Registering for Hawaii

With more and more couples living together before marriage, the traditional wedding registry has started to become a thing of the past. To replace it, unconventional registries for future homes and honeymoons are gaining more and more ground. Personalty, I think this is a great idea for the wedding couple who has everything. We've already had to make numerous donations to the Goodwill to reduce the multiple items that we had and really don't need to go through that process, again. Come on, who needs another blender when we already have two?

Drew and I talked this through and decided a honeymoon registry was the best way to go for us. However, we kept in mind that not everyone likes honeymoon registries and some even think they are rude. For that reason, we made a very small traditional registry with a couple items that could use replacing, a few books we've been wanting to get and our dream cookware set. Le Creuset in Caribbean blue, anyone?

Of course, we didn't want our registry to come off as a blatant hands out request for money. We really just wanted to be able to have a nice honeymoon since we've been putting everything we have into resorting our house to be nice for the Portland celebration and into the wedding. We want our guests to be happy, comfortable and to really be able to enjoy themselves. As a result, we've sacrificed the funds to be able to take ourselves on a honeymoon. But, not the desire to want to go on one.

I did a lot of research on honeymoon registries and in the end we went with Traveler's Joy. We liked how their website worked and that they didn't charge guests a fee to give you a gift. Being charged a fee to give a gift seemed really odd to us, so it was our top make it or break on which site we went with.

{source}

Where'd we pick for our honeymoon? Hawaii. Yes, we know we are getting married there, but that's on Maui. Neither of us has even been to the Big Island and we also wanted to visit the North Shore of Oahu. Really, did you think we would pick anywhere else? We are kind of obsessed with Hawaii.

The picture is actually a slide show of some of our engagement photos. If you look very closely, you can see it's starting to change to the next photo.

We spent a lot of time planning our honeymoon and adding everything to our registry. We wanted our guests to know why we decided to go this route and to give them the chance to share in our honeymoon with us. Traveler's Joy was so easy to use and not only could we include a nice description (Which I also spent a great deal of time writing.) of what we were registering for, but also a picture. We thought this gave it a more personal level and made it easy for guests to see what we had registered for. Once we were all done with our registry, we were very happy with it. Now came the hard part, sharing it with others.

Seahorse Tour at The Ocean Rider aqua-farm- Kimmy is still jumping up  & down at the idea of a seahorse farm & it's been months! We can't wait to get to hold seahorses, feed baby seahorses & learn more about them.

It's a huge no-no to list your registry information on your wedding invitation or to even put any kind of registry information inserts in your invitation suites. So, of course, we didn't go that route. Instead, we used good old fashioned word of mouth and our wedding website. Our wedding website actually had a feature to add our registries that made it really easy. We stated that we were registered at the following and put in the links to our registries. Our wedding website has really become a great tool for us while planning our wedding. When we were all done, we had a great registry we were very happy with and a nice way to share it with others. 

What kind of wedding registry did you do? How did you share it with others?