Clotheshorse?

So there's this wedding coming up next month. The one for which I just bought Julie that expensive but very cute flower girl dress. As a stay-at-home mom, I don't wear all that many fancy clothes - I tend to stick mostly to blue jeans, chinos and t-shirts. All of my clothes from before the girls are too small, and I really want to look as much like a put-together grown-up at this family event as possible. Especially considering the giant fashion blunder I made the last time the whole Kang family got together. But let's not go there.

I'm not the best shopper in the world. I don't absolutely love trying on clothes, and even when I was twenty pounds lighter and in great shape, I didn't love looking at my body in the mirror. Still, the shopping had to be done, and I wanted some good honest advice along the way. I begged my friend Jen to come along to the mall with me, and along she came, gladly enough. We were both excited to have a morning away from our beloved families.

After a stop at the coffee shop, we got down to work. Warning! Pictures of me and my deathly purple-white skin to follow. I promise - I will be using some kind of tanning product before wearing any of these things in public!

We started at J.Jill, and I think I tried on about fifty million items of clothing there - everything from pants to skirts to tunics to blouses and god knows what else. The sales lady even made me try on a necklace! She was really very nice. The only thing that even came close there was this linen dress with embroidered flowers:



And I think it's really funny that this dress is one that I had been looking at last week when I had the kids with me and no time to try it on, and then Jen e-mailed a picture of it to me as an idea when I suggested that I needed to go shopping. She and I have very similar taste, only hers is a more refined version of the same. I'm just too lazy when I shop, I guess.

There were a few other stores and trips into dressing rooms in between, but we ended up finding final candidates at only one other store - Von Maur, which is a nice department store here.

All three of these are V-necks because I needed something with nursing access. I tried on some skirt/top combinations and some pants/top combinations as well, but none of them both flattered my current egg-shaped figure and qualified as dressy enough.



By the time we got to the end, I was feeling a little punch drunk and was making silly faces for the camera:



Jen apparently felt the same way - she had the camera out in the hall while I was changing back into my normal clothes, and produced these very funny shots.







That's the new hat she got while we were out. She was just trying some on to amuse herself while I was picking up a package of - well, maybe the whole Internet doesn't need to know exactly what else I was buying today, but it was something to help control that egg-shaped figure. Anyway, she had this little green number on, and it was very cute and I had my credit card out any way, and it wasn't very expensive. I mean, just think if I had hired a personal shopper for four hours! This was a tiny fraction of what that would have cost, and way more fun.

Finally, we settled on a dress. Can you guess which one?

I came home, ready to see what my family had been up to all day. Julie was having a little snack.




Sophie was ready to play a little game of behind-the-back peek-a-boo while I folded some diapers. She would peek out from behind one of my shoulders and give me a big wide-mouth toothy kiss, then cruise around my back and do the same on the other side. Over and over for ten minutes full of giggles and grins.



Off to go crank out some more blankie squares!