I had chocolate chip cookies and a glass of red wine for dinner tonight. I am not particularly proud of it, but I had to come clean.

Mike is in Chicago at the YearlyKos conference, and Emma and I are having a little girl time for a few days. Used to be (don’t tell Mike) that when he would go away, I would have some “it’s all about me” time. I would eat and drink whatever and whenever I wanted, watch as many chick flicks as one human could stomach and sleep till whenever.

This trip, I’m a mom. So no eating a whole box of frozen T.G.I.Friday’s potato skin appetizers in one sitting. Nope, have to be responsible. Plus, routine right? Have to keep Emma’s routine so she doesn’t get all out of whack.

With all this in mind, I had every intention of eating a normal dinner - it was going to be salad with chicken - and Emma and I were going to eat together, inasmuch as one can eat with an infant spoon in one hand and a bowl of pureed orange stuff in the other. Somewhere along the way I just forgot.

I think I didn’t realize until tonight how nice it is to have a partner in the parenting thing - “You do the bath, I’ll do the bottle”, “You do her food, I’ll do ours”. When it’s just one of me, everything takes a little longer and if I have to choose between her needs or mine, I will go with hers every time (yeah yeah Mom, I know, oxygen mask in a crashing plane - I promise I will put mine on first…). Anyway, by the time she got fed, bathed, changed, read to, bottled and put down to sleep, it was 9:30 and I just didn’t have the energy to make that salad.

But the cookies sure were good.

Update: Ok, it’s the morning after “cookies for dinner” and I just made myself a pot of coffee while Emma sat in her high chair looking REALLY pissed that those pears on the counter weren’t “IN HER BELLY”. So much for choosing her needs over mine. What crap. I guess I just wanted cookies for dinner. Hey, at least I didn’t feed them to the baby.