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.

One of Kina’s perplexing habits is ceasing to speak when she really needs something. Under duress, or when she wants our attention, she will stomp around and stab her finger in our faces, spinning around to point wildly towards whatever it is she wants. When asked for detail, she will refuse, doubling down on her furious pantomime: pointing, waving, pulling our clothes, shaking her head, opening her mouth as if to take a bite of a huge snack. At the end, it is almost always a snack.

But even when it’s a snack, we have no idea which snack. We’ll offer melon (grunt, shake, point, point), crackers (grunt, point, point, open mouth), cookies (shake, shake, point, point, pull), and even show her the entire contents of our pantry (wiggle, grunt, point)—to no avail. Ultimately, if we get her close enough to the thing that she wants, she will simply pull us across the room, point directly at the thing she wants, point at her mouth, and wait for us to give it to her.

Unless we don’t, and It feels like I’ve written countless newsletters about what follows that.

I assume that not all our readers have lived with four-year-olds before, and so you might not be aware of the sheer variety of absurd games a four-year-old wants you—a full-grown adult—to play, nor the alarming frequency with which she wants you to play them. Before I even took a shower this morning, for example, Kina and I played:

• “Burlingame wakes up Baby Rainbow Cat on the airplane, and the flight attendant hits him away”

• “Baby Rainbow Cat goes in the fort, and you can’t get in”

• “Tea time with Panda”, and (as noted in our top headline)…

• “Whooooooooa I’m flying aroouuund caaaaatch meeeeeee!”

In this relatively new game, she twirls slowly through the house, evading every attempt I make to grab her, like an audibly-desperate mote of dust. It is almost meditative in its mock futility. As she floats past me, she rolls her eyes and lolls her head to the side, giggling uncontrollably. It is really fun to play this game.

A few months ago, Kina established a relationship with a local bodega guy who, whenever she stopped in, would give her little candy gifts. This is, as I see it, a major selling point for independently-owned convenience stores. It is also a testament to the sway Kina has over small businesses on our block. She is on her way to becoming the mayor of all local businesses within two city blocks. All politics is local.

Anyhow, the point: This bodega guy, a couple months back, gave her a little spinny toy helicopter thing that is full of pellet candy. We’re not talking Skittles here—this is a candy Happy Meal, a true high-end sugar experience. You have probably played with something like it before: The base contains a spring-loaded trigger, to which you attach a lightweight winged disc and twist five or six times; when you press the trigger, the disc launches off the base and spins wildly across the room, hitting your father in the forehead and knocking over precious heirlooms. (Because I have big-person-sized hands, I am the person who does both the twisty part and the clean-up part. )

As you can imagine, the candy really plays second fiddle to the danger machine, to the point where it’s not clear to me that Kina even knows there’s a treat inside. For weeks, we have played with this thing, sending her plastic disc rocketing into the ceiling, careening into the bookshelf, and—finally—crashing into a chair, where one of its blades cracked (again, this is Happy Meal plastic we’re talking about) and disabled any semblance of a guidance system. Now, whenever she launches the thing, it just flies off sideways and into the floor. Even for an admirer of chaos like Kina, this is not particularly fun. What to do?

She is feeling so much better today! Seems like the sea air did her some good, as the old leechin’ doctors might say. Perhaps more pragmatically, we propped the head of her bed up on a couple of dictionaries, and she slept like a champ. Gravity—great for a head full of snot. Wow, this update went sideways fast, didn’t it?

In any case, check out this rare publisher-drawn masthead! It’s been a long time; looks like our last executive masthead was drawn on July 28th, and I don’t think we have ever seen an actual self-portrait. Here you see Kina in all her resplendent glory, tip to toe—the things that look like tusks are legs (we trim her actual tusks frequently to prevent them from growing out like this) and she is wearing two hats like a total boss.

I miss the early days of the paper, when she participated more frequently in the printing of the paper, though I will note that it generally meant I was squeezed for column inches. Case in point: the April 18th edition (which preceded this newsletter), in which the masthead takes up half the sheet. This edition also gives you some insight into her art direction for the day (“I will make a big big line”) and is priced—as all editions were, for months—at three dollars.

