My family got together for happy hour and dinner at a nearby Southwestern restaurant to celebrate my mom's birthday. While a family dinner isn't a unique way to celebrate, it's truly the way we connect best, especially in my immediate family. We laugh until our sides hurt, we re-tell our favorite stories and gently poke fun at each other, we make sure that significant others are asked questions and invited to be part of the conversation.

When I was a kid, it was very important to my parents that we all sit around to eat at the dinner table without distractions (like TV) so that we could talk. However, I thought that family dinners were a drag. I mean, I wasn't allowed to bring my book to the table. I had to sit! And eat! And converse! When all I really wanted to do was finish up my latest read. Yes, I was (still am) a total bookworm.

Then when I was a teen in high school, my parents, sister, and I took a marvelous 3-week trip to France - our first trans-continental trip together. We traveled from Normandy to the Loire Valley to Arles, staying a couple days in cities along the way, and then spending the last week in Paris (which also happened to coincide with my mom's birthday that year.) Being that we were in France, good food and extended, slow-paced mealtimes became part of our daily routine and were an enjoyable way to relax at the end of a day of sight-seeing and endless walking.

Somehow, during that three week trip, the requirement of HAVING to sit and talk with my parents at the dinner table turned into such a fun thing to do. We'd marvel over the places we had visited, talk about what we hoped to do next, giggle over our missteps (my dad mistakenly asking, in his tourist's French, for tickets for his "wives"; the waiter who was quacking like a duck while serving our meal; the men who were flirting with my sister and me.) We carried that routine back with us to the States after our vacation, and as adults living on our own, sitting down to eat and laugh with my family is still one of my sister's and my favorite activities.

We're still happily enjoying the Seattle equivalent of a heat wave, so I was able to wear my purple Vince Camuto grecian hi-low hem dress without an upper layer (though I brought along a bright red cardigan as a cover-up just in case it was cool inside, which I wore part of the day at work as well.)

I kept the accessories simple and bright - standard white watch, faux-coral necklace from Nervous System (put on a longer chain this time so that it would mesh better with the neckline of this dress), turquoise and carnelian beaded earrings, orange ECCO pumps. I stayed cool and felt incredibly comfortable.

When I wear this dress, I notice that I keep trying to catch my reflection in mirrors or windows. The drapey folds of the skirt flow when you walk in it, and the longer back hem flares out and ripples. Vince Camuto really knocked it out of the ballpark with this one - it wasn't for nothing that the dress appeared on Angie's recent list of fab finds.