Not Feeling So Super Bowl....

I have been a football fan as long as I can remember. No, really. I have written before about the fact that one of my earliest memories is of me sitting in front of a (black and white) television, watching a football game in our single-wide trailer in the trailer park, with the encyclopedia open to the "football" entry because I wanted to understand the signals the referee was giving. This was clearly in the days before the referee wore a microphone, we didn't have a color television, and I'm pretty sure instant replay was either not invented yet or was used only sparingly. (In this digital age, that information is only a click away, but I'm not interested enough to go look it up. Besides, the Super Bowl just kicked off, and that statement is going to negate the title and most of the rest of this post.)

There were many years in which I saved one of my personal days just so I could take the Monday off after the Super Bowl. Admittedly, some years I was afraid I would be feeling ... under the weather, as it were ... the day after the Big Game. Other years I just wanted to stay up and watch the whole thing without having to worry about how being up past my bedtime would make me feel the next morning. With or without the assistance of adult beverages.

In a previous wifetime I actually threw a Super Bowl party, making a desperate attempt to prove my worthiness (to someone who turned out to be wholly unworthy) by inviting my ex's buddies over to watch the game. I cleaned, I prepared, I hostessed.

After Hubby and I married, we attended a few Super Bowl parties, usually at the club where we used to go to Happy Hour on Friday afternoons. (Remind me sometime to tell you what my yearbook staff thought I was referring to when I mentioned Happy Hour.) We rarely stayed for the whole game, of course, because Hubby has always gone to bed early, and we both had to get up early on Monday to go to work. (I think I was supposed to live on the West Coast, where the Super Bowl and most other football games come on at a decent hour.)

This year I'm not really into the Super Bowl. I have several NFL teams I enjoy watching and pulling for. I like the Bears, the Broncos, the Lions, the hometown Falcons of course, the Steelers, the Dolphins (I've pulled them since way before their perfect 17-0 season in 1972), the Bengals, the Cowboys (based upon the fact that I lived just outside Dallas with Frogger Blogger for a grand total of 5 months when I was in college), the Vikings. There are others I find tolerable as well. You will notice that none of the teams of which I consider myself a fan are either of the two teams appearing in this year's Super Bowl. (Admittedly, I'm more likely to consider myself a "fan" of a team if one of its major players played his college ball at UGA. Full disclosure.)

Like a majority of Americans, however, I will watch (at least until halftime) just for the commercials. We've already seen a couple that got a chuckle out of Hubby, although he wasn't impressed with the Pepsi commercial with Elton John that has already aired in the first quarter. His comment: "They paid 7 million dollars for THAT? And they can only pay me $11.00 an hour?"

Couldn't That Be Considered Child Abuse?.......

Maybe it's just me, but I think people who take infants to football games are guilty of some form of child abuse.

And I think we can add baseball, basketball, hockey, gymnastics, lacrosse, volleyball, tennis, badminton, rodeo, square dancing, skeet shooting, ice skating, roller derby, and rugby to the list.

We went to watch the Falcons play today (they won - yay!), something Hubby and I had never done in our 12.5 years of marriage.

Our seats were at the top of the Georgia Dome. Seriously. There were two . . . count 'em, two . . . rows behind/above us.

When Atlanta scored and there were fireworks, we were looking DOWN on them.

The Chick-Fil-A people dropped little parachuting cows from the upper reaches of the Dome, I'm guessing with coupons for chicken sandwiches for the lucky fans who nabbed them. We didn't have a shot at one, since there would have had to be a serious UPDRAFT going on for the cows to reach us.

A couple came teetering up the steps to our section carrying a baby that must have been born in the parking lot right before they came in. I mean, it was TEENY. It was not in a carrier, nor did I see evidence of one. The dad was carrying this baby in one arm and holding onto the railing for dear life with the other hand.

Another mom came huffing up the stairs wearing one of those baby carriers in front, where the kid is facing her with his legs splayed out to each side because she wasn't a small woman. That kid is going to need hip replacement surgery before he's two years old. Or maybe he'll just be an excellent cowboy.

Come on, people.

How much enjoyment is there for an infant at a football game? How much enjoyment is there for the PARENTS of those infants?

Aren't there risks involved? They sell alcohol at those places. Drunks abound (though not as many as there are at UGA games, where alcohol is NOT sold/allowed. Hmmmmmm), and the noise is considerable.

Really, why?

If they don't have grandparents nearby, perhaps they should pay for a sitter.

If they can't afford a baby-sitter, perhaps they shouldn't have shelled out the $55 per ticket for that particular stratospheric location.

If they can't stand to be away from the baby even for three hours, perhaps they should stay home and watch the game on television. TV coverage is excellent, and you get replays.

If they don't trust anyone else to keep the baby, what about the 30,000 or so STRANGERS they've plopped yon baby down in the middle of?

I'm just sayin'......