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.

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?

Those parents.

You know the ones I mean: the parents who use their children to get free stuff for themselves. And while Mr. Burt and I will stoop to almost any level to get a good deal, we prefer to leave the Burt Squirt out of it.

So we didn’t take him trick-or-treating. To do so would have made us some of those parents. I mean, it would have been pretty darn obvious from the distinct lack of teeth in the Burt Squirt’s gummy smile that we were only collecting candy for ourselves.

(Or would it have been? One of our neighborhood Wells Fargo tellers keeps offering him lollipops. So far, I have resisted the urge to accept a lolly to pop myself…)

It’s a short and slippery slope from a Kit-Kat to Kate Gosselin.

As you know, we got the Burt Squirt a costume, so we did take him to a few doors. Which still might have been a teensy bit like something those parents would do, but we convinced ourselves our neighbors would be upset with us if we didn‘t give them an opportunity to see the Burt Squirt dressed up like a dragon. Also, we wanted to do a bit of reverse trick-or-treating and give away some Halloween cupcakes leftover from a dinner party the night before. (This was less altruistic than to prevent Mr. Burt and myself–mostly myself–demonstrating a colossal lack of self-control and eating a dozen cupcakes. Which we totally would have done if we’d had a dozen cupcakes in the house.)

Alas, the plan went a bit bust. Our next-door neighbors the Nguyens were home but, judging from the colander of candy perched on an old upturned soy sauce bucket on the porch, didn’t want to be disturbed. Our across-the-alley neighbor and sometimes babysitter Patty opened her door and happily snapped pictures (and took a few cupcakes) for her husband and two teenage daughters, all Burt Squirt fans who were out.

And two doors down, Jenn and Joe’s house stood dark and empty on Halloween night.

Or so we thought.

As Jenn later told me, she wasn’t home, but Joe was. In fact, Joe was having a party. Just not a Halloween party. And as he didn’t have any candy on hand, he had to send a spy to the front door peephole to know whether the doorbell was being rung by guys arriving for poker night or kids in costumes. (He needs to take a lesson from our friend Damon, who was caught sans candy last Halloween but scrounged up some Tic Tacs for his trick-or-treaters.)

When the Burt family rang the doorbell, Joe asked his spy who was at the door. The reply?

“A tiny woman holding a lizard!”

So, I didn’t get any candy this Halloween (we won’t talk about the three giant bags that I bought and were mostly leftover after our three trick-or-treaters), but I did get a Native American name: Tiny Woman Who Holds Lizards.

I am, after all 1/32 Cherokee. Which means my little lizard is 1/64 Cherokee.

Not that I would ever exploit that. I’m not one of those parents.

The first clothing Mr. Burt and I purchased for the Burt Squirt when we found out we were having a boy was not a sweet, tiny newborn outfit  in which to bring him home from the hospital. It was far less practical than that, and in a size much bigger than newborn.

Our unborn boy already had a dragon costume for his first Halloween.

We knew our Burt Squirt would be adorable in his dragon costume, but at the same time we couldn’t imagine that the baby, still only half-term inside me, could ever have long enough arms and legs to fill the sleeves and pant legs. After he was born and, for the first few months, consistently measured in the 25th percentile for length, it seemed even less likely he’d grow into his dragon suit in time for Halloween.

But on Halloween, which also happened to be the eve of the Burt Squirt’s eight month-birthday, Mr. Burt and I dressed him in the costume as we’d anticipated doing for so long.

And we found it fit, perfectly.

Must be all that baby food he’s been eating almost ever since I posted about him not eating it on his seven month birthday. It took going against the pediatrician’s advice and introducing fruits before vegetables, but going by the way the Burt Squirt scarfed down an entire jar of squash in about two minutes flat the other night, there wasn’t any harm in our method. Now he eats at least jar of fruit and a jar of vegetables a day, divided over breakfast and dinner, and we’re working on a jar of fruit or vegetables, depending on his intestinal needs, for lunch. Breastfeeding is still going strong; he nurses about five times a day, which is great, and usually refuses a bottle, which is not so great. I’d really like to get back to choir, so we’ve got to figure out a solution to get him to eat when I’m not around for that bedtime feeding.

The one time he’s not eating anymore is in the middle of the night. He’d dropped the nighttime feed at around two months, but then at five months had a growth spurt and started teething and was waking to nurse in the middle of the night consistently until about three weeks ago. As of last week he continued waking with gas, but then one night he rolled onto his side, which he’d never done before, and slept through the night, with repeat performances the next three nights as he discovered that the side and tummy are comfier than the back–and better for working through those pesky nighttime toots.

And I’m betting that now he doesn’t mind being on his tummy, crawling really will happen any day now. If he doesn’t take off walking first. He can stand on his own for a good ten seconds now; yesterday he hit twenty, in his dragon costume, but I think that was because the tail gave him a little extra balance. He hasn’t pulled up on any stationary objects yet, though he tries, because all our furniture seems to be a little too tall for him. I thought for a minute he was going to pull up on the refrigerator today while he was playing in the kitchen while I fixed myself some lunch, but then I realized he was only hugging it. And kissing it. (Maybe all that affection will make my crisper drawer stop freezing my produce.)

There’s a lot of that going around.