SuperBowl day!

The city is posed and waiting for the game to begin. Hopefully the 49ers win and hopefully, no one goes crazy in the streets afterwards. One of those two things is very likely.

We are all set here. My mom, my brother Pat, and his wife Julie are coming over as is my friend Lori and her daughter Lily. That's perfect. A few people, but not so many that we can't concentrate on the game (and the commercials).

We have always been 49er fans, though I fully acknowledge that I am more into baseball than football. I was a die hard Niner fan when I was young. In fact my brother Pat and I went to the game where Dwight Clark made the catch. We didn't have tickets, but decided we HAD to be there and bought tickets off some kid that got us into the stadium, but didn't have a seat attached to them. We wandered for a while and finally sat down on about the five yard line, in a perfect position to see THE CATCH.

After I had kids I found it harder and harder to watch the hard hits. Tim played football for one year in high school and I sat in the stands with my eyes covered the entire time. Now that the boys are grown and won't be getting killed on the football field, I am enjoying the games more.

Of course the boys were always fans. Here's Eddie and Steve when Eddie was six months old.

When Eddie was in pre school, he had a jacket just like one that Joe Montana wore on a commercial. We pointed that out to him and from that day forward it was his "Jontana" jacket.  In the early to mid 90's, there was a defensive back for the 49ers who was also named Tim McDonald. Three year old Tim would introduce himself and tell people, "I'm Tim McDonald, but I'm not the one who plays for the 49ers."

 Oh, thanks for clearing that up, kid.

Maggie is ambivalent about the whole thing, though she will greatly enjoy the company and the revelry. When everyone cheers or gasps, she thinks it hilarious.  So she wins either way.

GO Niners!

Say what?

Maggie’s communication device is an amazing thing. It is a dynavox DV4 and has capability for unlimited speech. Maggie’s abilities fall far shorter than the dynavox, but it gives her unlimited opportunity to expand her communication. The picture shows a page of forty choices, many of which lead to other pages with 40 choices. Soon Maggie will graduate to a page with 60 choices.

Maggie and all her classmates use communication devices. They “talk” to each other all day and that is the best practice. Maggie can ask for meals, tell us when she needs changing, call mom, dad her brothers, her teachers and all of her nurses by name. Every week she shows some new level of understanding and it is quite amazing. She also loves to tell jokes using the device. She starts laughing before the questions are out and slams the button to get the answer out there as quickly as possible.

The “voice” on the Dynavox is a flat computer voice. It speaks exactly what is written. Stray punctuation or typos are spoken. It definitely makes you cock your head when you hear the word “comma” spoken mid sentence. Also spelling or uncommon words or names must be phonetic. Maggie has classmates named Grimaldy, Cui-ping and Tyre. These are not recognized by the dynavox and I have to spell those Grimaawldee, chow peng, and Tie ray for correct pronunciation.

Every school day Maggie shares her “news” from home and brings back news from her school day. This, of course, requires programming time. It is not difficult at all (though I am still the only one in the house who knows how to do it), but it takes about 10-15 minutes. I need some of that time to come up with something clever. Midweek news is the hardest because there is generally nothing to report. I never let the facts, or lack thereof, get in the way of a story, though, so I can generally come up with something. News on Monday and Friday is easy because we can talk about the past or upcoming weekend.

This morning Maggie’s news was about the super bowl. She is informing her classmates that we are rooting for the New Orleans Saints (all due respect to Colts fans, but it is just time). You really have not lived until you hear a computerized voice with zero inflection say:

WHO DAT!