I used to love hosting my nieces and nephew when they would visit us from Rocky Mountain House years ago. Reconnecting with family is always good, and we enjoyed a lot of wintertime activities together - sledding, sleigh-riding, and a memorable Chines Lunar New Year in Chinatown on our way back from the Silver Skate festival one year. But my favourite thing was exposing them to bits of nerdy culture and other things they might encounter in their hometown.
A lot of boardgames got thrown their way when they were old enough, but a lot of geeky media too. Fenya and Glory were only too happy to screen the Lord of the Rings trilogy ad infinitum, but even before that I had made sure to screen as many episodes of the animated Justice League series as I could, eventually lending them the set so they could fill in all the gaps before visits.
So I was tickled pink when I got to meet Jenna and her husband Dustin's new baby Charlotte on New Year's Eve. Well, not really that new, she will be 6 months old pretty quickly here, buit this was the first meeting for most of us.
I was even happier when they brought Charlotte over to sit on my lap the next day in a very special outfit that apparently triggered some memories in Jenna when she saw it:
Charlotte is a happy, healthy, beautiful girl, and I can't believe how well parenthood has settled on her parents. Jenna and her mother Betty had apparently been quite eager to see my reaction to her snuggly hooded (or perhaps better to say cowled) onesie, and I guess my delight was pretty palpable.
But even better was Jenna talking about her fond memories of watching Justice League with me and her cousins as a child. I was always happy to answer questions about the backgrounds of the characters or even the characters in the background and could of course do so at length ("Oh Blue Devil? Yeah, he's pretty cool..."). I remember taking her and Mark to see the first Avengers movie back in 2012 when they offhandedly mentioned not having seen it yet.
Superheros are not only fun, they are also a simple and colourful mythology that lets you explore morality and, well, justice in a safe and entertaining way. It's a big part of why I was so keen on watching those JL adventures with my own daughters.
I'm glad those times made an impression on Jenna, and I hope there are opportunities to do the same with Charlotte at some point too.
And I am so grateful that my in-laws from the country not only tolerate my nerdity but celebrate it, like with these socks they gave me for Christmas:
Looking forward to being a nerdy great-uncle now too!
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