Viviana McIntyre, a physics teacher who’s been at Mater Dei since 2016, is a mom of two kids with a third on the way. After finding out she was pregnant with her first child, she and her husband Johnnie made the decision to name their future children based on a superhero theme which was inspired by their mutual love for comic books.

“When we had found out that we were going to have a baby, we went on a walk that night and immediately we both knew that we wanted to have some kind of theme,” McIntyre said.

Their first born son is named Grayson after Richard Grayson, the original Robin from the Batman comics. Their daughter, just shy of one year old, is named Robin. Batman is one of McIntyre’s favorite comic books and she plans on naming her third child, if it’s a girl, Selena inspired by Catwoman who is also from the Batman universe.

“I love that he [Batman] doesn’t have any superpowers. He uses his intelligence, he’s a detective and builds gadgets… because I love Batman so much we chose a name from those comics first,” McIntyre said.

As parents, the couple hopes to choose positive names that their children can live up to. They deliberately chose superheroes that would be seen as role models and good forces of inspiration for their children.

“[Superheroes] fight for the good of the people,” McIntyre said.

The couple both enjoyed naming their children such creative names. Johnnie has been especially involved in the process and the two of them plan on having up to five children all with names from this theme.

“[Johnnie] loves it. He’s excited by it. He doesn’t want to share them with people, [but] it’s always a struggle because I want to tell everybody, [and] he doesn’t. He’s afraid people will steal the names,” McIntyre said.

Not everybody recognizes the theme in the names of the McIntyre children. McIntyre says that in order for others to see the correlation they would have to be really into comics like she and her husband are.

“People don’t necessarily think Batman when they [hear] Robin [because] it’s also a bird but if someone knows comics and they know Richard Grayson was once Robin, then they put it together,” McIntyre said.

Because her children are only one and two years old, McIntyre says that they haven’t yet realized the meaning and the thought process behind their names quite yet. She believes Grayson is on his way to understanding it and she reads Robin comics to him in the hope that he will make the connection soon.

In the couple’s opinion, the morals displayed by superheroes resonates with the McIntyre family. As a mother, she strives to embed these same morals into her children, hoping that they will become their own superheroes. She also has started to see a pattern in her children’s behaviors with her son being more cautious and thoughtful while her daughter is more headstrong and willing to jump right into things.

“My little girl Robin… she’s not going to be a sidekick. She will be a Batman. She is a leader,” McIntyre said.