K&A eating fondue on a trip to Paris and the Netherlands this summer!
I've known Katherine for about 17 years - she lived in Milwaukee during my teenage years (she's about 10 years older than I am). She moved to NYC just before I went to college, married Michael, had Ariel, and I only just reconnected with her about 3 years ago when I started making more frequent trips to NYC. It's hard for me to believe it's been such a short time since we got back in touch, because they're a huge part of my life - I stay with them in Brooklyn for long stretches, get my own space in the basement of their great house, and have a fantastic quality of life that's hard to match when you're crashing on friends' couches. (I've recently reconnected with other friends with extra space for me, which is wonderful, and that way it takes a little longer to wear out my welcome with one friend/couple/family.)
Anyway, the best part of it has been having this extended Brooklyn family and a little sister-type I never had. I *LOVE* Ariel. She is spunky, cute, smart, and majorly fun. She's also 9 years old, which enables us to have a slightly more grown-up relationship than I might have had with a tiny tot flower girl. Ariel plays violin scarily well, and she usually plays for me when I'm there.
I wanted her to wear a teal dress to match the Holy Grail teal in my dress (it has been a little hard to match), and the color will look amazing on Ariel. Also, although it didn't work out to have the bridesmaids wear "real-life" dresses, I absolutely didn't want K&M to spend a lot of money on something she'll grow out of in 5 minutes and only have worn once. The dress she wore for the other wedding was really fancy, and I told Katherine it was probably a little too much for our less formal wedding. I didn't want to leave her hanging, so I started hunting. Rarely do I have trouble shopping, but I was hard-pressed to remember stores with cute tween clothes! I looked at a few stores I often search for my own clothes online: Nordstrom, Macy's, and Boden. Here's the first one I found:
So cute, and a reasonable price - Boden also has coupons for some % off and free shipping, so it would have been a little under $40. Katherine thought it might be a bit too little-girly for Ariel, and I also thought the corduroy might not be dressy enough, especially next to the chiffon bridesmaid dresses. So the search continued.
I looked on eBay and found several great options, which I promptly emailed to Katherine, and one of them was from Limited Too. I've often walked by that store and thought they had really cute stuff. I always shopped at The (grownup) Limited when I was a teenager. I checked out their website and found two promising options:
I hoped K&A would like the solid teal one more, but honestly I really just wanted Ariel to be happy in what she ended up with. So - here it is:
Doesn't she look fabulous? She got some cute black shoes, too. I think she's going to wear a flower crown, though perhaps not this one - here she is practicing her [very serious] flower girl routine:
Since Jewish weddings don't traditionally have kids involved as flower girls and ring bearers, Ariel is going to serve both functions and carry a single one of these with our rings tied to it:
I received it the other day, and it is even cuter in person! You can personalize the ribbon color, so I got purple & red that just so happen to match quite nicely and also make it plenty girly for Ariel. The "pillow" looks bigger in the picture and is actually only 4" in diameter, so it's a perfect size for a kid to carry. The best part? $10!
No comments:
Post a Comment