Child Settles For Pudding

Big food day here at The Daily Kina, leading with an investigation into the extremely high-frequency consumption of dessert in our newsroom. We’re going feral here—Laurea is working some late nights in support of a long remote festival—which means that I’m leaning hard into delivery and dessert. We’ve done a substantial run on ice cream this week, but last night’s pasta delivery didn’t offer any frozen confections, and I am in any case a sucker for pudding (or, as they say in Italy, budino) as a lazy stand-in for soft serve. Kina was skeptical but ultimately won over by its quintessential dessert vibes. What I did not account for, one hour before her bedtime, was the effect of highly-concentrated sugar and dark chocolate on her energy levels. The nightly reading of Go, Dog, Go! was extra ridiculous (“Daddy, look! The dog has ice cream! Ha! Ha! Haaaaaaaaa!”) and getting her into bed was like herding crickets. All of which is to say: I spent twenty minutes tonight explaining to her why dessert was not an every-night thing but a special treat, which brings me to our next headline:

Seaweed Declared Snack, Not Special Treat

I’m not sure we’ve really talked about “special treat” here, but the term dates back to the earliest days of the pandemic, when we finally succumbed to using candy to bribe our child to do things like poop in the potty, participate in video calls with her grandparents, and chill for, like, three minutes. From the outset, we’ve referred to any sort of candy or gummy as a “special treat”. This was a crucial error, because without the broader context of what “special” means, she believes that this is just what candy is called. Accordingly, we are now subject multiple times a day to long wheedling litanies of “Can I have a special treat? Can I have a special treat? Can I have a special treeeeeeeat?” until we cough up the gummy. With that in mind, we’re constantly trying to swap in something moderately healthy in response, which leads to semantic debates about whether or not perfect in-season strawberries are special treats. This brings us to seaweed, the rare actually-bourgeois-Brooklyn thing Kina does ask for, which I bought in various preparations at a Japanese supermarket two weekends ago. She asked for some this morning as she watched Winnie and Wilbur, seemingly content for a while, until she declared that she needed a special treat. When I told her that it seemed like she had a perfectly good treat in hand, she patiently explained to me that seaweed was a snack with no particular value as a special treat—which makes sense if you adopt her worldview (as we all probably should) that we need frequent special treats to make the day bearable. You deserve a special treat. Kina deserves a special treat. Please have a treat.

Today, it has been four months since our first edition. I put all the originals in museum boxes this afternoon so that they wouldn’t get ripped or damp or lost. When I finish with all of this, I’ll get them all photographed properly (on something nicer than the black trunk next to our bed). It was a pleasure to hold each of them today—a record of what is happening to us, to her. Glad you can be privy to it, too.

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