Old Friends reunite!!

Tonight my best friend, Andrea, who I grew up with came to visit me with her daughter, Jordan. We had the weekend packed with dress shopping for the wedding. The plan was to decide on a bridesmaid dress and color FINALLY! Oh and my parents came up too. :-)

Andrea and Jordan drove up from Iowa earlier on Friday and stopped at several shopping venues on the way. When I got off work we met at the first bridal shop that was right by my house. Jordan and I hadn't seen each other in a long time so it took us an entire 30 seconds to warm up to each other. While her mom was trying on dresses, Jordan was able to try out the flower girl dresses as she is a flower girl in our wedding along with my niece Alyssa. Every dress she tried on was "BEAUUUUTIFUL!" Finally she decided that she was going to take the last one home with her. Eh....not gonna happen. It turns out that my future mother in law is going to make the flower girl dresses but we wanted to get ideas. As for Andrea, she was such a sport. She tried on everything we threw at her. We did end up liking one of the dresses and we had the lady write it down for future reference.

Finally it was time to head to the house for some dinner. That is when I introduced Jordan to Nattie. They were the best of friends....well for picture time anyway. As you can see.....Jordan was just an angel. Actually this little girl is always welcome at my house. Not only was she very entertaining, but she loves to do laundry. As I was giving the house tour, I showed her our laundry chute and oh boy did she love that. The first time we dropped clothes down there we had to go downstairs to see where it really went. And then later on in the weekend if she would start to get bored or whiny....all I had to do was ask her if she would like to do some laundry and she perked right up and was ready to go. Now my question is.....how come I don't see the fun in doing the laundry?

Saturday was the BIG day of lots of dresses. We started at 8:30AM when the crew of women left for The Wedding Shoppe in St. Paul. Our crew consisted of my mom, myself, Andrea, Jordan and my personal attendant Kristine. Right now I am kicking myself for not getting a group picture of us but I guess taking pictures was not on the agenda at the time. So we started at 9AM with me getting measured and trying on a similar dress to what I will be getting. When we finished with that, we went down to the main floor to order and pay for a portion of the dress and as we were waiting for that, Jordan was able to try on more flower girl dresses. And of course she entertained us all with her spinning and squatting. Yes I did say squatting. I really don't know why she would squat, but I'm thinking it was so her knees would kick out the skirt a little more. Looks like I will have to have Debbie make the skirts of her dress very full so she won't have to squat down the aisle. And now on to the big project...the bridesmaid dresses. We threw in every dress we could find that would come in the color we wanted. And what was the final decision......the same dress that we picked out at the store from last night. So with that said... Andrea was measured and she placed our order. It was so nice to have that picked out. I was going to try to do some price matching with the other store, but I didn't know if they would have come down $40 in the price of the dress and it is nice to have my dress and the bridesmaid dresses from the same place. Then it was Mom's turn. She tried on a number of Mother of the Bride dresses and found a couple that she really liked. The only downfall was that the price of those dresses were twice as much as a bridesmaid dress. Don't designers know that they need to make those dresses a little more affordable.....the bride's parents are already spending a lot of money already with the wedding alone. So we didn't find one for Mom.

We headed home as we were all tuckered out. My parents were going to head up to visit with my uncle who lives in St. Louis Park for the evening and Andrea and I would get some time to hangout with Jordan. :-) Jerad headed out to a T-wolves game so we all headed up to the mall to see if Von Maur had any holiday dresses on sale that would suffice for a dress for my mom. Well we found some ideas and then Mom and Dad headed out. As a reward for Jordan being so good all day long...and I'll tell you it was a long day for a 3 year old....we went to the little play area so she run off some energy.

After that we grabbed a bite to eat and headed home. Nattie was very excited to see us until she found out that if Jordan was wearing her Angel halo, then she needed to wear her reindeer antlers. As you can see they both loved it. Now I know that if you have kids come to visit and don't really have any toys....just pull out the Halloween costumes and they will keep them happy for quite a while. We had girls movie night and Jordan picked out a My Little Ponies movie and we got The Women. Both movies were pretty good.

Finally Sunday came and I was sad to see my friend leave. I can now understand why we were inseparable during HS. It is so easy to hang out and do nothing and it is just as easy when we are running around doing everything. After seeing how well she has raised her kids I'm thinking that I will send my kids to live with her until she has them all trained.