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.

In my family we have a favorite story about my brother, then age twoish, getting caught by my friend Crystal eating her cat’s food. Actually, she didn’t catch him eating; she caught him kneeling next to the cat’s food dish spitting something out onto the floor. Which, of course, she could only deduce to be cat food.

When Crystal inquired about it, Greg scrunched up his nose in an expression of distaste and replied, “That cereal was yucky.”

Since the Burt Squirt became mobile, various family members have laughingly warned me to keep our cat’s food dish out of his reach. Usually when he’s crawling or toddling about I do, but today the Burt Squirt turned on the stealth and managed to try the yucky cereal on the sly.

Only he didn’t seem to think it was very yucky.

Of course it happened because I was distracted–ironically, with cooking the Burt Squirt’s dinner. Obviously I wasn’t serving dinner quickly enough, because when I turned around, there was the Burt Squirt, sitting in the kitchen with his legs splayed out, Dorrie’s food dish between them. One pudgy hand hand fisted as many dry chicken pellets as the stubby fingers could close around; the other waved winsomely at me.

His little mouth, still with only the four front teeth in it, was chewing.

And it would have continued to do so, judging from the way his nose was not scrunched up in an expression of distaste, had I not gone fishing for one, two, and a half pieces of cat food. There might have been more–probably there was at least another half a piece–but the Burt Squirt wriggled away before I could plumb the depths of his mouth for the rest of his quarry. Goodness only knows how much he consumed before I saw him doing it.

I’m not worried, especially since just the other day I saw a TV ad for an expensive brand of cat food that slagged off all the commercial brands for being made mainly of corn. If corn’s good enough for my cat, it’s good enough for my kid! That might be a backwards philosophy, but I’ll keep it in mind in the dog days of summer when he starts catching and eating the baby geckos that find their way into the house.

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.

“It’s like he knows it’s Christmas,” Mr. Burt moaned, sometime between 3:30 and 4 on Christmas morning. We were staying with my parents, and the Burt Squirt had been awake since 1:30. Mostly chattering and chuckling as Mr. Burt snuggled with him in our bed, rocking having failed to produce any result than making our nine month-old scream.

I replied that I’d been about to say the same thing. While I wasn’t surprised to have passed on the inability to sleep on Christmas Eve that had plagued me since childhood, I hadn’t expected that trait to manifest in the Burt Squirt at such an early age. Especially since he virtually ignored Christmas trees and burst into tears at the mere sight of Santa Claus.

As it turned out, Christmas Day showed us the true reason for the Burt Squirt’s restlessness:

He cut his first tooth.

Which, I suppose, was a rather Christmassy thing to do. (Clever boy.)

Maybe that was why he cried when he sat in Santa’s lap: he told him he wanted teeth, but he knew it was really going to hurt. (Poor baby.)

The Yuletide teething didn’t catch us completely unawares, as the previous day’s lunch at Braums gave a revelatory glimpse of a whole mouthful of chompers ready to pop.

Yes, that’s a plastic ketchup cup we let the Burt Squirt play with while we ate our hamburgers and ice cream cones. (Inventive lad.)

Lucky for the Burt Squirt–not to mention the parents desperate to distract a grumpy teething baby–he didn’t just get his bottom front tooth for Christmas:

That’s just Liam’s pile.

Not even thinking about that new tooth!

Well, maybe even a pony, Woody doll, musical walking toy, phone, garage and trucks, snappy beads, talking stuffed dog, ball, and alphabet puzzle mat don’t totally make up for teething.

But even if we were a little sore–and sleepy–we still had a very happy first Burt Christmas.

When Mr. Burt and my parents asked me what I want for Christmas this year, I had a hard time coming up with anything. (This is saying a lot, considering my Christmas lists used to bear an alarming resemblance to Sally Brown’s.) It was much easier for me to come up with what I don’t want (heavy sweaters, sweatshirts, button-down shirts that have to be ironed…to which Mr. Burt replied in bemusement, “Does that leave anything at all for me to give you?” and which may not be so far removed from old Sally after all); I’m content with the things I have, and there’s very little else that I need.

Except for sleep. But last I checked, sleep doesn’t come gift-wrapped.

It’s been two weeks since Mr. Burt and I had a good, solid night of sleep, thanks to the Burt Squirt going through one of those physical development stages (learning how to pull himself up on the crib rail and beginning to walk) notorious for throwing off sleep schedules. (Also, gas.) Mr. Burt, I think, is actually getting less sleep than I am most nights–though apparently he’s not keeping count.

I, however, am.

Now, I learned rather early on in this parenthood venture that score-keeping is the quickest way to lose the marriage game, so it’s not that I’m sitting up in the middle of the night doing fuzzy math as the Burt Squirt nurses and resenting Mr. Burt for being snuggled up in bed. No, I’ve developed a more noble kind of arithmetic that revolves around me obsessing over Mr. Burt getting as much sleep as I do. Or me losing as much as he does. And me feeling guilty if I get more. Because that just wouldn’t be fair, would it?

A word problem:

If LR goes to sleep at 11ish at night and Mr. Burt at 11:30ish and the Burt Squirt wakes up at 1:30ish in the morning and Mr. Burt gets up with him, not coming back to bed until 3:00ish, how many hours of sleep did LR and Mr. Burt get if LR only slept intermittently during the hour and a half Mr. Burt was trying to soothe the Burt Squirt back to sleep and then got up to feed the Burt Squirt from 3:00ish until 3:30ish but was too wired to fall asleep until after 4ish and then was up at 7ish and Mr. Burt got up at 8ish?

I never was able to come up with an exact answer to my muddled math problem, but I got the gist of it across to Mr. Burt in conversation as we showered and dressed this morning:

LR: “If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t sleep very much while you were up with the Burt Squirt.”

Mr. Burt: “Why would that make me feel better?”

LR: “Because we got the same amount of sleep. Misery loves company.”

Mr. Burt: “Oh. I’d rather you actually get sleep.”

For the first time in nine months of being a mom (and in six and a half years of being a wife, really, because I’ve always struggled with (unfounded) feelings of guilt and fear that Mr. Burt might resent me for not being a monetary contributor in our relationship), it hit me:

I don’t have to feel guilty about getting more sleep than my husband does.

Because he loves me.

And fairness and equality, while both very essential ingredients for a successful marriage, don’t have all that much to do with love.

Misery may love company, but love hates misery. After all, love is why we get up when the Burt Squirt cries in the middle of the night and lose all this sleep in the first place.

It brings to mind the words of one of my favorite Christmas carols: What I can I give Him / Give my heart.

Mr. Burt may not be able to give me exactly what I want for Christmas, but he gives me the one thing I really need.

As for sleep…maybe that’s what the Burt Squirt will give to me.