“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.

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.

If I were a good mommy blogger, the first of every month would bring an update about the Burt Squirt’s growth and development. Alas, I am not a good mommy blogger; you will find no such posts prior to this, the Burt Squirt’s seven-month birthday. Probably I shouldn’t admit that my sudden motivation to blog is prompted by the fact that the alternative for this time before the Burt Squirt awakes is to clean the bathroom. That choice would make a blogger of anyone.

From what I’ve seen in the mommy blogging world, these kinds of posts typically start out with stats. This reminds me of something I read once about infancy being the only time when it’s considered polite to ask how much a person weighs or remark on how much hair he has. I’m not sure if anyone ever thought to ask the babies if they think it’s polite, but for the sake of perceived good manners, I’ll go with it.

At seven months old, the Burt Squirt weighs upwards of 20 pounds and is 27ish inches long. Forgive my imprecision, but he doesn’t have a checkup this month and our scale needs new batteries. I assume he’s heavier and longer than he was at six months, as he’s filling out his 6-9 month PJs nicely. Of course, it’s highly possible I shrank them in the dryer…I prefer growth spurt, especially considering how many times I nursed the kid yesterday.

Yes, at seven months old, the Burt Squirt is still nursing pretty much exclusively and shows no signs of giving up any of his six or seven daily feedings. Which isn’t great for the amount of sleep I’m getting, but I’m just glad he hasn’t cut any teeth yet–though Niagara Falls flowing forth from his mouth and constant chewing everything lead me to believe they’re on their way. We’ve spent the past month introducing baby food, but, “Liam, Mashed Sweet Potatoes; Mashed Sweet Potatoes, Liam,” is about the extent of our progress. There were two days in there where he voluntarily opened his mouth and ate apples, but then it was time to move on to other things and there hasn’t been a repeat performance, despite my singing Bananaphone and Peaches in the attempt to make him laugh and open his mouth. He grins–with his lips pressed firmly together. The Burt Squirt is nobody’s fool.

He’s actually sparing with his laughter in general, which obviously means he has a has a highly cultivated and discerning sense of humor, cracking up only at such comic gems as “poopies” said in a silly voice.

Just because the Burt Squirt doesn’t laugh a lot doesn’t mean he’s not a happy baby. Happy is his default setting, and he smiles and jabbers “dada” and “baba” all day to express it. Especially if he’s outside, or on the go. This is not a child who likes to sit around the house all day–a surprising trait in the offspring of two troglodytes. Lucky for him, he’ll be celebrating his seven month birthday with lunch at Babe‘s and coffee at Mozart Bakery.

Less surprising is his clear desire for independence. If the Burt Squirt’s not happy, it’s generally because he’s not where he wants to be and can’t get there on his own. He’d like nothing better than for me to hold his hands and help him walk around the house all day long. He gets less frustrated now that he’s finally learned to roll from back to front–a motor skill his pediatrician assured us is often delayed in kids with more weight to lug around. Though I think the delay was due less to physical inability as lack of interest in doing so, because one day he just suddenly did it, multiple times in a row, with great ease, and it was obvious he’d been holding out on us. There was a look on his face of, “Oh, I can get across a room if I do that. Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

He’ll be asking himself the same question when he figures out how to crawl, which is sure to happen any day now. He’s quite adept at lunging from a sitting position onto his hands and knees. What he needs is a good set of guns like I have–from carrying the 20 pound Burt Squirt around.

As we’ve come full-circle back to weight, it seems this Burt Squirt update has come to a close. It’s cliché, but I can hardly believe that more than half of his first year is already over and gone. How could seven months have slipped past since I first nuzzled his cheek in the operating room? And how could he be so big when a year ago today he was just a little 17 week-old bump in my tummy?

That time flies like it does makes me glad for those few hours each day when I don’t get any housework done because I”m stuck in my nursing chair snuggling with my little squirt who refuses to nap anywhere but in my lap.

Because that’s the only time I get to be a mommy blogger.