December 26th, 2009
Of all the moments that make up the journey of parenthood, watching our 3-month old daughter become a person is by far the most fascinating. It often looks like it is an exciting but traumatic experience for her, and watching it unfold has begun what I am sure will be a life-long struggle to find that elusive parenting balance between trying to make life easier for her vs. allowing her to experience and learn things for herself.
I remember the first time I left South Africa. I was in my early twenties, and I got on a plane to Australia to study there for two years. I had no idea what I was doing or how it would feel to be in another country. I also had no idea what jet lag was all about. The first night I went to bed at 4pm. Big mistake. I woke up at 2am, wide awake and hungrier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I got up to go hunting for food, and the KFC burger I found most likely saved my life that night.
I think of that experience often when I see Aralyn experiencing new things, because the look in her eyes reminds me of how I felt that night. The realization that the world is so much bigger than you ever imagined can be as frightening as it is exhilarating. And for Aralyn, every day is like a flight to a new country. From the smallest discovery that she is able to move her toes, to the overwhelming experience of being in an airport with all its noises and people, “overstimulation” in babies is no made-up thing you say when the crying doesn’t stop. It is very, very real.
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Posted in Family, Featured | Posted by Rian
December 22nd, 2009
When I was growing up, I was in the South African version of the Boy Scouts, called the Voortrekkers. A loose translation of that particular Afrikaans word is “Forward-pullers,” or “Those who pull things forward.” Yes, it’s a silly name. I also got out of it as soon as I was old enough to think for myself, but that’s a story for a different blog post.
I loved Voortrekkers, because it was all about being in the outdoors, learning how to tie knots, how to build a fire and pitch tents, survival skills, that kind of stuff. Also, there were girls. But there was one thing that made Voortrekkers very difficult. Our weekly group meeting was on Fridays from 5:30-7pm. And 7pm was MacGyver time.
Let met step back a second and tell you about TV in South Africa in the 1980s. We didn’t get a lot of quality shows from America, or from anywhere for that matter, so we made do with reruns of The Jerry Springer Show, and old seasons of Perfect Strangers and Full House. But Friday nights at 7pm was something completely different. Friday night was TV gold in South Africa. The night where the best action shows out of America were on: Airwolf, The A-Team, Riptide and yes, MacGyver. MacGyver was a family institution at our house. So every Friday evening at 7pm I would jump on my bike and ride the 6 and a half minutes home as fast as I possibly could so that I wouldn’t miss too much of an episode.
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Posted in Family | Posted by Rian
December 16th, 2009
There’s a famous quote by Guy Almes that I’m reminded of almost daily, because it describes me way too perfectly:
There are three kinds of death in this world. There’s heart death, there’s brain death, and there’s being off the network.
I read two articles yesterday that really brought the perils of this kind of information and network addiction home for me. The first is an article entitled iPhone users are delusional, consultants say. I didn’t even need to read the article to know that this describes me, but I went for it anyway. Here are some excerpts:
Many people I know are frightfully attached to their iPhones. They treat them as if they were a peculiar and exotic lover, one they can hardly believe they have managed to seduce. Apple has mugged millions of people with its beauty, dragged them off to a very dark cellar in some barren land, turned them into slightly bonkers Barbarellas, and then recruited them as soldiers for the cause. In reality, the iPhone is surrounded by a multitude of people, media, and companies that are happy to bend the truth to defend the product they have purchased from Apple.
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Posted in Social Media | Posted by Rian
November 28th, 2009
Becoming a parent is, in many ways, similar to the character Neo’s experience when he stepped out of The Matrix. You become aware of topics and arguments that have been going on for generations, but you just never noticed it before. Epidural or not? C-section, natural birth, or water birth? Cry it out, or console? And the list goes on and on. Our latest fork in the road was the all-important do we get our daughter vaccinated, or not?
The first book we read on the topic was Vaccine Safety Manual for Concerned Families and Health Practitioners: Guide to Immunization Risks and Protection. A better title might have been “Vaccinate your kids and they will die a horrible death, immediately.” It really is a frightening read in every sense of the word. We started reading the book a day before our daughter was scheduled for her first vaccination appointment, and it freaked us out so much that we immediately pushed out the appointment by 2 weeks, and wondered how we would ever be able to sleep without nightmares.
The next morning we took a deep breath, and started reading the other side of the story. We went through a bunch of sources, but the most balanced book we found on the topic, and the one we ended up using in our decision, is Dr. Sears’ The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child. The book provides a balanced view of the pros and cons of each vaccination, and instead of prescribing what to do, it gives reasons for why you might want to give, or not give, each vaccination.
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Posted in Family | Posted by Rian
November 26th, 2009
November has been one formidable month. No other way to describe it. Getting settled into my new job (which I love), learning how to be a dad (although I’m pretty sure you never stop learning how to do that), and of course, a crazy 9-day trip to South Africa for work.
It was great to be home, but doing a 70 hour roundtrip journey across a gazillion time zones in 9 days is not recommended. Turns out I’m not Superman… I think I also figured out what hell is going to be like. Here it is: In hell you will be in economy class on a full Boeing 747, flying around the world for all eternity. Or worse — just stuck on the tarmack, the captain coming on every 10 minutes to say that you’re “almost ready for take-off.”
But enough about that. The month has been one of the more exhausting in recent memory, but as I mentioned in my last post — this is the story Jess and I are writing for our lives right now, and we need to embrace it wholeheartedly. Sometimes you get thrown a fast ball though, a plot twist gets inserted into your story without your knowledge, and it ends of bothering you much more than it should. For me, this unnecessary fast ball is John Mayer’s new album, Battle Studies.
