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.

Everyone knows that the cardinal rule of grocery shopping is to get in the shortest checkout line. It is absolutely crucial to follow this rule when you’re grocery shopping with your baby, because babies have a tendency to be angelic throughout entire the entire shopping trip, then come unglued the second you get to the checkout and can’t hold them because you’ve got to unload your buggy, fish your wallet out of your purse, pay, and be otherwise incapacitated.

Unless, of course, a Walmart cashier claims your baby as her baby.Which is what happened to me–inevitably, I suppose given my relationship with Walmart.

Two weeks ago I was speeding toward the checkout lanes, eyes scanning each conveyor belt for the one with the fewest groceries. The shortest lanes–indeed, open and completely empty, as it was bright and early Monday  morning–were the 20 Items or Fewer registers (Yes–the signs actually say “20 Items or Less,” but that’s grammatically incorrect so I refuse to write it), but as I was doing a week’s worth of shopping, I passed them by without so much as a glance.

Until one of the express cashiers called out, “Hey, baby!” which stopped me in my tracks. Not because I thought I was getting hit on, but because the cashier, a middle-aged woman, was speaking literally– I’ve been stopped enough while grocery shopping to know when someone is talking to the Burt Squirt.

I paused in my pursuit of the shortest checkout line to indulge the friendly (and no doubt bored) cashier, pleased to see that I recognized her. Once upon a time, she told me the Burt Squirt was juicy. She’d checked me out lots of times since then–not surprising, since I do my grocery shopping every Monday around the same time, though she wasn’t normally in the express lanes, for which, as I mentioned, I had too many groceries. So, after we exchanged pleasantries (or rather, she flirted with the Burt Squirt: “Your mama didn’t see me, but you saw me, and you grinned, didn’t you, baby! Yes, you know me, big boy!”), I started to wheel my cart around in search of another register.

“Y’all come over here to me!” she said, and wouldn’t hear my protests about having a good deal more than twenty items. “I gotta talk to my baby, see what new with him!”

It was at this point that I realized, to my chagrin, that I’d never bothered to find out her name, even though it had been right there pinned to her blue polo shirt for me to read every time she’d rung up my groceries. Tempie–I could remember that, since the Dallas Classical radio station’s daytime announcer is named Tempie.

As Walmart Tempie rang us up, she kept up a running conversation with Liam, as well as with the customer behind me in line: “This my Monday baby! Look how he smile at me! Oh, he waving now–he know it time to go, mmm-hmm, he know it!”

Last Monday Tempie wasn’t working the self-checkouts, but was back at her usual lane–which happened to be the shortest, so I got in it. Before she’d even finished scanning all her current customer’s groceries, she’d spotted us farther back in line and was saying, “There’s my Monday baby! He smiling at me–he know his friend!”

His friend.

She wasn’t his cashier.

He wasn’t her customer.

Friends.

For the first time since I began making dreaded weekly grocery shopping trips, it occurred to me that more goes on in Walmart than just hurrying in, checking off all the items on my list, and hurrying back out again. (More, even, than having another funny encounter to add to my collection of vaguely amusing anecdotes.)

Today I broke the cardinal rule of grocery shopping. I didn’t get in the shortest checkout line. I looked for Tempie, and I got in her line, which was, in fact, the longest. But the smile that lit up her tired face when she saw the Burt Squirt was worth the wait–if, indeed, we did wait any extra time; I thought the rhythmic beep beep of the bar code scanner accelerated, as if Tempie was in a hurry to finish up with her other customer so she could talk to the Burt Squirt properly.

Or maybe she didn’t work any faster. Maybe I just realized there was no need to rush, that there are more unpleasant things I could have been doing this morning than listening to a grocery store cashier tell a total stranger how nice my–her–baby is who comes to see her every Monday.

Even if–especially if–it’s at Walmart.

More often than not these days, the Burt Squirt’s feet look like this, in need of a little TLC at bath time. Because, at eleven months old–that’s right, eleven months, which means invitations have been sent for the first birthday party–the Burt Squirt’s primary mode of locomotion is walking.

Actually, that’s not quite true. About the little dirty feet, not the walking. It’s wintertime, so most days, the Burt Squirt wears socks, the removal of which reveals lint, not dirt. Of course, soggy lint stuck between sweaty little toes isn’t exactly pleasant, but parenting is all about perspective: toe jam is less gross than poopy diapers. But wintertime in Texas means that in between freak cold snaps and snow storms, we get the occasional day of 80 degrees, which means barefoot walks in the grass at the Dallas Arboretum–yes, even for babies.

