When I went wedding dress shopping, I was not in the least bit pregnant. I wasn't even in the "trying" category. And I hate to admit this -- I didn't think I was the type -- but I LOVED shopping for a wedding gown. I got really into it. I went on a feverish Say Yes to the Dress-style blitz, booking appointments everywhere I could think of. I'm not a shopper, but for some reason, trying on long white dresses in fancy-sounding fabrics made me giddy. Like a schoolgirl.
When I found "the one" -- an empire waist halter dress in the Vera Wang David's Bridal line (aka cheap Vera Wang) -- I still was not with child. So the gown I slinked into was my usual size and fit me almost perfectly. It even needed to be taken in a little.Kids challenge gender identity earlier.
Looking back, those days were bliss. It was just about a week later that I got pregnant and a month or so after that when I found out about it. I quickly did the math. Yep. I'd be more than five months when I took the much-awaited trip down the aisle. The size 4 hanging in my closet would have been left behind long before that.Luckily, by the time my first fitting rolled around, I'd just done the at-home test that yielded the double pink lines. But for some strange reason that to this day escapes me, the seamstress and I both agreed that the 4 should still work and we'd just have to let it out some when the time came. Were we heavily medicated? No. There was no excuse for our delusions.
Three months into the pregnancy, I had a nightmare. I dreamed that I no longer fit into my wedding gown, but when I went to pick up the right size at David's, they told me they'd ordered a different -- read: hideous -- dress to replace it. I woke up in a cold sweat, and tried my dress on. Sure enough, I was already bursting out of it in the bust area (Dolly Parton would have been proud). I booked another appointment. Again the delusions washed over us -- was it something in the stuffy David's air? -- and we, very rationally we thought, decided to order me one size up, a 6.