It is an extremely 2020 twist of fate for Kina to have gotten sick during her epic birthday weekend. I’ll spare her (and you) the recitation of her evening tribulations, but it was, in short, a long night. In accordance with the contemporary practice, we postponed our plans for two last distanced one-on-one hangouts with her best friends Sloane and Futura, tootling off instead to the abandoned shoreline of Jacob Riis Park, where she took a long nap in her car seat as we gazed out at the ocean. Once Kina woke up, we dawdled around the park, walked in the sand, collected shells, and rode along with glee as Laurea (a deeply-apprehensive driver) finally took our car for a cruise around the vast and vacant Riis Park parking lot.

Just like the good old days, when, back in April, we drove our rental car to the same chilly beach, unsure how we’d make it through the year. I kept thinking about how doctors used to send tuberculosis patients to the beach, so that the salt air could cure their lungs. Kina, who had been cooped up in our apartment for weeks, ran so far we could barely make her out.

Just like the good old days, when Kina used to puke at the merest insinuation of a head cold. The first time it happened, I panicked, calling the pediatrician and Googling all the worst things. Eventually, I came to accept it as a reliable and benign reminder of Kina’s immune system. I learned to clean raspberries from her hair.

This will be a weekend full of birthday cheer and various scheduled outdoor and video-based celebrations of our esteemed publisher’s fourth year. Today, a lunch with Uncle Ken and the traditional family Zoom. Tomorrow, playground dates with her two best friends. As a child who loves to be adored, Kina is really relishing the over-the-topness of this particular birthday, and we love to see it.

The kind messages from readers of this publication have been well-received. You should know that our publisher welcomes each and every note—calculating the potential subscription revenue—and insists that I send you all her love and majesty.

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Our publisher turned four today—an occasion celebrated in this newsroom with four mylar balloons, a cake shaped like a unicorn, the opening of assorted gifts, a Zoom sing-along, and a day on the town. This is the first birthday that Kina has truly anticipated, which you might think is sad, given the circumstances of the year, but she has no real baseline to which she can compare the events of the day, and so it was basically a 10/10 for her. If you ask her, she has had no better birthday.

I almost hesitated to publish today’s paper. I remain slightly anxious that, by stating out loud what each of us is looking forward on the other side of this pandemic, we might inadvertently jinx the whole thing—rendering the vaccine useless or stimulating a particularly troublesome mutation in SARS-CoV-2. I’m a natural worrywart, but let’s throw caution to the wind, make the bet.

This moment is a strange one in this slowly unfolding catastrophe of a calendar year, hope in the midst of a rapidly-escalating nightmare. Over 3,000 people died of COVID-19 in the United States yesterday, more than died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Today will be no fewer. It’s an unfathomable tragedy, day after day, even more horrifying and inexcusable than the spring surge. And yet we know there’s an efficacious vaccine—three, in fact—in rapid production now. If we haven’t jinxed it, we have to believe that next summer will be different than this one. The months between now and then are going to be so dark.

The hair drama continues, as we learn to live with Kina’s mysterious curls. Today, when I was “giving her a haircut” in the living room, Kina protested as I combed out her tangles. Who wouldn’t? Straight-haired people often muse wistfully about curls, but combing through tangles is the worst, and I wasn’t even using a proper comb. (Playtime blowouts call for toy pasta forks.)

As Kina told me that she wanted to be a “straight-hair mommy”, her actual straight-haired Mommy was standing in the bedroom doorway, in awkward silence; this was delicate. “Mommies have all kinds of beautiful hair,” we told Kina. As I used a toy ladle to spritz her with some fake leave-in conditioner, I squeezed her shoulder in reassurance. We’ll come to terms with the curls.

On Instagram this morning, our friends were unusually vocal in their support. She’s not alone in her curliness, as it turns out. Lots of people have beautiful, frustrating curly hair, as it turns out—and not all of them are mommies. She’ll be in great company, knowing that all these people who love her are setting their hair in pincurls and sleeping on satin pillowcases every night. Maybe that’ll be her, too, but she can leave it all in tangles if she’d rather. Tangly mommies are perfect, too.

There are many things that Kina gets so excited about that she will literally kick me. Sometimes it is the promise that I will dress her up “like a popsicle” when she’s getting ready for bed. Occasionally it will be that she’s so thrilled to give me a checkup. Once, it was just the idea that she needed to get out of the tub. She’s got lots of excitement, this one, but very spotty unconscious control of her limbs, and so I often get injured in the delivery. I’ve been kicked in the shins, taken multiple skulls to the front teeth, and splashed with a bucket full of water (which, while not an injury, is significantly inconvenient)—all in the name of excitement.

