I spuddle.

I’ve been thinking about this blog and what it needs, mostly to keep me posting regularly (apart from The Bachelorette which I blog religiously on Mondays) (OK, fine, mostly on Tuesdays).   So after careful thought (i.e. I was vacuuming the crap from under the dining room table and thought, “I should add more structure to my blog!  Even though structure makes me anxious and I’ll probably forget by the second week!”) I’ve decided that Five Thing Friday is the way to go.   Every Friday, or some other day that ends with a ‘y’, I’ll post a list of five things.   Simple, right?  I’m sure other people have done this, so if I stole someone’s idea, I’m sorry.   Next time you see me, you can punch me in the nose, except please don’t because I’m the kind of person who would be the 1 in 1000000 who actually instantly dies from such an occurrence.   Could happen.   And would you want that on your conscience?   I thought not.

This week’s five things are, guess what?   Dresses.   That’s right.   I wonder if there is a word for a group of dresses, like a drama of dresses or a flurry of frocks.   If not, we should make those both officially the correct words for groups of dresses.   Someone add it to wikipedia, stat.

Without further ado, I give you the drama of dresses that I got for my birthday, which was entirely the best birthday I’ve ever had, and involved shopping (and actually trying things on, something I haven’t done for at least ten years and if you think I’m exaggerating, you are wrong), and eating out, and having blueberry ginger mojitos (spelled how?  no idea) at the pub, which is the only part which wasn’t as good as it sounds because actually I really am not a good drinker and instantly got a headache and felt like resting my head in a toilet.   Oh well, no day can be Totally Perfect, I suppose.

Well, hello there massive pile of dresses!   Having just discovered the (more…) feature of Wordpress, I’ve decided to just go ahead and use it so that my posts don’t look so intensely long, which they are, because I talk too much.   Oh wells.   Click more if you want to visit the dresses one by one, plus see three more things which aren’t dresses, but hey, they were birthday gifts, too.

1.   JCrew Dressy Jersey Twist Strap Dress in Dark Mushroom

Right after I posted this dress in my Five Dresses That I Covet post, it went on sale.   In combination with a coupon I happened to have, I paid $47 for this, so technically it wasn’t a birthday present, except I called it one in my head to justify the purchase.   This is the single most comfortable dress of all time.   BUY IT in spite of the fact that JCrew seriously needs to hire away Anthropologie’s catalogue writers so that this may be called something like Barefoot in the Park as opposed to the clinical tongue-twister it was christened with instead.   You will not regret it.   It is pretty because of the twisted straps, which makes it slightly dressier than the burlap bag you at first think it’s going to resemble when it arrives in the mail.   It is SO SOFT.   I am wearing it right now.   Yes, I have to alter it slightly so that the cleavage doesn’t end somewhere around the base of my sternum, which is not a good look for me, but I don’t care, this dress is worth altering.   I will wear it for every occasion that I can think of from now on, with my hair messily up and flip flops, so that it says, “I’m so casual and yet dressy and sexy and charming and hilarious and fun, all at the same time” so please invite me to something along those lines.   No, I don’t know what occasion that is, either, but we’ll come up with at least one so I can wear this for something other than typing this post.

2.  Oqoqo Strapless Convertible/Reversible Dress and Wrap

I love wraps.  I have no idea why.   It doesn’t make sense as they are traditionally the clothes worn by ballerinas and yoga enthusiasts over their perfect bodies when cooling down after an intense workout.   None of this has anything to do with my life, where the closest thing I do to ballet and/or yoga is when I stretch to pick up toys off the floor.   That does not stop me from worshipping the wrap, the perfect article of clothing.   This wrap came with a booklet of twenty different ways to wear the wrap, none of which I have tried but may just try one day in the future if I get tired of wearing it the regular way.   This wrap and strapless dress, which can also be worn inside out or as a skirt, came from Oqoqo which is part of the Lululemon chain of yoga clothing stores, which actually freak me out a bit because of all that stuff about how the employees have to do that training in whatever it is, like EST but not in 1970.   My two favourite dresses have come from this store.   They’re made of bamboo or something and so comfy.   I would have thought that a strapless dress made of bamboo jersey that was shorter than my knees would make me look like a jackass, but I put it on and Clayton swooned, so now when I wear this I feel pretty even if I’m probably too old to wear it.    Speaking of which, I tried on this other dress at a different store which was kind of a wrap dress made of purple linen but it had these strange vulcan epaulets on it and the saleswoman said, and I’m not making this up, “Oh, that’s too youthful for you.”   WHAT?  ARE YOU SAYING THAT I’M OLD?   BECAUSE I AM OLD BUT I DON’T LIKE FOR IT TO BE POINTED OUT.   I almost bought that one to spite her, but didn’t because the seaming on it showed exactly how crooked my spine is and it made me anxious because no one likes to be crooked, and if you are crooked, you really don’t want to look it.

