If it had happened at Walmart, I could have made People of Walmart.

But it didn’t happen in Walmart, it happened in JC Penney.

So many mistakes were made that if I could have a do-over, I’m not even sure which would be the most important to do-over first. Of course the situation would have been avoided entirely had I not attempted to shop for clothes without assistance, but in lieu of that, the next smartest thing would have been not to let the Burt Squirt out of his stroller so he could run amok in the fitting room while I tried on clothes. Smarter still would have been to check before undressing that I was in a fitting room that actually locked, or, at the very least, to make sure that the door latched shut properly so that the Burt Squirt couldn’t push it open and dart out into the Juniors department.

Which is precisely what happened.

While I was clad only in a pair of khaki shorts and a flesh-toned strapless bra, looking, at a glance, quite naked.

It was one of those moments in which you feel suspended in time as the world moves on around you. There I stood, in the wide open doorway of the fitting room, fully exposed to anyone who happened by, watching the Burt Squirt’s short, chubby legs increase the distance across which I would have to streak. He stumbled a little over the toe of his slightly too-long sandal as he looked back over his shoulder to mock me with the gap-toothed grin that should not have been at all adorable under the circumstance, while I stood there, ineffectively calling him to come back to me and wondering whether I was going to have to chase after him, barely clothed as I was, or if I could scramble into a shirt before I lost him in the racks of clothes or worse.

I took my chances and opted to get dressed first. I may be willing to be that mom, who attracts a number of head wags and eye rolls because shecan’t get her toddler to ride in his stroller without him pitching a shrieking temper tantrum, but I’m not quite ready to be that mom, who chases her toddler naked through JC Penney. I still have a shred of dignity left–

–the shred that makes me willing to blog about almost chasing my toddler naked through JC Penney.

As is customary on the first birthday, we let the Burt Squirt wreak havoc on a cupcake, mostly so we could take pictures of him with icing all over his face. He’s normally such a photogenically accommodating child, but he disappointed us by not getting so much as a smudge anywhere but on his hands. And he didn’t even taste his cupcake, which is really odd these days as he’s only too eager to stuff his face with whatever food you put on his high chair tray.

That’s right, the Burt Squirt is feeding himself–which means all that worrying I was doing about how I’d ever get him eating a variety of textured stage three baby foods was for nothing (as all worrying tends to be).

About two weeks ago he flat refused to eat his favorite puréed bananas, squash, and sweet potatoes and began gobbling up table food like he was afraid Mr. Burt and I were going to send our leftovers to starving kids in Africa. He’s not yet eating what we have at meals, but he has a fairly extensive menu of his own: bananas, whole grain toast, whole grain blueberry waffles, cheese, chicken, black beans, corn, peas, kidney beans, sweet potatoes, Annie’s Bunny Pasta with Yummy Cheese, whole wheat crackers, strawberries, brown rice, and whole wheat tortillas.

And talking of whole things, despite now having four teeth with which to chew, pretty much all of the Burt Squirt’s food comes out looking exactly like it did when it went in. Potty training is looking really good right now. Except that the Burt Squirt has never put up a fuss about having a dirty diaper, so that would probably be an exercise in poo-tility.

On the subject of fits, the Burt Squirt doesn’t exactly pitch temper tantrums (much), but he does know how to make himself pretty clear about what he wants. When he wants to go outside, he toddles over to the french door to the patio and pounds on it till you either take him out in the back yard or put him in his stroller to go to the park. If he wants you to read to him, he’ll go get one of his books and throw it at you. (Clearly I need to teach him that this is not the meaning of that idiom.) And if you don’t drop what you’re doing and get on the floor to read it to him immediately, he’ll follow you around with the book, flinging it at your feet, until you do. At some point this behavior will have to stop, but right now the novelty of it makes it endearing. (And as an English lit major, I can hardly discourage my child’s love of reading; after all, I carry around an e-book reader and an iPod in the belief that reading can and should take place at any given moment.)

Anyway, I’m sure speech will replace this cavemannish style of communication soon enough, as his jabbering now consists of just about every sound in the English language (plus some other interesting ones that make me wonder if he isn’t speaking Swahili). Though he has been known to sit with other babies and simply shriek back and forth at them, as was the case when his twin girlfriends Ava and Zoe were here for his birthday party.

