Speed Shopping

This month is what we affectionately call "No School November" because the girls have only one week with five days of school this entire month. Last week was a two day school week for Natalie! We're currently on the last day of a seven day weekend. Normally our schedule doesn't have a lot of breathing room and, besides Sunday, a free day is as rare as a tasty school lunch. November has lots of free days and it's been pretty great so far.

Today we decided to take advantage of the free day and try to find dresses for Abigail and Emily to wear to the winter formal. It's possible we'll have another day to go shopping between now and when the dance rolls around in February, but it's also possible that we won't. Plus, there are tons of cute party and going out dresses in stores right now because it's getting close to Christmas. If we went looking in January there'd be much less to choose from.

We headed to Norwich and found parking but we were on the clock - the maximum stay was two hours and if we went over that time limit there was a £50 fee. But as we learned today, there's nothing like a deadline to focus your efforts and force you to be efficient. We knew they both wanted something that was modest all by itself as neither of them wanted to have to put something over or under a dress to make it work. That one thing actually made the whole process easier because we could quickly eliminate the majority of the dresses and just look at the few that met the standards.

We spent most of our time in Debenhams because they have the biggest selection so it seemed like we'd have the best chance of finding something there. I think we ended up with around ten dresses to try between the two of them? We headed for the fitting room where Samantha and I helped with zippers and hangers while Emily and Abby tried on dress after dress. They both found a dress they loved, which was basically a miracle.

Emily chose this wine-colored velvet faux-wrap dress. She's been digging all the velvet that's back in style lately. I'm pretty sure I wore a velvet dress to at least one high school dance. Some of those 90s styles are coming around again!
Abigail found this dress at Sainsbury's, which is kind of like Target only a lot smaller. Still, they have groceries and clothes and home decorative stuff and this dress that was only £22 and everything Abby was looking for.
But then we found this dress at Debenhams and she had to have it because she felt "like a princess" in it and couldn't stop smiling and twirling when she was wearing it. We decided to buy it for homecoming next school year. 
We were such speedy shoppers that we still had 45 minutes to spare after finding and buying all three dresses. There was nothing to do but head down the street to Five Guys for burgers and fries! 


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