Today, after what feels like forever, Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find finally hosted a comic convention here in Charlotte. As excited as I was to get back in the world, I was just as eager to take Miles to the show a little bit over the weekend. Under normal circumstances, we’d have a couple chances a year to attend something like this, during which Miles does at least a little growing. But the last time Miles was able to come with me to a convention was pre-COVID, and he has grown a LOT since then. How would he react to something like this now?
I had done a bit of prep work during the week, telling Miles about the various things he might see at the “comic show.” I told him people would be dressed up as characters (and suggested he might even want to wear his Catboy costume again). On another occasion, he asked, “Will there be Paw Patrol there?” “You know? There might be Paw Patrol stuff there,” I answered.
As I should have expected, all of this swirled together in Miles’s head to create a set of expectations what would never be met. “Where’s the Paw Patrol?” Miles asked, genuinely looking for people dressed as his latest favorite characters (if not the actual dogs themselves). When told that they weren’t actually there, Miles asked if he could sit down for “the show.” “You said there was a show,” he insisted, referring to the term I had used interchangeably with “convention” all week. Strike two against Daddy.
Nevertheless, Miles found plenty to occupy his attention, often at the expense of my ability to look at literally anything on display. As I paused to eyeball an X-Men comic at a table, the vendor quickly said, “Hey, he’s…over at the Mystery Machine.”
I looked up to find Miles, looking at me with THAT grin, darting behind the famed van used by Scooby-Doo and Norville “Shaggy” Rogers to solve all manner of mysteries. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to purchase that comic.
And what was Miles’s favorite thing about the convention? When I asked him as we left, he didn’t think twice before saying, “The escalator.” In all fairness, this was one of his first encounters with an escalator, and it took him several hilarious tries to really master it (he fell on his butt repeatedly). Seeing him attempt to ride an escalator may have just been my favorite part of the day too!
The Perils (& Pride) of Paternity 