Meet George Jetson

Sunday was a “stick around the house” day. We had a new nurse on and I have to be backup for all the procedures, meds etc. I puttered around the whole day rearranging the piles of papers in my dining room/office.

A strange noise was coming from my computer. I feared the worst. My computer crashes a lot and I’ve never completely trusted it. I approached with some caution. But no! It wasn’t crashing. I was receiving my first ever SKYPE call. It was Emily, our friend and Maggie’s former teacher, who moved to Warsaw Poland to teach in an international school.

The Europeans on this list will laugh at my fascination with this technology. Apparently, everyone uses Skype in Europe. Well, it was new to me. For those of you who don’t know (and I hope I’m not the last) Skype is a computer to computer “telephone” service. You download the program for free and calls from one computer to another are free. Since Emily also has a camera on her end. We could see her while she was talking. Very George Jetson!

I brought Maggie over to the computer and she was BEYOND excited to see Emily. She kept waving and waving. I had to tell Maggie that Emily could not see us because we don’t have a camera. Maggie used her communication device a little bit to talk to Emily, but Maggie was so confused about what was going on, she sort of froze. Because of her trach Maggie doesn’t have a “voice” of her own, but she managed to get out some heavy breathing sounds that Emily could hear. When Emily responded, Maggie would start waving again.

This week I am buying a webcam. Next time Maggie can see Emily and they can wave at each other. I may bey a few of those webcams. Maggie can use SKYPE to call her brothers who are away at college. She would love to see them and visa versa. The boys would get the additional bonus of seeing their mother regularly. I’m sure that will be a selling point.