Warning: Really long post ahead! Take all necessary precautions! 
So I went dress shopping on Saturday with my mom and MOH. We went to the Alfred Angelo store since they were having their spring sale! (Gotta love coupons!) Our appointment was for 10am, right when they open. So when the sales girl unlocked the door, I had a moment where I felt like I was at Filene's and the Running of the Brides! There were about 5 of us there for bridal gowns, and another 6 girls, at least, there for Bridesmaids dresses. It was nuts! I gave my consultant, Megan, my list of dress styles that I was really interested in. One was discontinued, so that took my list down to 4. She pulled another 2 that she thought I should try based just for grins, lol!
Megan was just the nicest thing! She was incredibly helpful, wasn't uptight and you could shoot the stuff with her all day if she would have had the time. In some of the pictures, she looks like she's hungover and doesn't want to be there, but I blame all of that on my MOH who was taking the pictures. She wasn't completely schooled on my phone and how to work it.
This is probably why I look so darn weird in all of the pictures, lol! I'll go over the dresses that I tried on in order from least favorite to THE dress.
Dress #6, the LEAST favorite! This dress looked horrible on me! I felt like I had just pulled this dress out of an attic! I know that the Ivory, Cream, whatever color was the total reason for that feeling, but then there was just everything else about it. When my mom pointed out that it made my hips and butt look HUGE and that it really wasn't doing anything to flatter my gut, I turned right back around to the dressing room and pulled it off. No thank you!
Dress #5. This dress wasn't too bad. I really liked the petaling on the bottom when it was hanging on the rack. I didn't like the way it looked when I had it on though. And the sash it came with, had a flower on it, had to go. Ugh. Megan replaced it with a much better sash with some rhinestones on it and it looked a lot better. I apologize for my reaction in the picture. I have NO idea what I was talking about, but whatever it was, I was obviously against it lol!
Dress #4. I liked this dress! It was really cute, but I really wasn't feeling the train. I was trying to stay away from long trains for various reasons. But Megan and my MOH kept trying to sell me on the fact that no matter how long the train was, I could still do a bustle and have it pulled up and out of the way and just wear it like that all day. These dresses were heavy enough as it was, so to have all of that extra weight of the train pulled up and hanging off my butt all day just did not sound appealing.
Dress #3. Going into Saturday, this dress was my MOH's favorite. She really wanted me to get this dress. It was very similiar to dress #4, but the train was not as long. Still heavy. Still trying to sell me on the bustle. But, this is the exact shade of blue that I wanted to the dress to have, so I was glad that I could see the way the color looked against my (really pale!) skin.
Dress #2. So here's where the decision making got really hard! When I first looked at this dress, I didn't realize how long the train was. It's super long! BUT, I loved the chevron design around the waist and under the bust! It really made my waist look smaller and drew the attention away from my gut. It was unfortunately the heaviest dress I had tried on the whole day. Even with a bustle, this dress was going to be murder lugging it around all day. But I liked the way the top made me look so much that I was almost willing to ignore the train and just buy it. It was $200 more than what I had initially budgeted, so there was that factor, too. But I just kept going back to a dress I had tried on earlier that morning.
Dress #1. THE dress! The one! Numero Uno! I had tried this dress early on since it had been my favorite from day one. I figured that if I tried it on initally and hated it, then I still had plenty of dresses to try on and make a decision. Well, that really backfired on me, because I LOVED it! This was the only dress that I tried on that I didn't fit into right off the rack (except for my small top which had to be clipped) so it was clipped and pulled a lot in the back. So you don't get a very good look at the corset back that's on it, but I'm sure you get the idea. There's hardly any train, and the dress weighed almost nothing! There is also stitching around the beadwork that will match the Marine Blue that I picked out. I loved that little detailing that no other dresses had. When I had first walked out of the dressing room, and the inital shock of me being in a dress had worn off, I could just tell by my mom's face that this was the one. Even though she had only seen me in one other dress, that was the look I had been waiting for. I hadn't even looked at myself yet and I knew, lol! My MOH really liked it, everyone seemed to like it. I ended up trying it on twice just to be sure and I was. So, I said YES to the dress!!
