My son is 8 months old. That's a bit young to explain how strange/funny/interesting/infuriating it is for him to grow up with a GeekMom. But there is another one who can. For I now realize I grew up with a geek mom myself, even if the word wasn't invented yet.

Let's prove it :

• She had (still has) whole shelves of Sci-Fi books.
• She read The Lord of the Rings during her pregnancy, hastily finishing it before I was born so I could know the end (she said).
• She bought Dungeons & Dragons' now mythical "red box" as soon as it was possible in France and game-mastered for my schoolmates and me (I was about 10).
• She designed special postcards for the time I was on holiday without her. She painted them herself and made them tell a story in episodes about a gnome and a fairy. She even added flaps, revealing the different rooms of the gnome's house, quite similar to a hobbit's hole. I remember the wardrobe revealed the gnome's six bonnets, one for every day of the week (he was wearing the seventh one). Sunday's bonnet had been cut out of a rainbow by the fairy, to thank the gnome for rescuing her.
• She invented a "fairy school" where she was the teacher and I was a fairy pupil, and designed many funny tasks, from collecting special plants and flowers to writing "magical" rhymes. She designed "official fairy diplomas" for the end of the sessions (usually the holidays).
• She wrote pirate messages signed by "Barbe Noire" (Blackbeard) and left them in our children's tent. I wasn't really scared (I wasn't easily scared as a child) and that was the beginning of a long running game about imagined pirates in the Alps. (Yes, I know, that's quite far from the sea. But we were going to the Alps for summer holidays.)
• She designed cool costumes for me, such as musketeer or blue-skinned alien girl Themis (original name for Yumi in the wonderful French-Japanese anime Ulysses 31).
• We told cooperative stories together, first about a gnome family inspired by The Secret Book of Gnomes, and when I grew older, about the Amberite family from Zelazny's famous series, imagining their life as children.
• As she was (still is) a math teacher, she used to tell me mathematics stories and rhymes such as poems to memorize Pi's decimals or the Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel.

She definitely qualifies as a "PaleoGeekMom!"

Now I enjoy sharing my own geek discoveries with her, lending her books or even reading them aloud to her.

How was it to grow up with her? It was great, especially for a single child as I am. Mother's Day seemed like a good time to say it to her.

I feel it even more strongly now that I'm a mom, too. I hope I'll be as warm and energetic and funny as she was with me.