The inevitable has happened.

And then, of course, the companionable moment was broken when the Burt Squirt tried to take things too fast, too soon.

Poor Dorrie was forced to take refuge in the litter box, but even there found no respite; the Burt Squirt sent a spatula in after her.

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 a recurring joke between Mr. Burt and me that the first time we vacationed at Walt Disney World, on our honeymoon, we were too broke to eat.

That was the truth. We could only afford the trip in the first place because Mr. Burt’s parents took all the other Burt kids and Burt grandkids to Cancun that summer and gave us the money that would have been our portion of the family vacation. Due to our marrying right out of college (literally, a few weeks after Mr. Burt graduated and before he started his job) tight would be a generous word to describe our budget: Mr. Burt worked at Olive Garden all four years at Baylor to pay for room and board, textbooks, and student fees, and even with the IT job he took his senior year in addition to waiting tables, only managed to scrape by on his living expenses with a very little left over for dates (his entire savings up to that point had gone to buy my engagement ring–which was perfect for my tiny ring finger, but by no means a rock by anyone’s standards); I worked on and off at department stores but, to my chagrin, brought all of $70 into our marriage because I have no self-control when working around clothes.

When Mr. Burt and I arrived at Walt Disney World, we had X dollars in our budget with absolutely no wiggle room, because that was all there was in the bank. We didn’t even have a credit card, though if we had, Mr. Burt was smart enough to know that starting your marriage broke was less than desirable but not the end of the world when you had a good job lined up, but starting it in debt because of your honeymoon was not a good financial precedent to set.

So, we made like Oregon Trail and limited our rations to bare bones. We splurged on a character breakfast buffet our first morning at the Magic Kingdom, but the rest of the week our first stop was an Epcot cafe where we could get cheap (by Disney standards) pastries and breakfast burritos. And split an orange juice. We’d skip lunch, maybe share an ice cream early afternoon if we were desperate, and ate a late lunch/early dinner, frequently splitting that meal. Not exactly taking advantage of the many unique and delicious dining opportunities Walt Disney World affords honeymooners, but it was what we could afford that won the day, and anyway,we didn’t really care that much about eating because…it was our honeymoon.

Thus it was that when our hunger pangs subsided and faded, as did all but our very best memories from that wonderful first week of marriage, being too poor to eat on our honeymoon became a joke.

There’s nothing like old photos to give you a shocking dose reality.

Take, for example, one of the few pictures of one of our honeymoon meals (indeed, one of our few honeymoon pictures, period, as we were also too poor for a proper camera and made due with four 27-exposure disposable cameras, the developing of which also pinched):

Two drinks. One blob of mashed potatoes. One prime rib. Oh, and not pictured, a minuscule Caesar salad. For two adults who hadn’t eaten anything all day except a cheese Danish and a breakfast burrito and possibly an Lemon Chill because we were about to die of heatstroke standing in line for Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. And that was a splurge.

“Remember how excited we were?” Mr. Burt said as we boggled at the picture last night. “We sat there at that table and said, ‘All right, we’re gonna have prime rib tonight!’ A little bit of prime rib. Geez, I feel so bad for us!”

I didn’t feel bad for us. I was too busy laughing at our naïve, dazed-by-our-own-happiness newlywed selves till my stomach hurt and tears tracked mascara down my cheeks.

It’s little wonder when we returned to Walt Disney World five years later for our second honeymoon, our package including a Disney Dining Plan, that we reacted to our first meal like this:

While we may feel a little sorry that First Honeymoon Mr. and LR Burt didn’t get to fully enjoy all Disney has to offer, we thank them for having the good sense not to have made that honeymoon a financial burden, or else we might not have been able to go back five years later for seconds.

We definitely wouldn’t have appreciated what it means to have full bellies. (Too full; eighteen months later, we’re still trying to work off the pounds we put on during that trip! Luckily for me, I also had a baby during that time. Children: the eternal scapegoats–but that’s another post…)

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 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.