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Just before Thanksgiving, the boxes started arriving. We hadn’t even sent our Save the Date cards out when the deluge began. Someone told me that I’d start to know the difference between a UPS truck that was going to stop and a UPS truck that was going to pass by and they were right. It seemed as though every few days, a new box arrived.
Our families seemed to be mounting an all out raid on our registry and I was overwhelmed by their generosity. By the end of the holidays, I had a corner of the living room dedicated to their gifts. I was trying not to count the boxes, but we didn’t register for all that much and the stack had me wondering how much of the registry was fulfilled.
Alternative title: The Long, Obnoxious Task of Registering for Gifts
(Just wait till the fork finds out about this…) / Image via Big Sky Astrology
Actually, our registry is still a work in progress right now, so you can expect to see a few random incoherent posts about it in the upcoming weeks. I’m going to try and start from the very beginning. (It’s a very good place to start.)
You’d think that after five years of living together my fiance and I would have a pretty good collection of household items. You’d be wrong. Even though Mr. Coyote just turned 30 (!!!), we still live like a bunch of college sophomores. Honestly, I could probably list all of our kitchen supplies in this post and it wouldn’t even be long enough to bore you. Most of the things we do have are either hand-me-downs and/or are so broken that we probably shouldn’t even be using them (but I’m way too cheap to replace them).
This makes cooking meals difficult. We end up making the same three things over and over again and then spend the rest of week ordering takeout (see: paragraph above regarding living like college sophomores). This is not a way to live, my friends.
Short version? We’re basically starting from scratch with our registry.
’Tis the season for engagements!
I don’t know about you all, but it feels like more than half the couples I know were engaged between Christmas and Valentine’s Day (is there a stat out there about this, Penguin?). The TV commercials and jewelry stores definitely encourage the behavior, that’s for sure.
Anyhow, with all these engagements come great opportunities to shower a new bride (and groom) with love and attention (and presents)! I thought the timing might be right now to share some of the Turkey favorites for engagement gifts. This is a combination of both gifts given and received.
1. Planning Gifts
As a new bride, you’re basically a sponge trying to absorb as many ideas as possible. Blogs, Pinterest, magazines, TLC…you name it. I found some of my most helpful gift to be in the planning realm.
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| A gift for a recently engaged friend—some bridal magazines + subscriptions for 1 year
I had 2 friends gift me magazine subscriptions when I was engaged—love the fun mail! |
Back at Thanksgiving, Foxy Mama was meandering around the kitchen looking for something she clearly could not find. She then stopped, looked at Foxy and me and said “You really need a shower.” I kid you not.
A few choice comments later, it turns out she meant that I needed a bridal shower. I was also urged to get off my lazy bum and actually register for things so that she could indeed throw me said shower. While I’ve been thinking about registering for pretty new things since the day we got engaged, it eventually became one of those things that I kept putting off, thinking it was too early to do so. And then I realized we only had five months left. Best get on that registering, no?
So this past Monday, Foxy and I headed out to Bed Bath & Beyond, seeing as it’s the one store we both absolutely adore and literally want everything from. Will we register at other stores? I say maybe. Foxy says maybe not. Our loyalty to that store runs deep, yo.
Anyway, once we got to BBB, we had to fill out some forms before getting our fun little scanner gun.
I’ve heard from other folks that BBB is notorious for having a sales associate go around the store with you while you register, but for a brief second, I thought we were in the clear. I prefer to do things independently, especially when I need to meander and think and am not exactly sure what I’m even looking for. Foxy and I started to make our way towards the dinnerware on our own…
and then James entered the picture.
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Bossyboots and I are not shoppers, at least when it comes to leaving our house (unless it’s a Target adventure!). We online shop as much as humanly possible. What’s to love about brick and mortar shopping? Crowds, parking lots, pushy salespeople, squeaky carts, squeaky kids, squeaky people. No thanks.
So when it came to our wedding registry, you know we did it at 8PM on a Tuesday night, in our jammies, with frosty beverages. I call it Shopping a la Couch. We did make a trip to Crate and Barrel, just to pick out our china in person, but other than that… no real-life shopping excursions! Just thinking about that scanner gives me hives.
