On Registering

Last night renee and I officially started our wedding registry at Bed, Bath & Beyond. It’s a very bizzare experience, sort of shopping for yourself, but yet not. Using the barcode gizmo thingy is pretty fun, though, as we went through the store picking things we like. And other things we think we like.

Which brings up one of the best things about this registry. We don’t know exactly where we’ll be or what we’ll need after we get hitched. BBB keeps our registry for two years after the wedding and lets us return, in those two years, anything that’s purchased for us. So if it turns out we’re wrong, and don’t want the cool toaster oven, we can bring it back and get what we end up needing. The store also exists all over the U.S.A. and online, making it easy for people to shop. Eventually, for the fancier dinnerware and some other nice things, we’ll register at William Ashley in Toronto. (BBB actually has the nice stuff too, it’s just not displayed in-store)

BBB became our first choice because of all the things they do for us, making it easy and enjoyable throughout. And Robin, the wedding guru at our Lincoln Park store, is great to have working with us. But it’s still very weird to have a list at the end of the night showing how many things we registered for and the total value of the list — it’s scary, really. Which adds to the bizzare feeling that registering caused.

But we reminded ourselves of a few things. For one, Robin added whole families of items. Like every single Oxo thing they carry — which is a lot. We’ll be deleting a lot of that later (no way we need it all!), when we aren’t faced with a giant wall of gadgets (as much as we love that wall, it’s overwhelming). So the scary numbers will go down. But that doesn’t totally relieve the odd feeling.

So we also reminded ourselves (with Robin’s help) that we are very fortunate in that we have many loving and caring friends and family, who also want to give us a wedding gift. So they may as well see all the things we really want. After all, we don’t want one crock pot, much less four of them (and the crock pot is apparently the number one registry item). So the registry is valuable, and we can live with the fact that a whole lot of very wonderful people are not only in our lives but care a whole lot about us. That’s better than any gifts we’ll receive.

I should also mention that BBB doesn’t put things on sale. They have coupons, usually for 20% off a single item. Those coupons DO NOT EXPIRE (even though they, by law, have to print an expiration). You can also use more than one at a time (as long as you’re getting multiple items). They work in-store and online. Usually they come in the mail, and you can register on the BBB site to get even more. And if you have extras, save them for us — if we over-register, they’ll come in handy completing our wish list.

It’s exciting, though, to think that one day we may have the All-Clad cookware we’ve been salivating over for the last year.