At least now she apologizes for it, though she’s always still visibly thrilled when she makes her apology, which leads to the vaguest of feelings that she is not actually sorry. Typically I have words when somebody lies to my face about being sorry, but it’s hard to muster up the philosophical argument with a boisterous kid, and watching her smile does bring out the endorphins, so I grin, and I bear it. I have gotten used to all of this—both the injury and the insult—but it does eventually grow painful and exhausting, and I wonder when she’ll stop throwing her bones around involuntarily when she’s happy. When it happens, my body will heal, and I will surely appreciate my newly-subtle excited kid, but I will definitely miss it.

I will miss being kicked in the shins. Wild.

I admit that royal names can be weird, but Kina has watched Frozen before, and so she knows the main character’s full name. Still, as we role play this week, our queen is named Frozen Elsa, and she is no child. You get the banana offer in the dek because she’s been feeding us all toy food this week. Take the banana; it’s better than the hot dog.

Kid Dunks Basketball in Daddy’s Arms

I am not a sports dad, but I do enjoy those moments in which it seems possible that Kina’s hand-eye coordination is better than my own. We observe that possibility most often when Kina is chucking a stuffie at my head—she’s got quite the arm! Yesterday, though, Kina was able repeatedly to arc a ball into my outstretched arms from a distance of six feet, which seems like the kind of thing I might mention in a documentary in thirty years when my child is a four-time basketball world champion and has her own line of performance sneakers. Will she buy me a house? I must spoil her now.

I was a little surprised to discover in the archives that I have mentioned Burlingame here before, because he’s such a niche character in the family canon. It is simultaneously totally predictable that he’s come up, though, because Burlingame plays such a huge part in the family lore of this household. Part Greek chorus, part court jester, Burlingame is the guy who, when Laurea and I say we shouldn’t have cheeseburgers, suggests we decamp post haste to the nearest Shake Shack.* Burlingame asks about your family while you’re in the bathroom. Burlingame is all id, no ego, a fount of pure annoyance. For a while, he played second fiddle to newborn Kina, who did plenty of annoying on her own, but he made a resurgence when she was around two years old and needed a companion she could vibe with. Many of the games she plays now include Burlingame—including “Don’t Wake Baby Rainbow Cat”, whose rules go as follows:

1. Baby Rainbow Cat (Kina) is sleeping.

2. If she wakes up, she will yell and scream and bother the neighbors.

3. She will also say the words “sweet potato”.

4. Whenever Burlingame hears the words “sweet potato”, he lets out a huge fart.

5. Burlingame hates to fart.

6. He will also go to time out.

7. Therefore, Burlingame should probably not wake Baby Rainbow Cat.

8. But he really, really, really wants to wake Baby Rainbow Cat. He cannot help himself.

My job in this game is to prevent Burlingame from waking Baby Rainbow Cat, to remind him that it is in his best interests for her not to be disturbed. The game requires several rounds of negotiation with Burlingame, all while Baby Rainbow Cat rests quietly on her bed. At a certain point, Burlingame seems to get it, and stands down. Then, seconds later—and completely in line with his core motivations—he hops onto Baby Rainbow Unicorn’s head; she wakes, screams, and yells “SWEET POTATO”; he farts, is totally mortified; she grabs him and takes him to time out. We have played “Don’t Wake Baby Rainbow Cat” for what feels like several hours this weekend, which means I have negotiated with my own personified fist on a dozens of occasions, have made a similar number of loud farting noises, and have been to time out more times than I can count. He and Kina are truly kindred spirits.

Lately, when Kina blurts out some absurd phrase like today’s top headline, I play a little game called “She-Ra or Language Development”, in which I must either identify the episode of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power from which she purloined her statement or admit that her brain is expanding at an alarming rate.

