When I tell people the Burt Squirt is crawling, they give me one of two responses: “Uh-oh, he’s going to be into everything now!” or “Dorrie better watch out!” In this post, we deal with the reality of the latter.

Weary of relocating every time the Mobile One comes near, Dorrie takes refuge in the box that recently delivered Mr. Burt’s new graphics card.

Alas, Dorrie is chagrined to discover that the Mobile One’s wits have developed along with his motor skills, and she has not outwitted him with her little “out of sight, out of mind” game.

Because when it comes to games, the Burt Squirt has mastered the one that goes:  “Where’s so-and-so? There she is!” In this case, Dorrie, unfortunately, is so-and-so.

Dorrie attempts to unnerve the Mobile One with her feline stare…

…but the Burt Squirt is not intimidated.

And so Dorrie wears the look of haughty annoyance that is her most frequent expression these days.

Just last Saturday, as Mr. Burt and I browsed IKEA for nothing in particular, I commented that I have a bit of a dish fetish. Mr. Burt replied that he knew, and had bought me a second set of dishes a few years back in the hope of satiating my appetite for tableware.

“Oh, it has,” I reassured him even as my thoughts turned to the the other dishes in our high kitchen cupboards which he’d clearly forgotten we owned owned: the retro diner set, the vintage Valentine set, the two sets of Christmas dishes, and the antique china.

Though in fairness, the former were Mr. Burt’s bachelor dishes, the latter was an heirloom wedding gift from my former piano teacher, and the Valentine dishes and one Christmas set were gifts from my mother-in-law. I only bought the other Christmas set because I saw it at the now defunct Linens N Things when we were doing our wedding registry and not only was it after-Christmas clearance but marked down to $4 as well because two salad plates were missing.

We’ll gloss over the part where I’ve never used any of them because they’re up in the high cupboards where I can’t reach without climbing so I, too, forget we have them.

But speaking of wedding registries, that’s the perfectly rational explanation for the two sets of every day dishes:

Way back in the fall of 2003, Mr. Burt and I registered for this pattern. We both loved them because they were kind of retro-modern, and I loved the fact that Mr. Burt loved a set of dishes. Or felt strongly enough about them to insist we put them on our registry. Alas, not long before our first wedding shower, all the stores where I registered stopped selling them. So we registered for another pattern, which I loved and Mr. Burt liked well enough, but less than the first set which, bizarrely, would pop into my head every now in then in the years after our wedding. Like when, a few weeks before my 26th birthday, I wrote my lead character of Songs for Piano and Voice drinking coffee from one of the mugs from that set of dishes; on a whim, looked on Pfaltzgraff’s website to see if they still sold the pattern. As it turned out, not only did they sell it, but they were selling it on clearance–$115 place settings for four for $23. So I convinced Mr. Burt to get me them for my birthday. So I had both sets of dishes, and, more importantly, no more wistful regrets about my unfulfilled wedding registry or guilt that Mr. Burt didn’t get the one thing on the registry that he really cared about. Which he didn’t really care that much about.

All that to say, given my history with cheap dishes, it should come as no surprise that Mr. Burt’s first words upon arriving home from work today were, “What’s with the silly new dishes in the kitchen?”

“Halloween clearance at Albertsons,” I replied, and it was all the explanation Mr. Burt needed.

Because holiday clearance (75% off! 87¢ big bowls, perfect for popcorn! 62¢ plates! 31¢ cups! And to think I’d only gone in to Albertsons for hot dog buns and chili!) is my other fetish.

Before I was LR Burt, I was LR Bond, and I made Mr. Burt laugh by suggesting, while we were out on a dinner date, that we go walk around the new Target Greatland that had just opened in Waco. He couldn’t see the fun in going to a store like Target when we didn’t need anything from there (or have the money to buy it).

“Just wait,” I told him. “Someday we’ll be old and married and so desperate to get away from our offspring that we’ll hire a babysitter and go to Target and think it’s the funnest thing we’ve done in a long time.”

“Nope, not gonna happen,” Mr. Burt insisted, and then took me to a local pizza joint where we jockeyed for position with birthday boys and girls at the skee ball machines.

Famous last words–even if they were accompanied by a confident derisive snort.

Actually, it turns out we were both sort of right: seven years later, we’re married and once, if not twice a month, are shooed out of the house by my mother, whose favorite way to spend a Saturday is babysitting the Burt Squirt (to the consternation of our neighbor Patty, who wants a baby fix badly enough to offer a babysitting rate that’s in direct competition with Grandmommy’s), and our idea of a good date is still skee ball at Dave and Buster’s.

