Caroline's Turn

On Tuesday I took Katherine shopping. Today it was Caroline's turn. Someday, it might be Morgan's turn. I doubt it'll ever be Will's turn, at least not any time soon.

Caroline has graduation in two weeks! She'll graduate from elementary school and is supposed to wear a dress. Okay, well, the girls do have dresses galore in their closets. They're really cute dresses, too. The problem is that someone has reached an age where she doesn't really appreciate the cute and wants something a little more, well, (David, stop reading!) mature. Yikes! So soon?! Yup, she's hitting middle school in August and this girl wants to make a statement!

That is a huge exaggeration. She just wants a new dress that isn't a hand-me-down!

So we decided to go shopping...at Short Pump Mall. We'd never been there before and I really had no interest in going until this week. I'm not a huge mall person, and I hate crowds, but when K and I were shopping on Tuesday we ran into a girl wearing a beautiful graduation dress that she had bought at Dillard's at Short Pump Mall. Voila! The plans were laid.

So off we went, after extracting a certain 13-year-old from the back of the van!

First stop was Dillard's, where we found nothing remotely close to the dress I'd seen earlier. That was fine because, among other items, Caroline was able to find several dresses to try. She has forbidden anyone from seeing her graduation dress but I'll document the dresses she tried and nixed. The first one she tried because of the blue in the pattern, but she hated the pink flower. The second one was my favorite because it was such a pretty party dress - the major problem with that one was that it had no blue in it at all. The third one was really pretty on but looks horrible in the picture, was really too big, and not really dressy enough.

Why blue? Caroline and some of her friends wanted to coordinate their outfits for graduation and have even selected matching earrings and bracelets!

After paying for our purchases and mediating a disagreement between the two sales ladies who tried to help us, we abandoned the girls' dress department and headed to shoes. Caroline found three pairs that she wanted to try -

The pair on the right were her favorite - clear heels with rhinestone decorations. The other two pairs were more sensible for every other use beyond graduation. In the end, none would work. The rhinestone ones, called Cinderella, really were Cinderella shoes! Poor Caroline couldn't even get her whole foot into the shoe, even though they were marked the right size! We had to laugh, took our purchases to the van, and continued our search for shoes.

Here's Caroline with her Dillard's bags. They also hold things she picked out for her sisters. What a sweet girl. She'd see something green and say "Oh, Morgan would love that!' and when she saw an orange crush t-shirt she just had to have it for Katherine!

We wandered aimlessly until we found the children's shoe department at Nordstrom where Caroline charmed the shoe girl, and was presented with the last pair of open-toed shoes. We're sure they were sitting there on the shelf just waiting for us, because they fit her feet perfectly!

With dress and shoes taken care of we needed some lunch! Caroline consulted a map and we found our way to The Cheesecake Factory. We should have been 4 people because more than half of our food came home with us! Even the glass of sweet tea was monstrous! We were so full that we didn't even think about ordering dessert!

After eating we headed to several other stores that had caught our eyes. We ended up only buying a small gift for our little-about-to-be-a-big-brother-cousin Evan and some Thomas books for Will. We wandered on out of the mall and headed on home.

What a great day!