“You know I’m a hugger!” — Scorpia, from She-Ra, “Sword, Part 2 (series finale)”

“Nice catching up with you!” — Kina, to adults on the playground, as her brain expands

“That’s your cue, hot stuff!” — Double Trouble, from She-Ra, “Perils of Peekablue”

“If we all trust each other, we are a team!” — Kina, to her family, as her brain expands

After considerable thought and research, I have determined that today’s top headline—something she imagines her uncle Ken saying in the wake of a devastating zinger—comes very much from her own rapidly-expanding brain. After a few weeks of incredibly clingy and irritable behavior, Kina has begun to speak in weirdly florid sentences, replete with in-jokes and asides. At the same time, her emotions and expressions are becoming more nuanced, which makes our conversations more captivating now than they’ve ever been. It all feels connected to the conversational turn-taking at dinner she introduced the other week, and Laurea and I find it hilarious, fascinating, and slightly anxiety-inducing. She’s not copying these sentences in full, but the phrases and idioms that comprise them in many cases come right from our mouths.

Some of you who have been following this publication since its early days may have started to wonder, as we approached the year’s end, “But surely she must have a birthday?!” First of all, thank you deeply for your concern. She appreciates it. Everybody wants a birthday—and indeed, Kina does have one. It is exactly one week from today, and she is super psyched.

It is hard on most years to have a winter birthday. Laurea, who suffers from a similar malady, has explained to me (a child of summer) its many downsides: not being able to have pool parties, being forgotten in the midst of the holidays, and a sharp decline in access to ice cream cakes. Add to that the social complications presented by our current year, compounded by Kina’s limited but significant experience with birthdays, and you can imagine what Laurea and I are dealing with as we consider how best to celebrate this momentous occasion with America’s most party-happy preschooler.

We will cover those events aggressively here in The Daily Kina, of course, but I think you all read this publication often enough to know we’re not having a massive surreptitious toddler breath exchange. There will be, in short, no party. On this, two out of the three residents of this house agree; the naysayer is out there at the local playgrounds inviting random small children to our celebration. “You should come to my birthday party!” she tells them. She has invented, out of the plans we’ve made for various non-party birthday parties, the actual party we wish we were having. As you can imagine, her invitation is generally well-received—and what kind of monster would shatter the illusion that maybe somebody is going to throw a good old-fashioned winter birthday party?

How proud Laurea was of her purchase of three beautiful ornaments from Bergdorf, including an everything bagel rendered in delicate colored glass—in honor of Kina, whose code name during the early days of Laurea’s pregnancy was The Everything Bagel. Upon the ornament’s arrival, she hung it carefully on the tree, so it would be visible from the door whenever we walked in. After work, I emerged from the bedroom to see Laurea gazing lovingly upon it. Was she thinking of the morning we took the pregnancy test? The trip later that day, still dazed, to Black Seed Bagel in the East Village, where we ate the everything bagel after which Kina was named? The ornaments her own mother gave her when she was a child? It was a touching scene. Simultaneously, an episode of She-Ra reached its conclusion on the TV, which always leaves Kina slightly unhinged. “Do you want to see the new ornament?” we asked. She groaned and contorted her body, clearly hungry for yet another thirty minutes of good versus evil, even as her mother picked her up to have a closer look. Still irritable, Kina reached out suddenly to grab the ornament. Knowing it was fragile, Laurea pulled back, just quickly enough to suggest that Kina was forbidden to touch it (and raise her ire) but not fast enough to get it out of reach. The three of us watched together as Kina hurled the ornament across the room, where it shattered into glassy crumbs. So much for the bagel. Time out.

For the rest of the night, Laurea and I debated whether or not we should replace the bagel. Does procuring a replacement undercut the consequences of Kina’s actions? Should we nonetheless buy a new one? It was ours, not hers—she doesn’t suffer for its absence. She doesn’t have any money that we can tax, so there’s no lesson to be learned about value. Most importantly: if we buy a new bagel, will she simply destroy that one, too, in a moment of rage? How do we raise a rational, empathetic, well-centered human being? What does the bagel stand for in this horrible year?

The everything bagel ornament, while sold out at Bergdorf’s, was still available this afternoon at Z Gallerie. It seems somebody has since purchased the last one. They will undoubtedly hang it on the highest bough.

And now, presented without commentary, this classic stunt issue, condensed from a nearly five-minute-long rant about Batman delivered over a bowl of mac and cheese last night. It is unclear how she knows anything at all about Batman. She also asked if he “goes whoosh like a rocket ship”. He doesn’t. He just gets angry.

