Today was our first day trying out the registries. In person, in the store. I think a week or so ago we explored the Amazon registry a bit, but I don't think we actually registered for anything, mostly we just "looked around". Today, however, we decided to check out the stores in the mall.

Our first stop was Crate&Barrel, where we successfully used the gift card I got from my coworkers, who threw me surprise wedding party a couple of months ago. We got two pitchers, some port glasses and little bowl-like things for soy sauce (I managed to destroy one of our soy-sauce bowls some time ago, so for a while one of us had to pour soy sauce into a short water glass every time we ordered-in sushi). These were the first wedding gifts we got ourselves. :)

After lunch at Cheesecake Factory - the place manages to be busy every time I go there - we hit Macy's. A nice lady in the Bridal&Gift Registry department went over the registry "package" with us. I realized that they really are trying to get people to stay with their registry by adding little perks here and there. The more memorable ones - couples get discounts after their wedding date for 3 months;  I am entitled for a free Clinique lip gloss; and certain vendors offer freebies if you register for their stuff (better freebies if people actually buy a certain amount of the stuff). The last one my sweetie summarized as "buy X amount of our stuff and get a free dog!" This still cracks me up :). It was not actually a dog... more like "a set of stainless measuring cups" (the most useful of them all). After a brief silliness with the scanner:

[][]Isn't he silly? And cute? :)

[][]I want to be silly too!

[][]I think he might be trying to scan me now...

we proceeded to scanning. The hardest thing to pick so far proved to be the flatware. Some of the designs we saw would puzzle any serious person (one of the not-so-bad-ergonomically set had holes in the handles), while some are barely usable, and other are flimsy. Yet, we managed to scan a couple of the sets for future reference, and went over to the cookware corner, where things went a bit more smoothly... I think we wondered around Macy's for over an hour when we decided to call it a night and move to another store on our "registry hit list".

It turned out that at 6.45 pm Willams Sonoma was already closed, but we were not discouraged and headed to Bed, Bath, and Beyond. We have started a registry there as well (I'm still traumatized by the fact that we needed to write down the password for our online registry on the application - talk about security - we're going to change it of course, but still...).

[][]Filling out the application...

Some silliness with the scanner ensured - you can see this is becoming a tradition:[][]He's getting a hang of it....

[][]Here Erik is scanning himself - it proved to be harder than one would think! We're keeping it safe though - his eyes are closed shut.

Next hour was spent scanning things - BB&B has a decent selection of not-so-expensive-but-still-useful things....

At the end of the day we had a few things from Crate&Barrel (yay to thoughtful coworkers!) and 2 registries. And if you are thinking of getting us something from our registries - please don't do it yet! One not-so-useful thing about the registries is that you can't just put the things in your "basket" without putting it on the registries for everyone to see. Currently we have \~3 different flatware sets on 2 different registries and we still need to decide on what we want....

Now we just need to sift through the stuff we put on the registries and do more research etc. Just another thing for us to do... It was fun, and I'm glad we started it, but I'm also glad that the stores close early on Sundays - 7 hours of shopping will tire anyone :).

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