Bringing Up Bates, "The Quest for the Dress"...
- Kelly and Michaela meet with Kim, Kelly’s older sister, to discuss flowers for the wedding. Kim has a flower shop in Mebane, North Carolina, called Gallery Florist. She has done flowers for each of the Bates kids’ weddings, as well as for Kelly’s wedding.
- Michaela wants cherry blossoms, but since they aren't in season in August, she settles for silk flowers.
- After Kelly married Gil, her mom adopted two daughters. One of those girls, Beth, is getting married the month before Michaela, so Kelly and Michaela meet up with the rest of the family for Beth’s wedding shower. Michaela and Beth are only a year apart in age and are close friends.
- For one of the shower games, guests divide up into teams and create toilet paper wedding dresses. Afterwards, Gil the penny pincher gathers the leftover toilet paper to take home. “Man, look at all this savings!” exclaims Gil. “This is the soft kind.”
- Later, Erin and Chad have a photographer take newborn pictures of Carson. “I have never known why people want to go take pictures of itty bitty babies,” says Nathan. “And then the next thing is, why they always want to take their clothes off and put them in a little bucket or something."
- Michaela, accompanied by her mom, sisters, and sister-in-law, heads to White Lace & Promises in Knoxville, Tennessee, in search of the perfect wedding dress. The bride-to-be wants a simple gown that makes her look skinny and has a train and sleeves.
- As expected, Michaela is hit with an onslaught of opinions each time she tries on a dress. “I’m going to tell you something about the Bates,” says Josie. “They are not scared to say what they think. They just blurt it out. Whitney doesn’t do that, but we do that.”
- “It is good to be honest,” agrees Whitney. “But you have to do it in a loving kind of way.”
- Tori and Carlin turn out to be the biggest critics.
- After trying on a bunch of wedding dresses, Michaela admits to feeling discouraged. “I was thinking, ‘Maybe we should just elope or have a tiny wedding that nobody is going to see,'” she shares.
- But before long, Michaela finds exactly what she has been looking for. The gown will need extensive alterations to remove some of the poof and add capped sleeves, but everyone agrees that it is very “Michaela.”
- The only catch is that it will cost nearly $2,000, which is significantly more than Michaela had allotted for in her wedding budget. She resolves to pray about it and make the final decision in a few days.