Now that I’ve come full-circle back to the subject of the Burt Squirt’s birthday, I’ll make the obligatory remark about how hard it is to believe that my baby boy is a year old already, that it seems like not very long ago that I held him for the first time in the hospital. (Except that it seems like a very long time ago that I got a good night’s sleep!)

As I thought about this post, the lyrics to Seasons of Love from RENT kept going through my head: “How do you measure a year in the life?” With babies, it’s easy to fall into the habit of measuring growth in inches (somewhere around 10 since birth) and pounds (between 14.5 and 15 gained). Obviously those measurements aren’t the ones that matter (except to the Burt Squirt’s pediatrician), or I’d have more exact numbers. And contrary to what the baby books would lead us to believe, it’s not even the milestones that measure the first year (even though they do provide fodder for the mommy bloggers).

It’s the love–

–which, though not quantifiable, has undoubtedly grown.

More often than not these days, the Burt Squirt’s feet look like this, in need of a little TLC at bath time. Because, at eleven months old–that’s right, eleven months, which means invitations have been sent for the first birthday party–the Burt Squirt’s primary mode of locomotion is walking.

Actually, that’s not quite true. About the little dirty feet, not the walking. It’s wintertime, so most days, the Burt Squirt wears socks, the removal of which reveals lint, not dirt. Of course, soggy lint stuck between sweaty little toes isn’t exactly pleasant, but parenting is all about perspective: toe jam is less gross than poopy diapers. But wintertime in Texas means that in between freak cold snaps and snow storms, we get the occasional day of 80 degrees, which means barefoot walks in the grass at the Dallas Arboretum–yes, even for babies.

The Burt Squirt took his first steps at nine months, while on Skype with Mimi and Papa in Minnesota, and now is toddling quite proficiently, even if his swaying gait with his arms up for balance is a bit reminiscent of a baboon. A month ago we had to coax him to walk, but now he’d rather walk than crawl, and pretty much only crawls if he’s fallen down in the middle of a room without a piece of furniture or person on which to pull up. Because the boy put the foot in front of…the other foot and didn’t bother to learn how to stand himself up before he took of walking.

He has, however, figured out that banana puffs are a yummy snack, as well as a source of future blackmail great amusement for Mom and Dad, though we first endured a few false starts that resulted in the Burt Squirt being quite possibly the only baby ever to gag on–and, consequently, throw up–a food that’s designed to dissolve almost instantly in his mouth. I’m beginning to fear he’s inherited the hair-trigger gag reflex that makes it impossible for his mother to swallow pills, as all of the stage three baby foods that involve chunks and/or thick textures come right back up again. Technically we’re following the pediatrician’s advice to be eating stage three baby foods by now; the Burt Squirt gobbles up the stage three jars of apples, pears, bananas, strawberry bananas, squash, and sweet potatoes–in addition to stage two everything else.

The fact that he’s only got 2.5 teeth–we just felt his top left tooth cut through two days ago–probably plays a big role in the food issues, so I’m antsy for more to come in–unless they look like the banana puff teeth, in which case he can just go on slurping down purées for the rest of his life. (Come to think of it, this would save us a lot of money in the long term, in both the dentistry and tooth fairy departments.) At least I’d never be deprived of that gummy smile beaming up at me…

The Burt Squirt is still, very much, a mama’s boy. He can have all the toys he could want all around him, but he’ll abandon playing with them to be wherever I am. (If only he realized that the way to a mother’s heart is not to give her a heart attack by climbing two flights of stairs when she runs upstairs for all of thirty seconds to check the clothes in the dryer–that’ll teach me not to put up the baby gate.) Or maybe it’s just that the contents of the kitchen cupboards really are more interesting than all the baby stuff that’s placed so easily within his reach. I don’t claim to be gifted at math, but I think even the finest mathematical mind (especially when afflicted with Mommy Brain) would be hard-pressed to keep count of how many times a day I put the tupperware back in its cupboard. (For an added bonus, that once perpetually messy cupboard is now constantly organized; who needs a Smart Spin?) He’s also obsessed with the dishwasher, which, coupled with his continued love affair with the vacuum (though in all fairness, who wouldn’t love a Dyson?) gives me great hope that in a few years time, the Burt Squirt will willingly take over all housework so Mommy can get back to writing books.

