Newport Ball

 

We’re at this point, at almost the end of Ben’s first year of business school, that seems like we are just going from event to event. Somewhere in there Ben has a little bit of time to prep cases and sleep, but mostly it seems to be balancing a full social calendar of school related events. And to think this time last year we were putting our house in Ohio on the market, considering our time at the gym + church our outings for the week, and only dreaming of what Boston would be like.

But enough rambling.

I remember hearing about Newport Ball at the beginning of school. It seemed so far away that we’d be celebrating the end of the first year down in Newport, RI with all of Ben’s 900n classmates.

It turns out the venue is not quite the old Newport mansion we’d envisioned when we’d imagined the event back in the fall – but it didn’t even matter because the company made it a wonderful evening anyway.

For a spring evening it was freezing (we all would have loved to be wearing our down winter parkas in these pictures 🙂 ).

We drove out of Boston right after class on Friday afternoon,  grateful it wasn’t in a snowstorm like it had the two weeks previous for Cape Cod. We made the two hour drive slowly through Friday rush hour traffic, stopping at McDonalds (no Chick-fil-a en route) and the grocery store before arriving at our house for the weekend around 5:30.

We had an hour and a half to get the kids down for the night and ourselves dressed for the evening. With a bit of tag-teaming and a few words of caution to the babysitter, we were out the door around 7pm. We took ubers over to the manor (manor? mansion? extra large house? venue?) along with the friends staying in the house with us for the weekend.

We spent the night eating, dancing, and mostly just sitting around chatting with friends.

What I wore: 

I ordered a couple of different dresses off of Nordstrom two weeks before the event and fell in love with the silhouette of this dress from Eliza J. I ordered this blush and a gorgeous blue print in a larger size (I wasn’t sure what size I’d be and couldn’t stomach ordered each dress in both colors, even if I was going to be returning the ones I didn’t wear).

I asked you on instagram which dress I should wear and while the overwhelming number said blue, the fit just didn’t work and I went with the pink for the evening.

Both dresses are stocked in a few sizes online at a couple of different retailers and I can’t recommend them more! They’re even more beautiful in person and the perfect fun twist on a floor length dress.

for reference: I’m 5’4″ and would order this in a petite if I were doing it again (wearing a regular length here)

 

P.S. Unlike the winter HBS Prom (it isn’t actually called that but that’s basically what it is), we didn’t hire a babysitter to spend the night and wake up with our kids in the morning. And I totally should have.

Dress options / links:

pink dress // blue dress // another coral pattern // navy dress

(more cute spring midi dresses here)

Nude Heels: Old (more gorgeous pumps here)

Bow Clutch: Old (more fun clutches here)

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  1. Pingback: What We Miss About HBS life | Elisabeth McKnight