The Daily Kina Is a Big Girl Now

Since I decided to write the big emotional piece yesterday, I figured I would use today’s newsletter as a collection of my—and your—favorite headlines in The Daily Kina this year. I took a moment to look back through all three hundred and sixty-five issues, watching the potty training unfold, seeing how we learned to work with Kina’s curly hair, appreciating the massive variation in pricing strategies (from random numbers to heroes to statements of refusal). I can’t possibly explain it all, and so, instead, I’ll just put a bunch of headlines here (linked, when there was a newsletter to accompany the headline), and follow it with a full documentation of the legendary Oakwul storyline. Enjoy.

My favorite thirty headlines of the last year

• “I Will Love Everybody Who Needs a Hug”

• “We Are Fake Adults”

• “Everything Is Useless For Everyone!”; Nihilist Makes Her Morning Rounds

• Toddler Plays Doctor; You Allergic to Veggie Sauce, Use Epi-Pen

• Toddler Demands Novelty

• It Is Going On a Napkin; You Say You Break a Egg

• Toe Stubbed; “Daddy Can You Buy a Fluffy Door?”

• Daddy Bakes a Different Cake

• “Ow, You Bingled My Eye”

• “Sometimes You Have a Problem and Sometimes You Don’t”

• Panda Deposed As Editor Following Nepotism Scandal

• Meow: Meow Meow Meow

• She Did It! Kid Poops in Potty Unbidden, Collects Treat [ed: this was the first major pivot point of The Daily Kina, obviously]

• Kid, Angry, Throws Stuff; With a Terrifying, Silent Vigor

• Naked Kid Leads Black Lives Matter Cheer From Window

• “Do You Have a Booboo, a Sickness, or a Sadness?”

• Witchy Vibes Intensify

• “What Do You Do During the Day and Night?” “During the day, with the sun, and during the night, with the moon?”

• On a Hot Day, a Story of Two Parks; How inequitable sprinkler access ruins summer

• “I Have a Frickin’ Booboo”; Trouble on the knee-knee; Daddy shouldn’t clean it

• “I Do Impressive Things To Scare People”

• “You Really Chunkin On That Mozzarella, Hot Stuff”

• Child Settles For Pudding

• Tough Ballerina Menaces Local Family; Pink tutu, black denim; she is real bad news

• The Opposite of Me Is You; Little Hegel over here

• “Mommy, Are You Doing a Happy Cry?” Her child will see a woman in the White House

• “If We Make Steak the Smoke Will Set Off the Smoke Detector and It Will Go Out and Fill Up the Neighborhood and We're Gonna Get In Trouble and We Will Have To Move Somewhere Else Where There's No Steak”; So let's not have steak I guess

• Kid Learns That The Daily Kina Has Readers; Publisher shocked to hear about subscribers, thought it was just for her

• “Okay I’m Done With All This Talking. Let’s Get This Over With.” Cut the chit-chat; kid is all business

• Simone Returns; Prodigal owl resurfaces after “long vacation”; she is surprisingly clean

Oakwul

For those of you who aren’t my friend on Instagram, where the Oakwul storyline first unfolded, pre-newsletter, this was probably the most dramatic turn of events in The Daily Kina. Kina had come home from seeing her friend Sloane one day and made a strange statement about “Oakwul”, which she asked me to draw at the top of the page one day. What follows here is a capture of every Oakwul headline in the history of The Daily Kina (including an illustration from the legendary Meow Meow issue).

Et, voila:

Thanks again to all of you for following along. I’m proud of us for making it through this year, and I’m proud of Kina for being such an amazing little girl. Let’s keep going.

dad