Final day in Chicago (sad face)

My eyes popped open on Sunday morning after almost 8 uninterrupted hours of sleep in my Arlington House bed of awesomeness. It was 10 am and my last day in Chicago with the girlies. We put on something resembling decent outfits, cleaned up some of the makeup that had streaked down our faces while we slept, and headed off to a place called Duffy's for brunch to help us recover from the last night. $15 for all you can eat and all your can drink. Multiple flavors of champagne drinks. A buffet that is set to impress... it was all that and more. We showed up around 11. It was already a 30 minute wait for a table, but the hostess said we could try our luck at the bar if we wanted. Wouldn't you know, there were 4 seats all together right at the end. Like they were waiting for us. Like it was fate. Well who were we to argue with fate?

We plopped our butts down and introduced ourselves to the cutie bartender who was more than obliging in our attempts to live up the morning/early afternoon. He explained that there was 4 delicious flavors of champagne drink: regular mimosa, mango, passion fruit, and berry and that we could have as many plates off food as we could eat. Guess how many Erin had?


3! How did you know!? Lucky guess, I suppose. So yea she had 3 plates of food! What do you mean, 'what's the big deal?!' That may not seem so ridiculous on the outset, but let me explain. The plates looked something like this:

Fist Course: A bit of everything.

Second Course: Some desert.


Third Course: The leftovers of an excessive amount of crab legs.

As for the champagne drinks, they were delish! Katie J and I were particularly fond of the berry flavor. Erin, of course, loved the mango as she obsesses over all things mango. Julia wasn't really partaking in much because she was being lame-O! We tried to force her to have fun but it was hard.







Gosh, she see how resistant she was! As much as we tried to make her have fun, but she resisted. She was just being Pouty McPouterson. That's ok though. We didn't let her bring the party down.

There was still plenty of dancing in our chairs (a little bit of dancing in the middle of the floor, especially when the perculator came on!) and lots of joking around with the fabulous and super friendly wait staff. O yea and there was maybe a little bit of a mimosa drinking competition between the rest of us who weren't being lame.

We eventually (and I do mean eventually - as in 4 or so hours after we arrived) left Duffy's. Not for lack of a party. The left over kids were just starting to get animated, but we did want to get some shopping done in the neighborhood before we had to leave.

In retrospect shopping after drinking all morning was a terrible idea. I did get some cute stuff while we were out but... well... I also did this...

At our first stop, a consignment shop, I proceeded to buy a skirt that I thought was a shirt (in my defense it was a very deceptive skirt and may have even looked better as a shirt) and 4 pairs of shoes. 1 of which I didn't even like once I woke up from my post-brunch nap. Well good thing all that stuff was only $10 a piece or so, but still there is a lesson to be learned about combining alcohol and retail. It is not safe. Talk to your kids about it. Warn them before they end up with a pair of Charlotte Russe rainbow wedges and don't know how that happened.