Momma in Town: The Dishes...

Day Two.
When Dale and I first got married, I already had a hand-me-down set of dishes from a previous roommate, so we decided on getting more pressing things like cooking utensils and bedding with our wedding gift cards.  We've now been married two years, and I've spent the last 6 months saving up my fun money and shopping for dishes on line.  I finally narrowed down my list of possibilities to one set  of two colors.  I thought that this would be a fun thing to do with my mom, ... cause no one else really wanted to go with me to make the final decision on dish ware.

The plan was simple: walk in, pick up the dishes I had selected in the quantity I had chosen, and head on to a museum.  The execution was not quite so simple.

We walked in the store, and my mom immediately took an interest in an accent plate for my dishes. When I saw the set I had chosen in person, it turns out the "chili red glaze" which I had assumed was just a bad online picture was actually more of a deep maroon and was not what I had hoped for in my kitchen.  We immediately found a more red plate colored "paprika" (although how paprika is supposed to be more red than chili peppers, I have yet to understand), and went on the hunt for an accent plate.  We tried every red/yellow colored accent plate the store had in stock including this one, this one, and this one.  This one and this one were a little more tempting than the others, but I could go on, and you can understand how complicated this procedure is getting.  I finally decided on one, but when I got to the check out counter, it looked AWESOME with the red plates, but only a little impressive with the yellow.  Add that to the concern that the red plates didn't come in the same style as the deep bowls of the yellow, and ...

It was all very nerve wracking, but we came out with something beautiful:

 Forget that once I decided to get rid of the yellow plates, that made me itch to go back and consider other accent plates that hadn't gone well with the yellow,

And that the only piece of my original selection still included with these plates is the bowl.

I'm proud of them.  I always see sets like this in cooking shows and resturaunts, but I never know how they put them together!  It took us two hours to select, purchase, and pack the dishes, then another hour and a half to select matching table cloths and napkins, but I now have a beautiful dining room!

We had planned to do other things that afternoon.  Who knew buying dishes was a whole day event?  Anyway, thanks to my mom for going with me and encouraging me to try every option until I found the perfect one.  It was a lot of fun to be with you.