But in the meantime, Mommy will happily settle for reading books–the Burt Squirt’s current favorite being B is for Bear (though I’m managing to find the time for books that don’t rhyme or have fuzzy teddy bear ears to pet). That bit of baby-lit was a gift from Uncle Greg and Aunt-to-Be Meaghan, who have relieved us of the responsibility of indoctrinating the Burt Squirt to grow up and become a Baylor Bear. Though they may have their work cut out for them, as Uncle Peter and Auntie Ashley seem to be determined that the Burt Squirt will be the youngest-ever player drafted to the Minnesota Vikings (who might have made it to the Super Bowl if Brett Favre had had the Burt Squirt to throw to). And the Burt Squirt does already like to play ball–even if his version looks more like a puppy playing fetch (complete with panting and his tongue sticking out…though that could also describe Michael Jordan). He also likes music, particularly playing Daddy’s guitar, which is kept on a stand in the office where he can toddle right up to it and strum away (usually with his fingers, but occasionally with tupperware bowls or toy firemen), or the piano, which is a little less accessible but makes a lot of great noise. Or maybe he’s going to be the next Gunther Gebel-Williams, as seems likely by the way he laughs in the face of Dorrie hissing at him, and how he got the hang of chasing her around playing with her with a cat toy after I showed him how.

It’s so much fun to see The Burt Squirt’s interests coming out a little more with every passing day, and Mr. Burt and I are excited to see where his talents and passions lie in years to come.

And speaking of years, where–No, I won’t finish that thought. I may have Mommy Brain, but I refuse to be reduced to a total Mommy Cliché. Instead I’ll just say I’d better get cracking planning the party to celebrate the first year!

Today, the Burt Squirt has lived outside me as long as he lived inside me. While my mind boggled with every BabyCenter newsletter tracking his development in utero, not a day goes by that I’m not just as surprised, delighted, and amazed by a new skill he masters.

A little less than three weeks ago, that skill was crawling. He started out awkwardly, not covering much ground in a good length of time. Within the space of a few days, he was crossing entire rooms and discovering the fun of a good game of chase, the chief objects of which are Dorrie and Mr. Burt’s and my office chairs. The incident of the Burt Squirt trapping the chagrined cat in the undignified location of her litter box didn’t make for good pictures, but we did get a video of the roller derby:

In addition to being fascinated with wheels (the Burt Squirt entertained himself for about two hours on a coffee shop floor last week–no, I’m not a germaphobe–pushing his umbrella stroller around), his other favorite form of entertainment, discovered after he began to crawl, is the spring doorstops. Loving the sound they make when he twangs them, he quickly figured out where each one in the house is located, as well as how to screw them off the baseboards and detach the rubber end caps.  Which means Mr. Burt and I must come up with a creative baby-proofing solution so as to avoid a trip to the emergency room by way of boingy thing. Not something we expected to be an issue, and it reminds us very much of the first night after we adopted Dorrie and she found a hidey-hole under the kitchen cupboards that we previously hadn’t known existed. It just goes to show: if you really want to know your house, get something small that moves on all fours.

Not that the Burt Squirt’s going to be a four-legged creature for long. This morning when I went into his room I didn’t find him lying on his back, staring longingly up at the plush jungle animals dangling teasingly from his mobile (which was the thing for the first seven months of his life), or up on hands and knees, reaching for them (which he’s done since he became a crawler), but standing up in his crib, clutching the rail, and perfecting the expression that shall henceforth be called the Burt Smirk (no doubt learned from Uncle Greg, of the infamous Greg Bond Smirk, with whom he spent his first Thanksgiving).

Like crawling, pulling up also happened without preamble. He’d barely tried pulling up on anything at all, when one day last week, Mr. Burt, kneeling beside the bathtub rinsing a garment the Burt Squirt had, erm, soiled, looked up to see the Burt Squirt, who’d been playing (with the boingy thing) in his bedroom) standing beside him, holding on to the edge of the bathtub. The next thing we knew, he was pulling up on the ottoman, a shelving unit with pull-out bins, the crib, the stairs (thus far unsuccessfully, thank goodness, as we’ve only installed a gate at the top and not the bottom).

