A few pics of our family...particularly Ellie

So I have to tell the story of shopping for the dresses for the wedding. I decided since I wasn't going to be any thinner I would just accept that and asked my friend Brooke to go shopping with me. I told her I didn't care what I spent that I cared about looking good for one day. My sister's wedding colors were white and black but she asked that we all be in black with no other colors. We took a night and left our kids with our hubbies and went in search. We started at Dress Barn. We found a dress that made her job drop after only trying on a couple dresses. The only concern was, it was black and gray, not just black. So we kept shopping while we waited to hear from my sister if I could have gray. When I got a hold of her we had found the exact same jacket piece at Ross for half price and a couple all black dresses that were VERY expensive. She said yes and we went back and bought the beautiful black and gray dress. The hard part was over in one night, or so I thought. I honestly thought it would be easy to find a dress for Ellie. How wrong I was. I can't tell you how many stores and how many days I spent looking for a dress. I found one at Macy's that matched mine amazing but it was 140.00!!! How can I spend that on a dress for a 1 year old. I went to check it out when I heard they were 50% off. On the way there I stopped to check out Dillards and found a sparkly black dress for only 12.00 How awesome is that. It's a cute "slinky black dress style" But I still loved the gray and black dresses so I went to look at them again. The gal at the store gave me a LOT of pressure to just buy the dress--they had one in Rachel's size too. And return it later if it didn't end up working. I finally gave into pressure. I will never be so glad it did. There was a computer glich and it was taking 50% off the half price so I got both dresses for under 70.00. I did get the sparkly black dress too so she got two new dresses. Then while in Utah we were shopping at the Quilted Bear and one booth had black and white ties in sizes for my boys and John for 5 bucks each. How could I pass that up? So now we all match. How cute is that! Sometimes shopping and patience really pays off!