It's official. Blogging made me a bad mother.

I've read quite a bit recently about Jojo Moyes' article in the Telegraph saying that blogging and hands-on parenting are incompatible.  All parent bloggers are, according to Ms Moyes, plonking their children in front of CBeebies while they fritter their lives away online criticising people they've never met for the choices they've made for their children (who, of course, they've also never met).

Bloggers are bad parents.  Allegedly.

And I would have ranted about this. And pointed out that I am only blogging this evening because B has put Clash of the Titans on and there's a limit to my tolerance for really dreadful special effects.  And that in so doing, I am only ignoring him,  my children having been put to bed at a sensible hour after a home cooked (ish, it was fishfingers) meal with real vegetables (broccoli and peas, if you're interested).  Or how I never turn the computer on while they're awake (with good reason, sticky fingers can cause havoc on a keyboard). Or how television is only allowed for fifteen supervised minutes or so a day.  Or when they're ill.  As A was last Friday.

But unfortunately Ms Moyes is right.  Blogging has made me a bad parent. 

Cast your mind back to last Friday, when A was feeling poorly, and sitting wrapped up in a blanket in front of Toy Story.  Friday is officially a working day for me so the girls (when not ill) go to nursery and I get a break from the cooking of fish fingers and the breaking up of arguments; but as M is only seven weeks old, I'm giving myself Fridays off.  This means I could do the unthinkable - I invited to my house someone who I had met online.  Unprotected and unchaperoned, I met a real blogger. 

I was terribly nervous, but she, (am I allowed to name her?) was just as lovely in the flesh as in the word and we had a delightful hour or so in the sunshine, admiring my baby, eating chocolate digestives, and talking, oddly, about pretty much anything other than being a mum.

And I had such a nice time that I completely forgot to feed my daughter.  Until she had an enormous tantrum and I realised that it was 1 pm and neither of us had had lunch.

See. A bad mother.  Blogging did that.  Ms Moyes is right...