So then I do the girly-est thing ever. I wake up Sunday morning and I bust out into tears because I had a serious case of buyers remorse!! I just kept sitting there, looking at the pictures and thinking about how much I didn't like the dress I picked, and that I really should have just went with the other dress. After about an hour of sitting there, trying to talk myself back into why I picked the dress that I did, I realized what I didn't like about it. It wasn't the dress. I LOVE the dress! And I know I will love it even more when it's in my color and altered for me. It was my HAIR! I had pulled my hair up the second time I had tried it on to try and convey my hair idea to my mother. I didn't like the way the dress looked with my hair up, so problem solved! And it's as simple as just leaving my hair down for the wedding. Whew! Another crisis averted!!
Which brings me to today. Nothing really new to report. I emailed the planner and had her add the harpist onto our contract. Note to JoAnne -- Christine through JM is $375 for the hour. And I also am having her check to see if the florist can do a smaller version of the flower arrangements just to see if we can cut the cost. I'm hoping to spend no more than $250 on the arrangements. My mom really wants to do them herself, so then I can just save them for the at-home reception next year. But I don't want the hassle of making them, taking them down there, and bringing them back. I'd rather just pay someone to do them for me and then I'll make new ones next year!
And I finally got ahold of the bakery! They quoted me an awesome price on a 3-tier topsy turvy cake that will serve 32. I know that's 3 times more cake than we need, but it's cake! It WILL get eaten lol! Although I think Heather (or Jay, not sure?) and I weren't exactly seeing eye to eye on what we wanted for a design. I had asked if we could tell them one or two of our favorite Disney things, and give them free reign on designing the cake and incorporating those things into the design. We wanted to be totally surprised by our cake and not have one just picked out of a book. KWIM?? She tells me that they can't put any Disney characters on the cake because of copyrights. Duh. I knew that! I apologized, and I explained myself a little better. We didn't want actual characters on the cake (because we knew they couldn't do that!), but we wanted suggestive hints to our favorite things. Here's the example I used: My favorite character is Dumbo. I thought it would be cute to put on one of the tiers a little fondant circus tent, some peanuts, or even his signature red and gold clown ruffle worked into the design. Does that make any sense to anyone!? DF's favorite movie is Fantasia. Maybe a tier that is blue with white stars, like Mickey's hat, and then have little brooms or mushrooms (his favorite!) placed around the tier. *sigh* I think I'm just asking for too much. I just didn't want a standard topsy turvy cake. I wanted something that was more "us". I think I'm going to make our own cake topper though. I have a really great idea to make one out of polymer clay, and I'm going to try and work on it this weekend. Yeah, we'll see how that goes.
You know what's funny? My biggest fear was thinking that EVERYONE would be making the trip!! 
Our budget is so small, I knew there was no way we could afford for 100+ people to come down for the wedding! I was a little upset at first, but now I'm so relieved that there are only going to be 10 of us total! I sent out a Pre-RSVP, so-to-speak, a while back and that really helped me judge how many people were really honestly considering going. I seriously went from 
to 
to 
in a matter of 2 weeks!! 
You look beautiful! And I can't wait to see YOUR dress with that beautiful shade of blue. Totally understand about the train. The ones that I tried on that had the train, I felt like I had a giant tail. 
admit that I recreated a design I saw on another bride's post. I can't remember which bride used this design originally, but I fell in love with it! I have a background in design, so I got to work using Illustrator to re-do the card from the bottom up. I had a $25 credit with Shutterfly, so I got them printed as 4x6 pictures. I got 135 of them for FREE! I just had to pay the $8.00 shipping. So if you want to get technical, each one cost me about .06! Hopefully I will be able to score a deal like that when it comes to our Invitations!
