My name is Meredith, and I'm a chocaholic.

As most of you know, Brandon travels for his job. He’s normally gone Monday through Thursday. There was a period of three years when Brandon was staffed locally. Not coincidently, that period coincides with the birth of both of our children.

What you may not know, is it’s really not all that bad. In fact, there are some perks. Sometimes the kids and I eat things for dinner Brandon would never approve of, like waffles. We also have the opportunity to travel to great places because of all those airline miles and hotel points. There is one perk that stands out among the rest for Meredith; hotel chocolate.

I sometimes question in my head what kind of damage we’re doing to our kids by not having their father present four evenings out of seven. I’ve often told Brandon, “I wish you could be home more, and somehow still earn travel points.” If you thought I was shallow before, welcome to the deep end. Not long ago, we were putting Meredith to bed and she said, “I wish Daddy could stay home forever, except still bring home chocolate!” The apple doesn’t fall from the tree.

Each week Brandon comes home with a box or two of chocolate truffles the hotel fairies leave him. Truly, it isn’t great chocolate. Sometimes, it’s even emblazoned with the Marriott logo, which seldom makes for great taste. Meredith doesn’t care. Second only to her love for princesses, is her love for chocolate.

Brandon tucks the chocolate into a drawer in his closet. Meredith is known to scarf down an entire box in the course of two days. On occasion, we’ve discovered she’s eaten two boxes and we gasp in horror-- while laughing at the same time. Well, this weekend we hit rock bottom. Brandon was reorganizing his closet, it’s an epidemic, and pulled out a dresser. Behind the dresser, he found the little secret Meredith has been keeping from us.

Yep. Those are truffle wrappers. These in no way equal the wrappers we find in the trash on a weekly basis. So, all this time Meredith has been eating three times what we thought in the first place!!! That was an obscene amount, and it’s much worse than we thought. I’ll be spending our vacation researching chocolate rehabs for M. The damage is done.