The Burt Squirt took his first steps at nine months, while on Skype with Mimi and Papa in Minnesota, and now is toddling quite proficiently, even if his swaying gait with his arms up for balance is a bit reminiscent of a baboon. A month ago we had to coax him to walk, but now he’d rather walk than crawl, and pretty much only crawls if he’s fallen down in the middle of a room without a piece of furniture or person on which to pull up. Because the boy put the foot in front of…the other foot and didn’t bother to learn how to stand himself up before he took of walking.

He has, however, figured out that banana puffs are a yummy snack, as well as a source of future blackmail great amusement for Mom and Dad, though we first endured a few false starts that resulted in the Burt Squirt being quite possibly the only baby ever to gag on–and, consequently, throw up–a food that’s designed to dissolve almost instantly in his mouth. I’m beginning to fear he’s inherited the hair-trigger gag reflex that makes it impossible for his mother to swallow pills, as all of the stage three baby foods that involve chunks and/or thick textures come right back up again. Technically we’re following the pediatrician’s advice to be eating stage three baby foods by now; the Burt Squirt gobbles up the stage three jars of apples, pears, bananas, strawberry bananas, squash, and sweet potatoes–in addition to stage two everything else.

The fact that he’s only got 2.5 teeth–we just felt his top left tooth cut through two days ago–probably plays a big role in the food issues, so I’m antsy for more to come in–unless they look like the banana puff teeth, in which case he can just go on slurping down purées for the rest of his life. (Come to think of it, this would save us a lot of money in the long term, in both the dentistry and tooth fairy departments.) At least I’d never be deprived of that gummy smile beaming up at me…

The Burt Squirt is still, very much, a mama’s boy. He can have all the toys he could want all around him, but he’ll abandon playing with them to be wherever I am. (If only he realized that the way to a mother’s heart is not to give her a heart attack by climbing two flights of stairs when she runs upstairs for all of thirty seconds to check the clothes in the dryer–that’ll teach me not to put up the baby gate.) Or maybe it’s just that the contents of the kitchen cupboards really are more interesting than all the baby stuff that’s placed so easily within his reach. I don’t claim to be gifted at math, but I think even the finest mathematical mind (especially when afflicted with Mommy Brain) would be hard-pressed to keep count of how many times a day I put the tupperware back in its cupboard. (For an added bonus, that once perpetually messy cupboard is now constantly organized; who needs a Smart Spin?) He’s also obsessed with the dishwasher, which, coupled with his continued love affair with the vacuum (though in all fairness, who wouldn’t love a Dyson?) gives me great hope that in a few years time, the Burt Squirt will willingly take over all housework so Mommy can get back to writing books.

But in the meantime, Mommy will happily settle for reading books–the Burt Squirt’s current favorite being B is for Bear (though I’m managing to find the time for books that don’t rhyme or have fuzzy teddy bear ears to pet). That bit of baby-lit was a gift from Uncle Greg and Aunt-to-Be Meaghan, who have relieved us of the responsibility of indoctrinating the Burt Squirt to grow up and become a Baylor Bear. Though they may have their work cut out for them, as Uncle Peter and Auntie Ashley seem to be determined that the Burt Squirt will be the youngest-ever player drafted to the Minnesota Vikings (who might have made it to the Super Bowl if Brett Favre had had the Burt Squirt to throw to). And the Burt Squirt does already like to play ball–even if his version looks more like a puppy playing fetch (complete with panting and his tongue sticking out…though that could also describe Michael Jordan). He also likes music, particularly playing Daddy’s guitar, which is kept on a stand in the office where he can toddle right up to it and strum away (usually with his fingers, but occasionally with tupperware bowls or toy firemen), or the piano, which is a little less accessible but makes a lot of great noise. Or maybe he’s going to be the next Gunther Gebel-Williams, as seems likely by the way he laughs in the face of Dorrie hissing at him, and how he got the hang of chasing her around playing with her with a cat toy after I showed him how.

It’s so much fun to see The Burt Squirt’s interests coming out a little more with every passing day, and Mr. Burt and I are excited to see where his talents and passions lie in years to come.

And speaking of years, where–No, I won’t finish that thought. I may have Mommy Brain, but I refuse to be reduced to a total Mommy Cliché. Instead I’ll just say I’d better get cracking planning the party to celebrate the first year!