The difference is that seven years ago, Mr. Burt wouldn’t have responded to my suggestion that, after dinner, we go walk around IKEA, by saying, “Sure. It’ll be good exercise.”

Next thing we know, we’ll be power-walking in the mall with our pants pulled up to our chests.

It’s amazing to me how many characteristics you’d think would be learned behaviors actually turn out to be hardwired into our genetic code.

Talkativeness, for example.

When I wasn’t quite three, my parents took me on a road trip up the Pacific Coastal Highway. They figured I’d sleep the whole way. It seemed a safe assumption to make, as most kids sleep in cars.

I, however, was not most kids.

Not only did I stay awake the entire drive through California, I talked the whole time, too, earning myself the nickname Chatty Cathy.

My mother also wished I would have a chatterbox child when I grew up. She has amazing power. (I’m terrified about the karmic retribution I’m in for after The Playground Incident.)

Though the Burt Squirt, of course, has never been called Chatty Cathy, he has been dubbed Jabberwocky. He’s nowhere near three, but any time he’s in the car, he’s awake and talking.

For that matter, any time he’s awake, he’s talking.

And as of 4:30 this morning, he doesn’t even have to be awake to be talking.

That would be the Bond coming out in him.

You see, the Burt Squirt comes from a long line of sleep-talkers. My shining moment occurred on a family vacation, when my father, up late reading, heard me say to my brother in the other bed, “Don’t tell Dad!” Dad once freaked my mom out by suddenly sitting up in bed one night and whacking the foot of the bed, saying, “It’s in the sheets!” Mom never was sure of what it was; maybe the same it my brother was talking about when Dad caught him sleep-walking one night and Greg mumbled something unintelligible before slugging Dad on the shoulder and saying, “Psst! Dad, pass it on.”

But it’s Mom who has, fittingly, the mother of all sleep-talking stories. It was Dad’s turn to get a little surprise the night Mom sat up in bed, grabbed his hand, brought it up to her lips, and planted a smacking kiss on it. When he asked her, bemused, what she was doing, Mom replied, “It’s a handshake–a friendly gesture!” and promptly lay back down.

I’d be more surprised if the Burt Squirt didn’t talk in his sleep. Though I thought we’d at least get through the baby monitor years before he followed in the family footsteps. Which was how I witnessed this milestone: Mr. Burt was putting the Burt Squirt back to bed after I nursed him at 4 AM, while I tried, unsuccessfully, to fall back asleep due to the stream of baby babble emitting from the monitor on my bedside table. I was feeling rather sorry for Mr. Burt, thinking he’d be in there a while if the Burt Squirt was that wide awake, when suddenly he was crawling back into bed with me, laughing.

“He was talking in his sleep!” he said, and I realized the baby monitor was silent.

“Aw, he said dada in his sleep while you were patting him,” I said, thinking of how my brother and I always had that uncanny ability to sleep-talk about or to my dad when he was awake to hear it.

The Burt Squirt’s sentience would have been more impressive had I not earlier that day witnessed him look directly at the cat and shriek, “Dada!”

In fact, dada seems to be the Burt Squirt’s word of choice for describing anything that makes him happy, as you can see in this video in which he is clearly not asleep.

…or is he?

Somebody at Albertsons realized that if a manufacturer is going to offer a coupon for $3.00 off the purchase of three products, selling that product for $1 apiece doesn’t turn a profit.

How do I know this?

Well…After I managed to snag nearly $60 worth of spices for $4 last Sunday, I might have gone back to Albertsons the following Friday and seen that the deal was still on and they had an Italian spice blend in this time and I still had a $3.00 off coupon and cleaned them out again without once swiping my credit card.

And, addicted to amused by hitting the jackpot not once, but twice, Mr. Burt and I might have driven to two other nearby Albertsons (because there was a cinnamon sugar blend we hadn’t managed to score yet), only to discover that there are other shoppers like us in town but no other Albertsons employees who like to watch customers treat the self-checkout like a slot machine; the other Carrollton store had sold clean out of the bargain spice grinders, and while the Lewisville location had plenty in stock, they’d rigged the self-checkouts to discourage the kind of extreme couponing required to pull off this deal.

And I might have made a third trip to my neighborhood Albertsons yesterday (not for free spices, I swear!) and discovered that they had followed suit.

It was a buzz kill sad day for frugality, but I take heart in the knowledge that I got $133.92 worth of spices for the low low price of $4.

Pepper, anyone?