Part 2

So are you all on pins and needles about my quest for the perfect dress? I had every intention of wrapping that one up quickly, but then life got in the way. It tends to do that! Just so we can move on to other topics, here is the abbreviated conclusion!

First a back-story. In 2007, I was attending a wedding of one of Mark's best friends. This was maybe the second or third time I had ever hung out with his college crowd, and I was more nervous than usual about the wedding and making sure all his friends liked me. I wanted a new dress to wear for it, so I started out on a hunt. My biggest problem was price - I realllly didn't want to spend more than about $50 on anything new, so I was looking for a good sale. As I searched and searched and couldn't find anything that fit in my budget, Mark started tagging along and offered to split the cost of a dress if it was too pricey. We found nothing. We must have gone to four different malls and it was zilch everywhere. I was getting discouraged and wanting to give up and just find something in my closet, but Mark made me forge on. Out of sheer desperation, we wandered into the BCBG section of Macy's. This was really a bad idea because let's face it, we didn't stand a chance of finding an inexpensive dress there!

I had been bypassing any dress that was over $100. Mark kept trying to get me to try them on, but I wouldn't even let him spend that much on me, so I refused to give them a chance. But by this point, after days of looking and countless stores, I humored him and tried on about three different dresses, all $200+. It was at this time that we found The. Perfect. Dress. It was navy blue with gold detailing and it was the perfect amount of both dressy and casual and it was just beautiful. They didn't even have my size, but I tried on one size smaller than I usually wear and was even able to zip it up. The sales lady assured me it fit perfectly and did her best to talk me into it. Yes, I loved it. Mark loved it. He said he would buy it. But at $250 i refused. He kept insisting that it was a great dress and totally worth the price and he didn't mind getting it for me. Now I'm all for letting him spoil me a little every now and then, but that just seemed absurd. I'm not the kind of gal that would ever spend that much on a dress. So we left it behind and I sulked about it quietly for a good month or so.

Ok, back to the current story. I'm searching for a dress for our party and the mall has failed me. I head up to McKinney after work with Mark one day and we stop at the outlets in Allen to see what they have. We park at JCrew and proceed to make our way around the entire shopping center (in the 100 degree heat no less!) and go into store after store after store. We give everything a chance. If it looks like it sells dresses, we go in. I think I tried on a total of three total and none are even remotely what I'm looking for. No one has summer dresses! We made our way down the last row of stores and Mark wanted to go into Brooks Brothers. It's then that I spotted the BCBG store, which I had forgotten was tucked away in the back corner of the mall. We went in, felling hopeful.

The store is arranged by color and we worked our way around, pulling more and more dresses from the racks for me to try on. This one's cute! And so is this one! I remarked how much I loved BCBG and Mark commented that he knew that because remember that one dress? I stopped mid rack as it came back to me. The perfect dress. I told him I was surprised he even remembered that dress, much less what brand it was! I even joked that maybe it had made its way to the outlets by now and that we should keep our eyes out for it. We worked our way around the store and finally made our way to the blue section. I sarcastically told Mark to look for it as I was sliding some dresses across the rack when Bam. There it was. The perfect dress. Navy with the gold details. Marked down significantly and - the entire store was an additional 50% off! And it was in my size! I grabbed it in disbelief and added it to the growing stack of dresses to try on.

I must have tried about 12 dresses and they were all fantastic. BCBG, how I love you. The navy dress was not at all what I was looking for for our party - it was much too fancy. But I found an adorable little strapless summer dress that couldn't be more perfect. I walked out of the dressing room with this dress and the navy one. I told Mark that I felt like God had put this dress back into my life and I was not going to walk away from it twice! So I bought them both. Or rather, Mark bought me the navy blue one after all, two years after we first found it in the mall.

So now, all this girl needs is some great shoes to wear with my new party dress! Whew!