Dress shopping with Dakota

Brighton and I went dress shopping with Dakota to get her a dress for Prom. I am really excited for her to have the opportunity to go to. She was asked by Blake Truman. She and Brighton started by going to Jacque Trumans to see if she had any dresses (She buys immodest dresses and remakes them into beautiful modest ones) She had one that Dakota really liked but she wanted to continue shopping to see if she found one she liked better. I have to tell you here that we went in Jamens Jeep (The boys had taken my suburban to a race in Arizona) Let me just say that even though my suburban is 8+ years old and has 200,000 miles on it, I. LOVE. MY. SUBURBAN! Jamens car has no A/C and is very loud. Which means you have to drive with the windows down in 98* weather with the wind blowing in loudly. Which means that you cant have a conversation in the car because you cant hear anything! Although on the plus side, my left arm and ear did get sunburned from hanging out the window so much! Now I just need to be a passenger in his car to even the other side out! Dakota's 2 friends- Mariah Logue and Cameron Mock came with us. They are really cute, fun girls. (I wondered what they thought, they aren't LDS and it was a big deal to find a modest dress- did they think I was weird to keep asking Dakota how she would make each dress modest? But then again, by the end I did hear them say a couple of times- you could do this to make it modest or look at this one- its pretty modest!) We started off by going to Davids Bridal. I think she tried on about 10 dresses there. They had no dresses in her size. She did find a purple one that she really liked but it was way to big. We continued on. We decided to go to the Meadows Mall. On the way there we passed another dress shop, it was called The Bridal Shop, so we stopped. It had some really crazy dresses! If you are looking for something that will make you stand out in a crowd, that was the place to go! It was fun seeing all of these crazy dresses though! We got to the mall and started in Dillards- downstairs and upstairs. She found a couple she liked but they were seriously $200.00. Not even close to our price range. JC Penney's, Princessa and  Macys. Nothing. Now what? And can I just say- why are there no modest, beautiful formal dresses? Dakota said she didn't want to be the girl you could totally tell that had had her dress re-made. (The cheap (-in price) Mormon) We were running out of time. Brighton and Cameron had to be back by 4:00- Brighton to go house hunting and Cameron to babysit. I decided to drop Dakota and Mariah off at the Fashion Sow Mall, take everyone else home and go back and get Dakota. There was supposed to be a really great store there to look at. Turns out- not in Vegas any longer! Bummer. By the time I got back to pick them up, I was DONE! I just wanted to go home. My feet hurt, I was so hot and sweaty from driving Jamens car, I think the heat just took alot out of me. I just wanted to be home. Although--- I did get 3 pieces of chocolate from See's candy! 2 white chocolate mint and 1 caramel!!!! MMMMMM! They were so tasty! (YES, I did eat all of them in 5 minutes or less!)

I want to tell you a really cool experience that I had. Heavenly Father truly does hear and answer our prayers. From the time I was dropping Dakota and Mariah off to the time I met back up with them, I was saying a prayer in my mind to please help her find a really beautiful dress that was in our price range ($125-$130). I just kept saying it over and over.They had looked in a bunch of stores and she had found one at the Macys store (they had way more to chose from in the Fashion Sow than at the Meadows) So I met up with them there. She showed it to me and it was really pretty. It was a minty green with long flowing strips from the bodice down to the floor so it would swish when she moved. It fit her perfectly. She would even be able to wear heels (Blake is 6'7", only a foot and 2" taller than her) I asked her how much it was and she told me it was $170. Too much! But as I told you- I was so done with shopping. I told her that we would get it and I would figure it out later. We went up to the check stand and the lady was really nice. She asked if I wanted to open a credit card account. If I did I would get 20% off. I declined. She asked again. No thank you. Then she asked when we needed the dress by. In May. She then asked if we would be interested in doing a presale? I didn't know what that meant. She said if we bought it now and picked it up after Wednesday (they had a big sale starting on wed.) then we would be able to get 25% off. I said yes! It ended up that we got $43.00 off of the sale price! That made it $139.24!!! Right where we needed it to be! (OK $10.00 more but still- really close to where our budget was!) And did I mention that it came with a scarf that we could have made into sleeves that would match perfectly and make it modest!!!!! Heavenly Father truly did answer my prayer! He hears us! He wants to bless us. He will do everything he can for us. It was fun going with her. I hope she didn't think by the time we were done that Brighton and I were still the modesty Nazi's (She did call us that while she rolled her eyes at us the night before. And she said she would end up getting a turtleneck with us going!) Love ya Dakota. You are beautiful!