It rained there.

I spent the weekend in Chicago with my girls. And it rained. A lot. The entire time, actually. Except for the moment we left to walk to breakfast. They talked me out of taking my umbrella. And then, of course, it rained on the walk back. And we got quite drippy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Why did I go to Chicago? There are lots of reasons, but the short answer is to see my two best friends, Emily and Molly. (Together we’re the three M’s. We’re tight like that. I think it was sometime in high school when we started calling ourselves that—you know, for Megan, Molly, and Emily. We’ve been friends for twenty years, people—we were destined to get a group nickname at some point). Emily moved to Chicago this year, and Molly and I wanted to plan a trip to see the apartment, hang out, shop, and do all the standard M’s stuff, like make pizza (except it’s really like watch Emo make pizza and then eat it). If we’d just made chocolate chip cookies (but ate half the dough) or those orange sweet rolls in a can, it would have been like many of my weekends of yesteryear.

The trip was excellent. We did some standard Chicago-type things, like eat at Gino’s East and shop on Michigan Avenue. We saw lots of old friends who were also in Chicago. I bought a supercute purple bag. Ooh, and we ate cheesecake-stuffed French toast. Sooo good.

There is just nothing like hanging out with best friends. Friends who have been around so long that my dad calls them his “oldest and dearest friends.” We just know each other. Like, even though Molly and I have no idea how she does it, Emily’s showers take less than a minute. Or the way I know I can trust Molly’s advice when it comes to bag buying (guess who was carrying a Coach bag this weekend? Not me). And we can talk about boys forever and say the same things over and over, essentially, but there’s always more to say. And that’s okay. We can talk about how we’re unsure of our haircuts or how we wonder if we need different shades of eye shadow or whether these shirts look good on us, and regardless of the answers, we know we’re all beautiful in the end. And really, that’s why I went to Chicago.