We actually worried that pulling up would prove a little out of reach–literally–as our furniture is large scale for vertically challenged people. The worry was needless, as the Burt Squirt’s had an upward growth spurt, prompting Grandmommy to give him his Christmas presents early in the hope that he wouldn’t outgrow them before he got to wear them. Once again we’re between doctor’s appointments so I don’t know his exact height and weight, but I think he’s around 22 pounds, a weight my baby book (which my mother wrote it more religiously than I do the Burt Squirt’s) shows I didn’t reach until I was about two years old. Regardless of what the scales and tape measures say, he fits most comfortably in 12-month clothes, provided that the pant legs are rolled up. Which seems an appropriate size for him, seeing as most people express surprise that he’s not at least a year old, especially since he got his first haircut.

Like another boy of some note, the Burt Squirt is growing not only upward and outward, but in intelligence, as well. When he was wearing the new boots featured to the left, a Starbucks barista exclaimed, “Look at his little shoeies!” and the Burt Squirt swung his leg up and looked at his suede-shod foot. As the barista took this as a sign of advanced language comprehension skills, I choose to do so, too. He has, after all, begun to say mama, and with meaning–though it would be nice if that meaning were less along the lines of “I’m unhappy with my current lot in life and need you to do something about it!” and more like “You’re more than a food source to  me, and I’m simply delighted to see you!” Just in the past day or two he’s picked up nana, which I must attribute to the increasing frequency at which our little crawler is hearing the word no-no (which was, incidentally, my first word).

I can’t believe I’m talking about first words and first haircuts and first times pulling up in cribs. How are nine months gone already? Nine months seemed a heckuva lot longer when Liam was inside me…People say it goes too fast, but personally I’m glad to have flown through the sleepless nights and days of endless nursing. This is the fun part. Now if only time would slow down a bit…

But I know it won’t–so since the Burt Squirt’s three-quarters of the way to a year old, I’d better start planning that first birthday party.

When I told my mother-in-law two months ago that the Burt Squirt would be crawling by the next time she visited, I didn’t think he’d take me quite at my word. My mother-in-law came today, and the Burt Squirt crawled for the first time yesterday.

Hopefully this isn’t an insight into his future study habits, but if it is, I blame his father. I always finished my school projects at least a week before their due dates, while Mr. Burt pulled all-nighters the eve before an exam. Who ever heard of a baby procrastinating?

Even if he doesn’t take after me, I’m still pleased as punch. In fact, I’m prouder of the Burt Squirt for crawling than I’ve ever been of anyone’s achievements, my own included, though I can’t pinpoint the difference here.

One mommy friend suggested it’s that our children are a part of us, so we have some stake in their accomplishments, or that our parenting skills are validated by our children meeting milestones, but those explanations seem a trifle self-centered. Then again, if I’m honest, I can’t deny that after eight and a half months–not counting the ten months of pregnancy–of having a baby need me for everything, I’m heaving sighs of relief that he’s gained independence. So my maternal pride isn’t as untainted as I’d like to believe. But independence, I think, is definitely at the center of whatever it is that tickles me so pink about the Burt Squirt crawling. It’s simply profound when your child does something all on his own.

Which was exactly how this milestone came about. Mr. Burt and I hadn’t been too hyper about the Burt Squirt being eight months old and not crawling. Occasionally we’d put him on his hands and knees to acclimate him to the idea, but we knew he’d crawl when he was ready. And when that moment arrived, I wasn’t even paying attention; I was puttering around the house, getting ready for my mother-in-law’s visit, and then glanced up to see the Burt Squirt up on all fours, lunging out with one pudgy arm as a chubby knee scootched forward, carrying himself across all of two inches of carpet before he flopped down on his belly. He tried again–and again–all day long, and by the end of the night was doing this:

So he looks a bit like a drunken sailor baby…but he’s mine. And he is remarkable to me.

And I think he’ll be walking well before we see my mother-in-law again. Because if I teach the Burt Squirt anything, it’ll be that there’s no value in procrastination.