Since Bossyboots and I are in our thirties—we really don’t need a ton of things. There are certain areas where we are sorely lacking, and so we only registered for the things we really need. Here are our superstars:
I just got a disappointing surprise. I spent a couple hours at Macy’s creating our registry just a few weeks ago. The experience was a good one and I felt like Macy’s registry page was easy to navigate and simple to use. They had some nice perks of which we’d be able to take advantage after the wedding, too. Registering seemed like one of the easiest parts of the wedding planning process.
When Rue La La had some items from our Waterford china pattern for sale a couple weeks ago, I wondered if my chosen pattern was being discontinued. I quickly went to Macy’s and saw a bunch of notes that looked like this:
Screen shot from Macy’s.com
While that screen shot is of a note on our flatware, those lovely sentences were also under every single item on our china list.
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Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
I have a confession: I love wedding registries. Am I alone in that feeling?
When I get an invitation to a wedding, I can’t wait to look up the couple’s registry. You can sometimes tell a lot about a couple by these lists. There are those who don’t have homes yet who register for all the necessities like appliances, towels, and sheets. There are those who already have homes who register for fun things like camping gear and sporting goods. There are the traditionalists who have china and crystal on their lists. Then, there are the couples whose lists are a delightfully random collection of items. I can just imagine these people at one of those “sip and shop” events that stores like Crate & Barrel or Macy’s put on to get couples in the mood the register. After a glass or two of champagne, I picture them having a grand time running all over the store, aiming the registry gun at anything and everything.
The registry gun / Photo by Miss Mink
You’d think that my affinity for shopping from a registry would mean I was eager to set ours up. I wasn’t.
At first, I didn’t want to register.
Read more…
…to register.
I’m sure it is not a shock to many of you ladies that I had to beg and plead Mr. Turkey to help put together our registry. The conversation* went something like this:
Miss Turkey: I’m thinking we should probably register.
Mr. Turkey: OK.
Miss Turkey: I’m thinking we should probably have between two and three registries.
Mr. Turkey: OK.
Miss Turkey: I’m thinking we could go next weekend.
Mr. Turkey: WE???
I’ll save you the rest of the conversation, but basically I had to “reward him” for each of the three places we registered.
To make the registration process as painless as possible, I did a couple things before involving Mr. Turkey in the details. In terms of registry locations, I netted out with Macy’s, Pottery Barn, and Williams-Sonoma based on what we needed and our personal tastes (e.g., Crate&Barrel was a bit too “minimalist” for us).
Earlier this week I came home to find a package on my front doorstep. I didn’t remember ordering anything, so I suspiciously brought it inside. As I began to open it, I noticed an iconic blue color staring back at me.
Tiffany’s? Someone must be playing a joke on us. How did they find a box that perfectly matches Tiffany’s?
I then removed the ribbon and opened the enclosed card. My eyes laid upon this fun goodness:
This weekend we finally ticked off another major task on the to-do list: our registry. I’ll be honest with y’all. Registering was on the bottom of my priority list. I knew it was something that had to be taken care of at some point in time, but I was kind of dreading it. In a lot of ways I was thinking it was going to be a pointless exercise. I mean, Mr. Hawk and I have been living together for over a year now. What could we really need? When we decided to rent a home together, we both brought a good amount of things into our home: pots and pans, plates, silverware…or so I thought. Being little miss type-A, I printed several suggestion lists—Real Simple, Macy’s, and Crate&Barrel—and reviewed them thoroughly. When it came time to take a good solid inventory, I realized that we were definitely lacking. I’m embarrassed to admit that in a lot of ways we’ve been living like college kids (at 26 and 30, no less)!
The majority of our cups (I can’t even call it glassware) are emblazoned with either Green Leafe logos (one of my favorite college bars) or sports logos. We have a collection of mismatched wine glasses we’ve collected at our various wine-tasting outings, and our serving platters are all Tar-jay plastics. I was incredibly surprised that I only was able to eliminate a handful of items from the registry lists! Apparently this registry thing was something we needed more than I originally thought.
