that time Panda Express reprimanded us for bad parenting

Well, ok.  It's not exactly like it sounds.

"Let me explain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up."

About a month ago, Tim and I decided to go on our very first date since the birth of our precious baby girl.  Tim was a nervous wreck.  I was totally comfortable.  After all, Tim's brother and his wife would be watching her.  And they are only the sweetest, most responsible people in the universe.  And we would only be gone for a couple of hours.  And Ellie probably wouldn't even notice we were gone.  Piece of cake.

Or so I thought.

When we arrived at their house, Ellie started crying almost instantly.  And then she had a massive blowout.  And then she started crying harder.  And then I tried to comfort her and couldn't.  And it was then that I realized...this was going to be a lot harder than I'd thought.  Despite totally trusting Jeremy and Ali, my heart felt heavy with guilt at the thought of leaving our baby girl.  Eventually, they convinced us to go.  They'd dealt with crying babies before.  They would text us with updates and send us pictures, and she would be absolutely fine.

I told them approximately 97 times to call if she became inconsolable, already planning to replace Tim as the designated driver and drive at the speed of light to her side if necessary.  Even after they texted us and told us that she'd stopped crying two minutes after we'd left their house, I reminded them again that they could call us at any time.

As Tim became more and more comfortable, I became more and more anxious.  Finally we arrived at Panda Express. We'd decided to eat somewhere where we could leave quickly if we needed to.  I took several minutes in the [very long] line to consciously calm myself down.  I even made Tim take pictures with me to document this momentous occasion.

Ali texted me a picture of a calm and happy Ellie.

Everything was looking up.  I could feel the knots in my stomach start to loosen.  But as Tim opened his fortune, the universe decided to deal me a solid punch to the gut.

"Time once lost can never be regained."

Welcome aboard the ever-popular Guilt Trip, hosted by Panda Express.  Amenities include self-pity and self-loathing.  A guaranteed bad time.

It took the remainder of the meal for Tim to convince me that it was not necessary for us to immediately return to our daughter in a vain attempt to regain lost time.

We headed over to the Logan mall to find a birthday present for me, but instead we ended up finding two dress shirts for Tim.  [$15 each at JCPenney.  Holla!]  My decision-making skills had apparently been depleted for the night, and thus, I decided to do some online shopping at home.  But not before making Tim take more pictures with me.

Naturally, I made him take like 10 pictures of me with the very definite goal of hiding my post-baby gut, and then ended up using the first picture he took anyway.  Go figure.

We returned to Jeremy and Ali's to find a sleepy and obviously very relaxed baby.  I finally calmed down and realized that perhaps we weren't such terrible parents after all.

Thank you for choosing the Guilt Trip, where all your worst nightmares come true.  Hope you had a terrible time!