“It’s a Dunker!”

When we arrived at the beach at Jacob Riis yesterday at 10 AM, Kina was steadfastly opposed to putting her face even close to the water. This is no different from prior visits to the beach in the last few seasons—our notoriously beach-loving publisher will spend hours being battered by the most frigid of waves but draws the line at wet faces.

Coming off an adventurous day at McCarren Pool (see “Child Takes Leap of Faith” in yesterday’s edition), though, I was able to show her how Burlingame—my anthropomorphic talking fist—could take a quick breath and close his mouth before dipping under the water with a little splash. As she watched my fist jump and frolic in the Atlantic Ocean, Kina was ultimately sold; when the tide came in and the surf grew more adventurous, she took a deep gulp of air and dipped under a crashing wave with me. She emerged gleeful, reborn.

Two hours later, she was still begging me to go back in the water with her for “one more dunkie”, hooked on the adrenaline rush of subaquatic life for the first time. Laurea and I are now fully convinced that this child loves the beach more than both of us combined; we were at the beach for six hours, and Kina spent at least four of them in the water with one of us—and frequently fully-submerged with me. The Sea Parent strikes again, and he has the waterlogged ears to prove it.

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