She's Gone to Plaid!

Earlier this month, my mom came to visit Chicago for the very first time! Here are some things you need to know about my mom:

1) She's an extremely upbeat, positive, warm person.
2) Small children love her, and she loves them right back.
3) She hates dressing up/wearing fancy stuff. (So did her mother. It skipped two generations in my case!)
4) Every so often, my college roommate and I will go on Facebook to discover a deluge of notifications that she's liked approximately 25 of our posts/photos in a row. Her name has become a verb for the act of liking a zillion of someone's social-media posts at once.
5) She has an impressive collection of hair flowers. In fact, while visiting New York last year, I went outside with a flower in my hair, and my goddaughter looked at me very seriously and said "That's Janie's flower."
6) She might be the only person in my family who enjoys taking/looking at photos more than me! (So brace yourself for a deluge of posts featuring pics from her time here!)

I was so excited to have her visit Chicago at last and see where I live that I even Swiffered my kitchen floor, since I knew that if I didn't, she'd waste some of her time here cleaning for me. Because I am sort of a type-A person, I had a long list of things planned for us to do, and spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to maximize her four days in Chicago.

Most of my plans revolved around restaurants. In my family, food is the alpha and the omega of any gathering, so we stopped for our first meal on the way home from O'Hare to my apartment. I'd tried out Reno in Logan Square a few weeks earlier, and thought it would make the perfect spot for a meal. Sadly, we got there a little too early for the brick-oven pizzas I'd been planning on, but the amazing sandwiches we got more than made up for that. I completely finished my steak sandwich, while Mom brought half of hers home for Jeff.

Wearing both hair flowers she brought, so they would be safe on the plane.

After a very satisfying lunch at Reno, we walked around Logan Square for a bit, enjoying the sunshine and the sights. We saw the most amazing mural ever and stopped to snap some photos. This made my day, because usually I'm alone and tripod-less whenever I spot great street art. The colors in this mural were just magical, and I loved the vaguely mermaid-House-Targaryen vibe it had.

Bonus: my red tights were like camouflage!

It's rare for my mom to be in a photo, but somehow she's got natural posing skills!

Good question. I don't know, mural.

The dragon must have three heads.

After the long L ride to my apartment, we dropped off her bags and went out to walk around my neighborhood, accompanied by Jeff. Another bonus of having my mother in town: Jeff is 100% less grumbly about being photographed when she's the one asking him to stop for pictures every two seconds!

Highlights of this portion of my mom's visit included the riotous variety of flowers in my neighborhood, gorgeous gothic architecture, and most importantly, the discovery that a family of ducks lived in the little pond near Jeff's office! We visited them twice more while she was in town, because BABY DUCKS.

Oh, I'm being told this is mostly a style blog? Alright, I'll get to the dress I'm wearing. I was glad I happened to be wearing one of my favorite wiggle dresses for all of these super-photogenic adventures, because it meant I could grab a few photos against some unusual backdrops! I'd seen this Hell Bunny tartan on Miss Amy May's blog ages ago, and once I discovered that it came in a wiggle dress with a Peter Pan collar, I went on a mission to find one in my size. After a while of trawling the internet, I came across an eBay UK listing that had two crucial things: my size, and reasonable international shipping. A week later, it was in my hands, and I've gotten loads of wear out of it since then.

I usually size down to a medium in Hell Bunny, but went with the large in this dress as the fabric didn't really have much give, let alone stretch. This was absolutely the right call. Like most wiggles on me, it's a bit loose through the hips, but I don't mind because that makes it comfortable for all-day wear and easy to walk in! I absolutely love the high neck for work, and am hoping they'll bring this style back in new prints next fall.

This is as close as I ever get to RBF.

Looking back on it, I'm impressed by how much activity we crammed into the first half-day of my mom's visit, and I'm excited to share more photos from her trip to Chicago! Be on the lookout for an upcoming post about our day at the Chicago Botanic Garden, one of the prettiest spots in the Chicagoland area, as well as some dress reviews that feature her wonderful photography skills!

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