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Posted in Music | Posted by Rian
November 11th, 2009
So go unlock the door
And find what you are here for
Leave the great indoors
Leave the great indoors
I started this blog when I first moved to the US with only a backpack and my guitar almost 6 years ago, and I named it “Leave the great indoors” because these John Mayer lyrics resonated so well with that strange mix of bewilderment and excitement you feel when you start a new adventure that turns your life upside down (and makes you feel so ridiculously alive).
A lot has changed over the past 6 years as I got married to my lovely American wife and we got settled into day-to-day life. But unfortunately so much has stayed the same, and over the past year or so Jess and I have grown increasingly restless in our comfortable indoors. It is a testament to the success and brilliance of America just how easy it is to live here. Everything just, well, works. Sure, America is not without its problems, but let’s agree on one simple fact: it works.
Ironically, in that blessing that is the American Dream also lies the country’s biggest curse: the undeniable draw into all-consuming consumerism and complacency. You can end up defining yourself by things like how big your car is or how quickly you can get promoted at work — and let’s face it, there are more important things in life. It is this slow descent into just another branded life that brought Jess and I to a point where we finally made the decision we always knew we’d make at some point in our lives: moving back to South Africa.
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Posted in South Africa | Posted by Rian
October 24th, 2009
Aralyn is now just over 5 weeks old. And during a few rare moments of silence while she is sleeping on this beautiful Bay Area Saturday afternoon, I realize that I haven’t blogged in quite some time. I thought I would write so much more, but life, as it usually does, had other plans.
Aralyn is healthy, beautiful, sweet, and we love her to death. She also has colic. Which means that our lives have become very much like a Vegas casino in many ways. We never sleep, it is always daytime, and our victories with her are few and far between. I won’t lie and say that it’s been easy. I can’t pretend that we are happy campers when it’s 2am and she is in her fourth hour of inconsolable crying. But I am also amazed at how ridiculously much we love her.
You see, there is nothing wrong with her. She is strong, she eats well, she grows and poops just like she is supposed to. It’s just that her personality is, well, I guess you could say “spirited.” No one knows what causes colic, but there is universal agreement on two things: (1) it peaks around 6 weeks, and (2) it goes away completely by about 3 months.
So this means that we are about to enter the 6-week peak. It is amazing how our tolerance level for crying has gone up exponentially, and surviving on less than 3 hours sleep per night has just become part of everyday life, even if I still work full days every day up in San Francisco.
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Posted in Family | Posted by Rian
October 5th, 2009
Many of you know that I have developed quite a passion for vinyl records. There is so much to love about vinyl — the warm sound, the artwork and inserts, the patience it requires, etc. I should probably write an “I love vinyl” post at some point, but this isn’t it. This post is about a specific album I recently bought, and how it is really challenging me on so many levels.
When it comes to jazz music, it doesn’t get much better than Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” album. It is almost cliche to talk about it as the “quintessential jazz album,” but it really is. For some reason I’ve been holding out on getting the 200g vinyl re-issue of this amazing album, but this weekend I went ahead and bought it. Partly because of its greatness, and partly because I needed to introduce my 2-week old baby girl to jazz music, and I couldn’t think of a better album to do that with. And it sounds absolutely brilliant. Magical.
What makes this album so remarkable is how loose yet completely structured it sounds. Consider this from Bill Evans’s liner notes:
Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a “take.”
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Posted in Music | Posted by Rian
September 30th, 2009
Today is my last day of paternity leave, which means that two weeks have passed since the birth of our beautiful baby girl, Aralyn. I do believe someone is playing a trick on me, like that episode of The Office where they turn the clocks forward to make the boss think it’s 5.00 pm so that everyone can go home. Because surely it has not been two weeks since we brought her home from the hospital.
Speaking of hospitals, let me begin by saying this. Although we received excellent care at the Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara hospital, I did question their judgment when they told us we can go home with the baby. You mean to tell me we’re allowed to take a whole human being home with us, without anyone supervising us? Highly irresponsible of them, if you ask me. But I digress.
Speaking of digressing (and I’m allowed to do that since I didn’t sleep last night), here’s another observation. When you first tell people that you are about to have a baby, their initial reaction is always a wonderfully self-affirming excitement, followed by the universally agreed-upon “when are you due?” question. (Or, as one friend put it, “When did it happen?” None of your business when it happened, buddy!).
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Posted in Family, Featured | Posted by Rian
September 18th, 2009
Yesterday at 5:09pm the beautiful Aralyn Leigh Van Der Merwe said hi to the world with one magnificant scream. Aralyn means woman with song, and in her less than 24 hours on earth, she has already proven that she has the lungs to go along with the name (no, we did not get much sleep last night, and the prognosis appears to be very similar for tonight).
Aralyn is, quite simply, a rock star. She is alert and awake, eyes darting everywhere, and I kid you not, she seems to recognize us already. Not so much our voices, but she is so responsive to our touch. It is magical and terrifying and exhilirating.
I am still trying to wrap my mind around this miracle, but I will say that time came to a standstill for about 45 minutes this afternoon. Aralyn’s temperature was a litle low, so the nurse told me to warm her with my body heat (skin to skin contact). I think that was the moment I utterly and completely fell in love.
Lots more to come, but for now I will leave you with her beautiful profile:
Posted in Family | Posted by Rian
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