3.  Point Zero Summer Dress

In addition to my Day Of Shopping with Clayton, my mother-in-law gave me a gift certificate to Winners.     I could write a whole post about how much I love Winners.   If I am going to shop, I invariably shop at Winners, which is the equivalent (I think) of TJ Maxx in the US.    It’s like treasure hunting and sometimes you can find the best stuff.   I buy all the kids’ shoes there for about a tenth of what they would cost at the fancy kids’ stores in this neighbourhood.   Toys?  Check.   Clothes for Clayton?   Check.   Lawn furniture?   Check.   Books?   Yep.   Kitchen stuff?   Definitely.   With my gift certificate, I found this cotton beauty, the only dress on this list that is not stretchy.   This dress says, “I am walking on the beach barefoot and maybe I’m going to go surfing or perhaps sit and read with the wind blowing prettily in my hair and my kids playing quietly in the sand by my feet while the sun sets over the Pacific.”    I love this dress.   When I saw it on the rack, I thought “Myenh, too much pattern.”  But huzzah, it FITS so entirely perfectly (which is a miracle because apparently I don’t have breasts anymore, I must have grown out of them) that I was forced to buy it.   It also helped that it was $29.99.   My mother-in-law had no idea when she bought that gift certificate that I would turn it into two dresses, a swim suit, a pair of jeans, shoes for the kids, a My Little Pony bag for The Birdy, and a Spiderman swim set for The Bun.    I love you, Winners.   SMOOCH.

4.  Calvin Klein Jeans Dress

OK, here’s a funny story about this dress, which isn’t that funny.   But how funny can dress shopping be?   Not very, that’s how.    So there I was at Winners, alone with no kids, trying on dresses even though I was almost out of money on the Gift Card.    I tried on this dress, and it was cute and comfy and I thought, “Great!”   It was only $29.99!   A steal!    As I was leaving the changing room, I noticed a size medium on the rack.   I’d tried the size small, which fit fine, but for some reason I thought, “I should buy the medium!”  I have no idea why.   If it fits, why mess with it?   Regardless, I bought the medium without trying it on and when I got home and put it on, I realized it was cut for Pamela Anderson.   Apparently the difference between a small and a medium, when you are Calvin Klein, is all in the ta tas.   Which are two things, ta and ta, which I do not have.   As a result, I spent two hours altering my size medium dress so that it fit as well as the size small had fit.   I did impress myself by managing to not screw it up, but still, why?   No idea.   Anyway, it’s a cute dress.   I wore it yesterday to get cupcakes with the kids.   I’m not sure what occasion the dress is for, so I’ve decided that it’s just an every day dress, and damn it, I WILL wear it every day because it was so much trouble.   But also, $29.99!    Thank you, Mr. Calvin Klein.   I love the tie-dye effect, which suggests that I really am a hippie on the inside, or even actually on the outside as well.

5.  Ralph Lauren Little Black Dress

I did not go shopping for a LBD.    I have one or two or three LBDs and I was shopping for a summer dress.   This dress is Clayton’s fault as he forced me to try it on and then made me buy it because he declared it “perfect”.  If you find a dress that your husband thinks is perfect, you must allow him to buy it for you because after all it is your birthday and if you own a perfect LBD, he will want you to wear it and will therefore take you out to fancy dinners where you can wear it and then you’ll live Happily Ever After just like in Disney films but with less singing and fewer bits of lace and shiny pink things on your dress and no soundtrack by Mr. Elton John.   We found this dress at The Bay, which is the same shop where the saleswoman said I was too old for vulcan-style epaulets, which just goes to show that the sales-staff are downright mean at The Bay.    Dresses were 40% off so if you are shopping for a dress and live in Canada, now is a good time to buy one at The Bay.   I’m just saying.    Anyway, LBDs rarely photograph well when posed gracelessly on the dirty ottoman in my living room, so trust me when I say this dress is v. cute.

Which rounds out my list of five things, for this, the inaugral post of Five Thing Friday.   But wait!   There’s more!   Because I took a picture, I will show you!   Because it’s my blog!  And I can do what I want!

Hello, pile of other lovelies that I got for my birthday:

Yes, this makes it eight things.   The purse caught my eye after three hours of shopping during which I’d found nothing I even wanted to try on apart from a seventies Pucci print Michael Kors dress that cost more than everything in this list combined that I’d wear while yachting on the Mediterranean, i.e. never.   The purse cheered me up.   Because, pretty!   The jeans (Earl) fit better than any jeans I’ve owned in my life and if there was a housefire, I suspect Clayton would run back into the house and save the jeans at the last minute.   Better yet?   $39.99.    Yep, Winners.   The swimsuit which I only now realize is stained with someone else’s deoderant, I bought because I haven’t bought one since university (which was twenty years ago) and last time I took the kids swimming at the pool, I threw out the old one because the fabric had disintigrated to the point that it looked like I had slipped on the outer layer of skin from an elephant, if there was such a thing as an elephant who was black and had the word “Roots” written across his/her chest.    By the end of the lesson, it was held together by only my intense humiliation and wish that it at least remained somewhat in place until I could get it to the nearest trash can.   It goes without saying that also at the pool at the time was a girl I went to highschool with who looked perfectly coiffed and dressed and twenty years younger than I know her to be.   It was like a reunion, if you can imagine being naked at a reunion while everyone else is perfectly coiffed and dressed.   I put this swimsuit on in the changeroom and The Bun said, “Wow, Mummy, you look so pretty!”   Which says something but also I should mention that The Bun likes to see a lot of skin and may have been commenting on the amount of Mummy that was showing vs. the cut of the suit itself but I was in a hurry and guess what?   $29.99.   Is anything at Winners NOT $29.99?   I thought not.

Whew.   This was more shopping than I’ve done probably ever and now I have a new wardrobe of dresses.   Quick, invite me somewhere!    Please?

Filed under: Five Thing Friday, Shopping