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You may recall that Kina developed a rudimentary sense of time earlier in the pandemic, but it’s only recently that she’s started to be more reflective about events in the past. We take for granted the experience of memory in ourselves (I, for one, spend most of my waking hours ping-ponging between worrying about the future and regretting the past) but to watch another person develop an awareness that there are things that happened in the past, and to see them revisit those moments—that’s a nifty thing. It’s also a little surprising, the things she remembers, because we never expected her to remember them: a trip to our friend Eric’s house in San Francisco, where our friend Chuckie gave her a stuffed avocado (which she promptly named “Chuckie Avocado”); that one time she made rice porridge with her mother on a Mommy-Daughter day; a visit from her Lala last June. It’s fun to watch her marvel at things “from when I was a baby”, but it also makes me feel old to see my child being wistful. She was young once, and time passes. Chuckie Avocado, on the other hand, is forever.

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Kina and I have a strange nightly ritual of taking back kisses, which emerged naturally from a long period in which she would ask me to kiss her cheek and then push my face away before I could land it. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about these rituals, and in some ways I’d feel better if she just didn’t want a kiss at all, but kids are weird, and we give them what they need because we are biologically obligated to do so.

When taking back a kiss, it is important to make a loud chomping sound to fully scrub the kissed surface of its smooch juice. Then, after chewing twenty times, one must swallow it by saying “gump!” Finally, to close the ritual, you recite a secret incantation that I cannot for obvious and secret reasons write down here. Afterwards, the ritual is inverted—the kisser becomes the kissed, the taker-back is taken.

Last night, after elaborately reclaiming my kiss from Kina’s cheek, I allowed her to smooch me on the nose, but she refused to take it back, seemingly insulted by the suggestion that her kiss was unwelcome. “Keep it. Keep the kiss. It’s nice,” she said, in a vaguely threatening organized-crime way. She did exactly the same thing tonight after I put her to bed, which means we have entered into a new phase of affection acceptance that I expect to navigate clumsily. Should I also refuse to take back my own kisses? Should I no longer say “Ew I don’t like it”? I will only learn from my own mistakes in this kind of scenario; I know that, at least.

When I bought our car, I debated for three days whether or not to add a “premium package” that included a sunroof and a nicer sound system. In order to make a rational decision about this, I played out the pros and cons. In the “cons” column, I told myself, were the increased lease costs, the additional moving part in the roof of my car that would go unused at best and leaky at worst, and the clear delusion that I would listen to any music at all in this car that would benefit from a subwoofer. In the “pros” column was a beaten-down middle-aged former drum-and-bass DJ who just wanted to drive down the highway—any highway—with the sunroof open, blasting vintage Dillinja tunes.

The pros, reader, won the day, but the war has gone to the child. As long-time readers will recall, Kina is a devoted fan of two Disney franchises—Frozen and Moana—and is particularly fond of three songs from those movies: “Let It Go”, “Into the Unknown”, and “I Am Moana (Song of the Ancestors)”. On most days that we drive, the very first thing she asks for is one of those three songs, and she does not stop asking for those three songs until we park. My ten-speaker Bose sound system—the crown of my Premium Package—renders those three songs, and only those three songs, with exquisite clarity and depth. At the same time, any consolation afforded me by the sunroof is dashed, as Kina typically demands that I keep it sealed shut so that she can better hear her songs. As a compulsive music listener, I admire her conviction, but this is otherwise a deeply demoralizing situation.

And yet, yesterday, as we pulled out of the parking lot at the Japanese market in Sunset Park, Kina asked out of nowhere if Laurea would like to play a song, which rendered both of us temporarily speechless. Laurea, who has long since given up having any sort of agency over the music played in our car, had no idea where to start. Somewhere in her mind was a long list of songs she had hoped someday to play—perhaps when Kina was headed off to college—but she could not locate that list. Graciously, Kina offered that perhaps Mommy would like to play a song by Madonna; she knows her mother well. Laurea cued up “Express Yourself” and turned up the volume. As we drove down the Hamilton Avenue underpass, I opened up the sunroof, looking in the rear-view mirror to see both Kina and Laurea with their eyes closed, Kina’s fist raised. It was a Thanksgiving miracle. As the track faded out, I looked expectantly at Kina, who granted me permission to play my beloved Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack for the rest of the ride home. It wasn’t quite the bone-shaking midlife crisis music I had imagined, but I had the sunroof open and I wasn’t being forced to sing the role of Moana’s grandmother for a change.