wake in the middle of the night myself, either because I’ve heard stirring by the tree or because Kina’s newfound and specific excitement about Christmas is rekindling all the years of anticipation I felt for these mornings, and for tomorrow morning in particular.

The realization has come to us slowly that Kina does not like cookies: A molten chocolate chip cookie from Levain, returned to us after a single bite; Oreos stripped of their filling and left for the vultures; jammy thumbprint cookies, eviscerated and crumbled. On its face, this seems blasphemous—a child who doesn’t love cookies? Laurea and I spent the other night wrestling with this, and decided we needed to look for larger patterns. Take, if you will, four desserts: pie, cake, ice cream, and cookies. Without falling into the rabbit hole of specific pies or specific cookies, how would you rank them? Here’s where we landed:

Laurea:

1. Cake

2. Ice cream

3. Cookies

4. Pie

This morning, as Kina was mourning the absence of her beloved Pigeon Friend, I distracted her by pointing out a guy walking his dog, wearing a fleece top and gym shorts. This kind of behavior feels deeply un-New-York to me—a sort of showiness that is more at home in Maine (where my cousin Kirk is likely wearing shorts right now) or Wisconsin (where I understand it is a statutory obligation to wear shorts until mid-January) than on the streets of Brooklyn. In this house, we protect our knees from the chilly winds of winter, and we berate those who wear their hypothermia on their sleeves. I opened the window for Kina so that she could address him directly, and her voice rang out across the neighborhood as she hounded him off our block. Take those lake-effect knees back home and put some pants on, man. Even the pigeons are embarrassed for you.

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What is there to say about this one? If you go right now, you might still catch a remnant of the most reliable giant snowman in New York City, at the corner of Essex and Canal. A snowman for the ages—and I have no idea how they build him.

Kina was awed but ultimately only wanted to go on the swings across the street. Even the eighth wonder of the world can’t beat a day in the swings. Such is childhood.

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Kina does not like being stopped in traffic, which makes New York simultaneously the worst place for her to live and the absolute perfect place for her to live.

Worst: We leased a car just as the pandemic traffic reduction here made a sharp turnaround, rendering Delancey Street—barren in April—once again impassible. Even Laurea refuses to drive in New York City, and she’s relatively tolerant of red lights, but Kina didn’t sign up for this car thinking that it would from time to time sit idle. She finds this infuriating. Surely the suburbs must be better than this.

Best: She is growing up to be the most stereotypical New Yorker possible, calling out from the back seat for me to get a move on, demanding that the light be turned green for her, telling me to do something or get going. She does not suffer in silence, this kid, and stillness for her is suffering. In that, she is very naturally of this place.

Kina and I have struck a deal regarding intrusions into my home-office-slash-bedroom. Periodically, in the rare moment when I don’t have a video call, she’ll sneak in and we’ll take pictures of each other on my laptop. Otherwise, she knows that I’m busy and will tootle off to entertain herself in other ways. I feel like I’ve gotten off easier than other parents in that respect this year; there’s something about Weekday Kina that is relatively undemanding, and our agreement feels resilient and mutually-beneficial.

My gentle dismissal language, though, has started to crop up in her fake job pantomimes. She’ll sit at her computer—lately, a dictionary and her first-aid kit—and type away until I ask her what she’s doing, when she’ll turn to me and say patiently, “I’m a little busy doing things. Go find something else to do, okay buddy?” It feels very gentle and loving, and frankly is one of those turns of phrase that a four-year old so readily absorbs that I don’t mind having reflected back at me. It does not take much to imagine how much worse it could be.

I wonder if this kind of imaginary-world behavior that Kina loves to demonstrate will carry over in any way to her adulthood, imprinting itself on her psyche through play. She’s not all that patient—if I’m being honest—in her day job of Actual Child, but in as much as we tolerate her diminishing monstrousness as normal, we are optimistic. In the meantime, she’s modeling outstanding office etiquette. The other day, she emerged, gasping, from my bedroom and wheezed, “Oof I need to get some air!” Truly, my child.

We didn’t have much of a snowy winter last year, so yesterday was probably the first day in Kina’s life that she really got to play in the snow. The local schoolyard was unlocked, so Kina got to roll around in a rare pristine patch of the chilly stuff, grabbing up hunks of crusty snow in her arms and cradling them like little babies. There’s not an inanimate object on earth that Kina won’t somehow adopt. Laurea managed to convince her to leave all that snow at the schoolyard, which saved us from having to deal with the melting issues that plagued the protagonist of The Snowy Day. I have always found that melted snowball scene uncommonly sad, for what it’s worth, and it comes far too close to the end of the book, which I think should call into question its Caldecott Medal—but I digress. Kina loved the snow, which of course makes her parents happy.

At the same time, our expectations for how much she would love building snowmen came up short. Kina was neither patient enough to roll a snowman nor trusting enough of their carrot noses to build one of her own; we may have to wait a bit before she’s a snowman girl. I feel like she hasn’t picked up on the snowman from Frozen; Olaf, I think? Maybe it’s Olaf she’s skeptical of, actually. I don’t know anything about that snowman, but I don’t really like any reanimated snowmen—even Frosty, for that matter. Actually, I think I don’t like snowmen. She gets it from me.

The snow, one day later, is gross now, as is often the case in New York. I’m glad we got her out there before it all turned gray. We’ll teach her to moan about slush soon enough, but she had a great run while it was good.