Chocolate and Cheese

I'm feeling like my blog has become so earnest and prissy of late. Smug and self-righteous and majorly unfunny. I'm having a hard time with it, to be honest, although some good manages to slip through sometimes almost by accident. I'm also not focusing on work projects as I should be, although to be fair to myself it's because I'm actually working much more, and at the end of a day, when I find myself sitting here, I'm pretty well spent. I'm not sure how to get out of my slump, but I want you to know that I'm trying.

As a rebuke to myself, and a palate cleanser of sorts for the blog, I am going to confess my major parenting hypocrisy now. I am a food hypocrite of gargantuan proportions.

On my behalf, I will start by saying that Lily and Annika are two of the most well-fed children I know. I like to shop for food, and I like to cook, and one of the few decisions I made before Lily was born was that any children of mine would be exposed to as many foods as possible from as early as possible and that we would never distinguish between "kid food" and food in our home. For the most part, this--unlike most other uninformed, premature decisions I have made--has worked beautifully.

Before I slide too far back into the land of self-congratulation, I would like to add that I have the worst eating habits of anyone I know, and if I were to confess to you what I actually consume most days you would possibly be sick to your stomach; you would certainly feel shock and dismay.

I will give you a sampling of what I'm talking about, an amuse-bouche, if you will. Today, I had three large cups of coffee with half-and-half and sugar, two pieces of toast, four brownies, and a wedge of cheese the size of my fist. I also had a cheeseburger and fries from the new uptown Shake Shack at 3:45 in the afternoon which, I don't think I need to underscore, is not actually the time of a meal. I assure you, if you're not from New York, that if you were to walk right by the new uptown Shake Shack at 3:45 and there was NO LINE that you, too, would dash in for a quick cheeseburger and fries even if you weren't in the slightest bit hungry just on the principle of the thing. No? Well, fine. I knew there was something I never liked about you.

But I digress. The point is that on an ordinary day, my diet consists primarily of salt, fat and caffeine, even as my girls eat roasted Brussels sprouts and salmon, sauteed spinach and raspberries, greenmarket plums, Greek yogurt, and multigrain bread with smears of homemade jam. If I had a dime for every time I have been dishonest about the empty bag of Cheetos I am stuffing in the bottom of the trash can, the candy corn hidden in my purse, the number of chocolate truffles in the very top shelf of the freezer, I'd be able to buy a second refrigerator, which I could hide in, well, I don't know, the closet, stocked to the brim with cheese, candy and fried chicken from Dirty Bird, which Lily prefers to eat with the fried coating off. Why? Because that's all she knows to like--I have eaten the coating off of hers since before she was too young to know it was desirable, and it worked: Now she prefers it au natural. All the more crispy grease bits for me.

I could go on ad infinitum in this vein. In fact, I once wrote an essay about my eating habits in graduate school that one of my favorite professors called a "frightening, revolting, awe-inspiring tour de force," but as I said, I'm not feeling it 100% these days, so I'll stop at this for now.

And I will go to bed. Breakfast will come all too quickly. Cantaloupe and soft-boiled free-range eggs for Lily. Coffee and butter and chocolate for me.