The Registry

I suppose all brides and grooms have to disagree about something and well, our disagreement has been the registry. No, not where to register, but whether to register. Funny thing is, we agree on one thing, we don't really want gifts for our wedding. And on top of that, we both feel a little uncomfortable setting up a registry as it feels like we're telling people they have to buy us something. But as a good friend told me, "If you don't want gifts, don't get married." I'm of the opinion that if people are going to give us gifts, I'd prefer they be something we could actually use and enjoy. The idea of sitting in my living room surrounded by gifts that are useless or, heaven help us, ugly, is just too depressing for me to risk. So after countless conversations, procrastinations and scoldings from various family members, Rob and I finally decided to the plunge and register and let me tell you, it was not easy.

We started by putting a few things on a registry at macy's. I was pretty proud of us for setting anything up at all. But then Macy's suggests for the size of our wedding, we register for 200 gifts. We've managed to think of 13. 8 of which are all the same and were only recently added. The day Randy was at Macy's and asked to have our registry printed out, the sales clerk laughed in his face and told him it was the smallest registry she had ever seen. I think we may have humiliated him.

Next we went to REI where I could have registered for dozens of things but thought a bunch of new clothes for myself might be inappropriate for a gift registry. We were able to come up with 6 things the two of us could use though so it wasn't a wasted trip.

With 181 gifts to go, we realized we had to call in some support. Gretchen Junker to the rescue! On Sunday, she took us out to Crate and Barrel to try and add some more things to the list. Crate and Barrel has it all figured out. They offer couples a handheld scanner you carry through the store to scan the UPC codes of any item you're interested in. At the end, you just load the scanner into the registry box and it updates your registry. So Rob goes up to the counter and asks for "The Gun." What a man, eh? A gun. Funny thing is, the clerk followed suit, also calling it a gun. Except when he was talking to me and suddenly it became a "toy."



With the right equipment, we were able to shoot, are you ready for this, 50 more gifts! That's about four times better than we were able to do anywhere else so, obviously, Gretchen's assistance really made an impact. Perhaps it was the hand shadow threats she made to us on the third floor.



Holy mackeral, only 131 more to go. Is it even possible to think of 200 gifts that you want for yourself? We are about tapped out of ideas so we went to www.thehoneymoon.com and finished up our registry with things that we want to enjoy on our honeymoon in Kauai. We're not quite at 200 but if we just don't log on to Macy's any longer, we can easily avoid the bright red "low registry" warning. Please, haven't we gone through enough?

Take time out to view our gift registry dance if you need some inspiration.