If you don’t know, Pearson and I went to college in Arkansas, but we grew up in Georgia. We were getting married at our home church in Buford, Georgia and both of our families and a lot of our friends live there. So it made sense for us to register there. Or at least to register at stores that had branches there. But we were in school at Harding in Arkansas. Of course, I could have registered any time during Pearson’s last semester after I graduated and was living with my parents, but he wanted to be there for it. So we did it while he was home for spring break.

We set aside a couple nights that week to go to Target and Bed, Bath, & Beyond, but we looked online first. We had a plan, I knew what colors I wanted, and we took a checklist with us. When we went to BB&B, we had a lady helping us. She took us around each room. We felt sort of pressured and ended up registering for way too much for one store. Later, I went to our registry online and took a lot of things off. It did help a lot to have her with us the first time, though because we had no idea what we were doing.

The next night, we went to Target. We asked if we could start a registry and the girl typed our names into the gun, handed it to us, and let us go. It was a much different experience. But I liked this experience too because we were completely by ourselves and could go wherever we wanted and goofed off a bit along the way. 🙂

We ended up only registering at those two stores. And we kept adding and taking things off the list throughout the whole process. If we got something that we registered for but the person didn’t actually buy it off our registry, we deleted that item. The problem with this was that we could see online what had been bought and sometimes we hadn’t received it yet so it sorta spoiled the surprise. 

I also went back to the stores a couple more times by myself after Pearson went back to school. There were some things I waned to change but I wanted to see them first. And that’s OK. You can change things up to the day of the wedding if you want.

My Advice: 

• Go during the week. I’ve talked to people who registered on the weekend and they were sorry because of the crowds and pressure.
• Make a plan by looking online first. I can’t imagine walking around with a scanner without having any idea what I wanted or without some sort of plan.
• Don’t go for the most expensive or the cheapest version of everything. Find a happy medium. 
• Don’t do it all at once. Make several trips so you don’t feel overwhelmed.
• Try not to watch the registry online if you can help it. Don’t spoil the surprise by seeing when something was bought before you get it.

Thanks for reading!