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Wedding registry takes just as much planning as the wedding

Emily Campbell

Everyone knows wedding are all about being organized in your planning. Lists, bullet points, and countdowns are all important tools that can help plan your big day. But what about the events leading up to the big day? It’s important to be organized in those as well.

My mom and MOH kept asking me about my bridal shower – when we should have it, who I wanted to invite, what should be on the menu, etc. Then my mom asked me where we were registered.

“Um, the wedding is still like six months away,” I replied to her.

“Why would we register this early?”

Well, turns out when you have a bridal shower, people shop off of your wedding registry so they can get you the gifts you want and not ones you don’t need. So Awesome and I needed to get cracking on our registry.

The first hurdle we had to get over was where to register. I’m all about making everything as simple as possible, so I figured, hey, we’ll just register at one place and make it easy on everyone. Mom again explained that we should do at least two stores so we don’t run out of stuff. So I thought the fair way to do this was for me to pick one place and Awesome to pick the other. I chose Target. Awesome chose REI…then Best Buy…then finally decided on Home Depot once I reminded him how many tools they have.

Great! Now all we have to do is go to the store, put some appliances on the list and then we are good to go. Yeah…no. We kind of made the mistake of going to the store without checking out current “inventory” first. Awesome and I are no spring chickens, and we have both lived on our own for several years. So we both have accumulated a ton of stuff for the house. For example, Awesome has three coffeemakers; I have about 16 cake pans. So clearly we don’t need any coffeemakers or cake pans.

We also made the mistake of thinking we could knock out this whole registry thing in about an hour. This was also incorrect. We were there for an hour and only managed to put 34 things on the list before we had to leave for another event in our day.

We ran into more trouble when we had an argument in the middle of the pots and pans aisle of Target about whether or not Awesome should be able to put an Xbox on the wedding registry (you can imagine who was for and who was against).

My advice? Inventory your current household items, make a list of things you definitely want to register for – and things you definitely DO NOT want, plan for at least three hours of shopping, and bring a snack. Because while you are staring down an aisle of pastry cutters and ice cream scoops and wine openers, you are going to get hungry.