With my notated lists in hand, we went to Macy’s. We decided to take care of a lot of big-ticket items there such as our china, silverware, and small appliances. At first I regretted bringing Mr. H when it came to china patterns. He thought china was pointless, yet was somehow very opinionated when it came to decision-making. (Sigh.) In the end we were able to agree on a great pattern.
Then after a Starbucks visit (and venti-sized coffees in hand—did I mention the exhaustion?), we were on to Crate&Barrel. C&B was the place I was most looking forward to after our in-home inventory. I knew that we were in desperate need of everyday items. We found some great glassware (plastic cups, begone!) and grown-up serving platters. One of my favorite items we found was the lightly green-tinted Miguel pitcher and glasses.
Since we registered nearly a week and a half ago, Bed Bath and Beyond has done a wonderful job keeping up on things. They noticed we added a few things online and deleted a few items, and a representative took the time to call us and ask if we had any questions. I also came home the other day to a nice handwritten thank you card in the mail from them. Although Bed Bath and Beyond was overwhelming, it was completely worth it. Being that they have SO much stuff, we were able to eliminate other places we were considering registering at. I know a lot of people register online and not in store, but I have to say that I am glad we stuck to registering in store. We were able to look at the quality of different items and see what they look like in person. There are items that we added to our registry that if I had only registered online I probably wouldn’t have chosen.
I really enjoyed our relaxed experience at Crate and Barrel. While we were moseying around, we struck up a conversation with a woman and her husband who were there buying a wedding gift for someone else. They have been married for nearly 30 years and they had some great advice for us.
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You learn a lot by setting up a wedding registry. The scanner guns are even more fun than you had imagined, there are a lot of gadgets out there that you never knew existed that you’re now convinced you can’t live without, and they’re not kidding when they say don’t use fabric softener on your towels because it covers them in a film and makes them less absorbent.
I use to be really bad about judging other people’s registries. You’re just starting out together…why is a Q-Tip holder, the complete seasons 1-4 of Alf, and some random crystal that could pay my rent on your list? It’s on there because they put it on there and that’s fine. There are so many ins and outs that I had never considered before.
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It was a smart move on our end to break for lunch and relax a bit. This gave us time to process the past three hours and create a game plan for our next stop. Everyone told me to register at Crate and Barrel, and I told all of those people…no thank you. I was quite certain that everything was too expensive and there was nothing there that we needed.
In my defense, I had never actually been to a Crate and Barrel. Go on and laugh at me. I know, I know. How can I judge a place I had never been? I don’t really have a good answer for you, I just did.
We kept hearing about Crate and Barrel though. We decided what the hay; let’s go see what they have. First off, their registry system is fantastic. If you are like us and have a tendency to want to shop alone and do your own thang…
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We had been talking about registering for quite some time now, but the wedding always seemed so far off that we didn’t feel it was necessary quite yet. Well, now that we are at that six-month mark, we decided it was as good of a time as ever. So we set out to the first place on our list, Bed Bath and Beyond.
You guys, you always imagine the scanning gun would be fun…right? I am here to tell you that yes, it is in fact one of the most fun things EVER. You get to walk around and scan anything you want. The problem with that is you can scan anything you want. It is dangerous, and you feel powerful. That is not a joke, it is true.
We really did try and be smart when choosing things that we wanted on our registry. Like usual, they did try and push the china. We had no interest in china, so we left it off. We added some big ticket items like our cooking set and a Keurig coffeemaker, but also added a ton of smaller items like utensils and drinking glasses.
At one point I did start to get frustrated when I would scan something and then realize the price was astronomical. I scanned an accent pillow that turned out to be $60. AN ACCENT PILLOW. Not even a full size pillow, a small little pillow that was $60. Is it stuffed with gold dipped goose feathers?
Read more…
Confession: LOTS has been going on in life lately outside of wedding planning.
Shocker, I know.
Work has been getting busier, I technically started a second job, I’ll (hopefully) start dancing with a local company in the next few weeks, and…minor detail…we moved!
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