Wedding Dress Shopping!

We had the BEST weekend in San Antonio shopping for Melissa's wedding dress.  She became engaged in July and it loosed a frenzy of ideas flying about where to have the wedding, how many people to invite, what kind of venue, etc.  Poor Michael had no idea that when he popped that simple question, life would change as he knew it!  There are so many questions still unanswered, it was nice to be doing something definitive.  THIS... we can DO!

Mother, Brittney and I drove up to San Antonio on Friday evening.  Melissa had two appointments for us and we were the first of the day at David's Bridal. 

Now I've got friends who are well off and they might poo pooh at David's Bridal... but with our present plans to take off and be vagabonds at just about the time Melissa plans to get married... we were just fine with what David's had to offer and it was a great place to start. This dress will be worn one time and dragged to Puerto Rico where there could possibly be "trash the dress" photos to be had... GET REAL!

 When we got to Melissa's place on Friday evening, she had the TV tuned to one of the cable channels with shows about, what else?... shopping for bride's dresses.  These people had budgets of "nothing over $5,000"...  Like I said, GET REAL! 

We were up and out the door on Saturday morning.  We arrived at David's and were assigned to Elsa.  She started with a tour around the place and left us to look at dresses on the racks while she went to pull several of the ones Melissa had marked in the catalogue.  There were SO MANY DRESSES!

We were tucked into a dressing area all to ourselves and had Elsa's undivided attention for most of the morning.  Let the fun begin!

We started with a short one.  We thought maybe it would be easy to travel with and since Melissa is thinking "beach wedding", it might be nice.  Cute but I'm thinking no...

From this point on, it was a blur of white fluff:

Tired... hungry... but happy!  We finally put poor Elsa out of her misery and headed off for Lunch at Jason's Deli.  What started out with light hearted abandon, was now becoming quite a chore for Melissa.  Thankfully the store was well air conditioned.  These people really know their business.  I had worried that we would find snooty sales people... c'mon... you're a seller of dresses!  But I was pleasantly proven wrong.  Elsa was a peach and put up with seemingly endless mind changes as we progressed from knowing nothing about this, to knowing what really works and what doesn't.  Few of the ones Melissa had initially chosen were what we finally ended up liking. 

But... we were off to the next place.  We had a very nice attendant at a little boutique, I forgot the name... She showed Melissa several grand dresses...

With complicated lacing...

But in the end, we decided that these were just "too much dress" for a destination wedding.

Melissa's second appointment time had arrived... 4 pm at Alfred Angelo's.  They assigned Shea as our attendant and she whisked Melissa right off to the back after a short interview about what we were looking for...

Brittney messed around a bit... wouldn't this make a LOVELY Bridesmaid's dress?  Hey... change out that red sash for Coral and we may be onto something...  jk

We tried on another half dozen or so dresses...

They were kind of all starting to look alike... and we began to find the tiniest fault with each one... 

Maybe we're about done... but wait, I like this one.  It's simple and elegant and you would be free to accessorize...

Let's see how it moves.  Try the Chicken dance or maybe YMCA! OK, this has just got to STOP!  I think we've become delirious!  At this point we threw in the towel.  We had two dresses that were contenders...  Very different, both with merit and drawbacks.  It was at this point I tried to stop my commentary so that Melissa could make her own choice.  I think in the end, her choice was perfect.  It's the one that makes her feel the best and that's what really counts.  It's her day.  It will be beautiful.  We are so excited about it and I can't wait to see her be married in this, the perfect dress...