look at my gun...

So Saturday was another big step in the marriage process for Alexa and I. We spent about 6 hours in the afternoon starting our wedding registry at both Bed Bath and Beyond, and Target. We started at Bed Bath and Beyond after doing some other shopping at both malls in Des Moines. The malls were so busy in the afternoon it was difficult to move around in any of the stores. I've never seen it that busy before, everyone must have needed something to get them out of the house and out of the cold.

It was an interesting process doing our registry and I had no idea what to expect once we decided to start. I figured you just sign a sheet and they give you the scanning gun and you go to work, but boy was I wrong. Bed Bath and Beyond had a couple special employees who specifically work with wedding and gift registries. So we were placed with our registry specialist who took us through the whole plan for our afternoon. It was a good thing we left a lot of time open because it took us a lot longer than we ever expected.

She started by helping us choose our dinnerware by placing it on a table with everything set up so you could see the placement of the dishes and how they all looked together. I'll admit, I was very overwhelmed and let Alexa make the decisions in this area. We decided after picking all these things out that they were all too expensive for our tastes and planned to delete them all from our registry on the internet after making her happy and picking them out. We thought it was a little outrageous to pay $12 per plate and $50 for 4 glasses so we shopped in the "cheap" area later and found more reasonably priced items. I personally think the "registry consultants" were just scam artists to get you to pay more money than necessary, but what she doesn't know won't hurt her.

We then got to pick out our cookware which the in-store manager who worked in the resturant business helped us pick out the best value for our money (Or I guess in this case our guests money). It was after this that we tackled the wall of kitchen utensils. This was crazy! A 20ft wall that was about 100ft long just full of everything you might need for your kitchen. It was then to all the mixing bowls, pans, cutting boards, storage, etc. that you could ever want. By this time both of our feet hurt pretty bad. Neither of us chose comfortable shoes for the journey and were reaping the benefits of it. We ended by randomly wandering throughout the store and finally picking out our towels. It was pretty difficult picking a lot of the things we might end up needing because we have NO idea where we are going to be living.

We then, after refueling with some pizza at Nick and Willy's (small place across the street from Jordan Creek in a strip mall that we randomly found one time), for some excellent pizza headed to Ankeny on our way back to Ames to register at Target. This was much more relaxing and is more what I expected with registering and then getting the gun and running around scanning things. This was the store that Alexa started to get annoyed with me scanning a bunch of random things, but the gun they gave you was touchscreen and a lot of fun to use.

That IS me scanning a large Sony TV on our gift registry.

We spent a couple hours in Target going up and down each aisle throughout the entire store (except the food) to find the things we wanted. This store was a lot more fun without such a strong emphasis on the utensils and hardware, but had more games and fun things that we got to pick out. We found a lot of things at Target that we liked better than what we picked out at Bed Bath and Beyond so we had to make sure and delete those things later.

If your interested in checking out our registries for either place click on the links to the stores below and it should take you there.

In the end we had a great time and I hope that we find out we forgot a bunch of stuff because I'm ready to go, gun in hand at those stores again and this time come out the winner. We're looking for your help though! Did we forget anything? Is there something that you just can't live without that we might want to add? Let us know in the comments.