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Simple Pleasures

Family Life278 words2 minutes to read

I’m watching my daughter sleep…

She’s sucking on her Binkey, cuddled up with her stuffed bunny, underneath her Winnie-the-Pooh blanket.

She’ll be two years old soon. I can hardly believe it. It was a little over two years ago when my then-girlfriend (current-wife) and I found out she was pregnant sitting in an examining room at Kaiser. She and I were in very different spots in our lives at that point… we weren’t even sure if we were going to stay together. She was into the rave scene, I was struggling with depression. She had just started working at Washington Mutual bank outside of San Francisco, I was working part-time at Trader Joe’s in Daly City.

… And then one day it was all different.

Money was extremely tight, so we left the two-bedroom, $2200/mo. apartment that we shared with six other people, and moved in with her parents. In time, we worked out our differences and got married. My wife started working her way up in the bank, while I became the General Manager of a pizza place I used to work at, and later went to Golden Rule Produce as the web/graphic/print/networking guy.

My daughter was born at the tail-end of 2001. My wife didn’t want to take the drugs because she didn’t want to be groggy through the football game. After 45 minutes of hard labor, this beautiful folded-up blue blob of child was born.

And now I watch her sleep.

Goodnight my little Boogie. Sleep tight, don’t let the bed-bugs bite. If they do, bite them back. And may Jesus and all of his angels watch over you while you sleep. I love you.

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.