“Can he sit up?” asked Lindsay, the photographer, at the start of our three month-old’s session at the JC Penney Portrait Studio.

“For a few seconds,” I replied, my husband quickly adding, his voice strident with paternal pride, “He did it for a whole minute the other day!”

“We’ll give it a try,” Lindsay said.

Try was the operative word. After a few unsuccessful attempts at snapping a picture before the Burt Squirt toppled over sideways (I think this had less to do with the Burt Squirt not having good balance than with his not wanting to sit up), she asked her assistant for the various tools of the photography trade that keep infants propped up for photo shoots.

She asked us, “How old is he?”

“Three months,” I answered, my husband chiming in again, “Four months on Thursday, actually!”

Lindsay stopped arranging the Burt Squirt and looked him over.  “Seriously?  He’s big.  I thought he must be five or six months.  That’s why I asked if he could sit up.”  She shook her head, chuckled to herself.  And repeated, “He’s big!”

“We get that a lot,” I said, because it was the truth.

A few weeks earlier, a Walmart cashier had clucked her tongue at the sleeping baby in the shopping cart.  “Oo-ee!  He’s juicy! How old that child?”

“Eleven weeks,” I replied, adding, as the cashier furrowed her brow in the effort to convert weeks to months, “Almost three months.”

“Three months!’ the cashier cried, then proceeded to grumble, “Ain’t no way that baby only three months.  Look like he five or six months.  Three months.  Heh.”

She looked up, suddenly, and her grumbles became a shout at a fellow cashier just closing up at the next wrap stand.  “How old you think this baby look?”

The second cashier shambled over and looked the Burt Squirt up and down.  “Five or six months.”

“He three months old!” said the first cashier.

Now it was me who was being looked up and down.  “What you feeding this child?  Cereal?”

“Nope,” I replied, grinning in amusement — and, I admit — a touch of pride, “just breastmilk.”

“Breastmilk.”  The cashier’s eyes dropped a few inches south of my chin.  “Heh.  I never did none of that breastmilk.  Hurt too much.”

I chuckled politely, because, well…what do you say to a Walmart cashier when she tells you about her breastfeeding pain?  She shifted her attention to the still-sleeping Burt Squirt.

“Three months old and he that big…I bet you don’t qualify for wick, do you?”

“Pardon?”  I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.

“Wick,” she repeated.

It wasn’t until she explained that she, too, had a baby who was big for his age, and that somehow that had kept them from qualifying for it, that I understood she was asking if I received WIC.

She proceeded to tell me how she’d gotten around the problem of having a big, healthy-looking baby by getting her sister to apply for WIC, while I contemplated how strange this conversation had become.  Never in my life had I been asked if I was on, or had applied for, government assistance.

Did I look poor?  I was wearing my bleach-stained yoga pants and an old t-shirt and had tied my hair up in a quick, sloppy bun.  Then again, you can buy that look at designer boutiques.

Maybe it was because, rather than buy expensive baby formula, I’d resorted to feeding my child from my own breasts.

Or maybe it was just because I was shopping at Walmart.  It was, after all, the very supermarket in which a woman stalked me, offering parenting advice to me and bits of a sticky bun to the Burt Squirt. But that’s another story for another day.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not the low low prices that keep me shopping at Walmart.  It’s the stories.  (It’s certainly not the way they randomly stop selling items that are a part of my regular shopping list.)

(Okay, I admit it.  The low low prices are the main reason I shop at Walmart.  But the stories are a bonus.)

I’d say that, as the mommy of a big baby, these stories are my new normal, except that I’ve got lots of strange stories about Walmart, going back long before I was the mommy of a big baby.

But then, doesn’t everyone?