More Dresses?

Last week, I went home to clean myself out of my parent's house because they are selling it. While there I found loads of things that I had forgotten about. I went through report cards, essays, drawings, toys, Legos. I even got rid of some Legos, toys and books, if you can believe it. Here I am going through my things. As you can see, I was very happy and excited about the whole thing. You may also notice that that picture is taken outside. The weather was actually pretty awful the whole time I was in Chicago, but, I did get to see and hear some great thunder and lightening storms.

While I was home, I decided to go visit Oakbrook Shopping Center with one of my bridesmaid's Jenny in search of dresses. I already had a plan. I looked up some dresses online and I found the one I liked. Unfortunately, the site said that I could only find these celebration stores in 3 locations, 2 in IL and 1 in Texas. Upon going to the store, I learned that actually that is not the case, there are really 70 stores--but it just happened that the size I looked for on the ill-organized website (it took me a half an hour to find a list of all the so-called celebration stores after I knew that it would be listed somewhere on the site, if I wasn't being so vague I would probably challenge my readers to do the same and find the store list and time themselves so that I could give the company some kind of idea of how poorly their site is laid out when you are looking for something specific).

The shopping was painless. The neatest part about going in was discovering the high quality materials. I had previously shopped only at 2 other stores looking for bridesmaids dresses and come up with a feeling of unease. One store, while organized by color and style seemed to supply only the lowest quality of materials with clasps and zippers visible from the outside. The second store had a small select crushed into a corner. While the dresses may have been of designer quality, they were in a small place with hordes of women circling the area, so I just wasn't sold on it.

This store was open and free. Nobody bothered us while we looked at the dresses and colors and chose what we expected to be beautiful choices. Jenny volunteered to be the model of all the dresses we chose. This proved to be excellent to me because I wasn't really keen on trying on a bunch of dresses anyway. Jenny was the perfect model. She looked good in all the dresses. I could tell her final choice leaned away from my final choice, but I do not doubt that she was happy with the end decision. The dresses are beautiful, the quality is wonderful, and I stuck with my Norwegian heritage on color decisions.

In the end my mom and I went back to the store and commandeered the dresses in the appropriate sizes and sent them to my bridesmaids scattered across the country. Everyone received their dresses in less than 3 days. It should be noted hear that Kristen actually drove a total of 160 miles to exchange her dress for another size instead of going through the hassle of returning and reordering from across the country. What a pal! And now, another piece of the wedding list has been crossed off.

Attendant Dresses