I know my mama is counting my wedding dress buttons from heaven.

I don’t really have many friends, not someone I could really consider a best friend, at least not any more, but I got my wedding dress a while back and I want to show it off somewhere. The wedding is in November and Im so so excited. There’s also a story to this wedding dress. My mom passed away when I was just 9ish months old. She had bone cancer in her jaw that spread rapidly and she died the day before her 19th birthday. Naturally her sister, my aunt, and my mom’s best friend are incredibly close to me. I wanted them at my first dress fitting. My aunt and I are very close, more like sisters, and she lives close to home where I get to see her and her sweet baby girl. It was that baby girls first birthday the weekend we decided to shop for dresses the first time, since my late mama’s best friend I mentioned earlier, would be in town for the baby’s first birthday.

So the place I call to make an appointment with that I really wanted to go to, had shut down! So my aunt suggested a different place and I called to see if they had an appointment for that day, and they just so happened to have a cancellation! We had to just get in the car and run! We were even a couple minutes late to the appointment.

Now Im trying on dresses and I could have stopped at the first dress or the second (they were in my top three) but all the dresses I was trying on, I was struggling because I didn’t like the necklines. Im very self aware of how wide my shoulders are and I dont really like a lot of chest showing. My aunt knows this because we have the same body type and same insecurities so she suggested on a whim that I try something on with a longer sleeve, that way I feel more comfortable (plus the wedding is outside on the coast in fall anyway so it’ll be chilly.) So they pull out this dress, this beautiful gown. They normally don’t sell this designer because she usually makes 20-30 thousand dollar dresses, but she came out with this line ($3,125 for this dress to be exact) so they carried it for a while. Now that price, way out of our budget even though my mom and dad would have tried to make it work, but they didn’t have to! This dress was the sample, and they were selling it, because the dress just wasn’t selling! The girls around here wanted sleek and tight and sexy, not fluffy and traditional. It was on sale from $3,125 to $495!!! AND HERE’S THE KICKER, IT FITS ME LIKE A GLOVE!! NO TAILOR NEEDED! :O It was a total God thing! He wanted me to have that dress. Once I said yes to the dress my mama’s best friend told me the story about how she used to keep my mom company in the hospital by looking through wedding magazines judging the dresses. And every dress that they came across that had buttons down the back, they had to stop and count the buttons. I just know my mama is up in heaven counting the buttons down the back of my wedding dress. ❤️