Wedding Dress Fitting...Oh Boy!

I went to IL this past weekend to have my first wedding dress fitting. I was SO excited! I spent the weekend hanging out with my sister who is home from college; Monday was the big fitting appointment. We were planning to go to the fitting at 11am, grab some lunch afterward and then Ashley was going to drop me off at the airport because my flight was at 5:30 in the evening.

We showed up at the bridal store and they remembered me. All the ladies who worked there got all excited and went in the back to get my dress. They hung it up in its opaque pink garment bag in the dressing room and I went in to try it on. My wedding dress! How exciting! I unzipped the bag and.....

...it was not my dress. It was some completely different dress that I HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE. OH GOD, WHERE THE HELL IS MY DRESS?! So, attempting to be calm, I went over to the woman who was ringing up another bride at the counter and informed her that that was not my dress. She proceeded to look horrified (as did the woman odering her dress!) and go look in the back to see if something had been switched while I tried not to cry in public. It turns out that the factory transposed the dress number. Instead of sending dress #672 they sent dresss #762. Fan-freaking-tastic. And, oh yeah, they don't have a dress #672 in stock in my size, so the earliest they can get it to me is mid-late July. Keep in mind that the wedding is August 12.

So, at this point the ladies who work there are totally freaked out. I can tell that they are genuinely upset about this, and the woman who owns the store offers me two options:

1) They will order the new dress in my size and when it comes in they will ship it to me in MD and pay for me to have it altered out there.
2) They have a floor model of the dress I ordered in the store that has only been tried on a couple of times and is one size smaller than the one I ordered. They can have their seamstress let it out a bit and I can come back that afternoon to see if it will work and if I take that one, they will give it to me for half price.

So, I took option 2 with contingency plan 1. I tried on the smaller dress which mostly fit except for being a bit tight in the waist. Ashley and I stayed in the area. We got some lunch and hung out at the mall until they called us at 2:40 to let us know that the dress was ready for me to try on again. It did fit, actually, and so they took the measurements for the hem and sent us on our way.

Now, Ashley and I had to make it to O'Hare airport in time for me to make a 5:30 pm flight, which was a bit dicey since it was, at this time, 3:10 or so and we had to stop for gas on the way. Plus, we were coming from a different suburb than usual so we had to take a different route with which we were unfamiliar. Oh, and on the way we encountered a bad accident and a major traffic jam.

It all ended up okay...actually, it ended up better than okay since I made my flight AND I am getting my wedding dress for half price. Still, it was an extremely stressful day to say the least! *sigh* I should have gone with a Greek theme and worn a white bedsheet...I mean toga.