I bet you loved the convenience of a wedding website – the perfect place to keep your guests updated with pictures, information, and the registry. If a baby’s on the way, you might be missing the convenience of your wedding site as friends and family start peppering you with questions about due dates, gifts, and health updates. With Deposit a Gift, you can create a website just like you would for wedding with all the same convenience, but dedicated to your impending arrival!
Pregnancy is an exciting and busy time! Make it easier with a baby website. With all the important info in one place, you’ll take a lot of pressure off yourself to keep everyone updated!
If you’ve stepped foot in a baby store recently, then you know the overwhelming feeling that comes with endless choices between strollers, car seats, and cribs. Deciding which to register for can be a daunting task, but it shouldn’t be!  A baby registry is a great way to share with family and friends what you need and to let them help out.  But before you go registry crazy, be realistic about what you want – items that seem cool in the store might end up in their packaging forever or your baby will quickly outgrow. You want to think bigger picture and longer term than the first few months. Let’s face it, babies are expensive and most of the important baby needs are too.
Register For What You Really Need:
A Deposit a Gift registry lets you register for what you actually will use long term: money. But it’s not just money for money’s sake; it’s money to be used for exactly what you need, when you need it. You can register for things that you never could with traditional store, and you have the flexibility to buy as needed instead of everything at once, such as:
What are the Benefits of an Alternative Baby Registry?
Given that a lot of the baby gear decisions are based on lifestyle preferences, it’s important to give yourself the time and space to figure out your parenting style and what works for you. Therefore, a traditional registry can often be inefficient. An alternative baby registry is perfect for:
Registries are a fantastic way to make it easy for friends and family to know what you need, but you shouldn’t feel pressured to go the traditional route if that doesn’t fit your style. A Deposit a Gift registry can help you manage and customize what you buy for your new baby to give you the most flexibility with this new phase of life.
By now, you know all the benefits of an alternative wedding registry and you know that they’re perfect for honeymoons. But you might be left wondering, “How can we have a shower when there are no physical gifts yet?” After all, the point of a shower is to shower you with gifts, right? Well, if you take advantage of some of the tools Deposit a Gift offers you, you’ll have no trouble at all throwing the perfect shower!
Get the Guests on Board
This is an idea that many guests are not familiar with, so make sure they understand the idea before the shower begins. Include a note on your registry to let guests know why exactly you’ve chosen this new kind of registry. Describe their contribution in terms of giving the gift of experience. They’ll be thrilled to know that their gift will go towards a lifetime of memories.
Print a Gift Certificate
When a guest purchases a gift, they get the option to print out a gift certificate:
The certificate is a great way to bring a tangible gift to the shower. You can even get creative with it too. For example, for a gift for a tropical honeymoon, try wrapping the certificate around a towel or putting it in a beach bag with other beach goodies.
It’s All in the Theme
Turn your honeymoon locale into the theme of your shower! Try incorporating the food and music of your chosen destination into the shower. It’ll give the guests a taste of what their present has given you. Like these French macaroons for a Parisian honeymoon shower…
Photo Credit:Â Style Me Pretty
With just a little effort, you’ll be sure to have a shower to remember! And remember, we offer a monthly prize for the most creative shower. If you think that’s yours, then take a look at the contest details here!
If you haven’t heard the exciting news yet, it’s engagement season! Last month we got you started with some tips on the registry, and now, we just want to remember all those fun things that make any engagement so amazing!
From Emmaline Bride seller Harvest Gold Gallery
There’s so much more to the engagement than just the proposal, ring, and shower. It really is a magical time – what’s your favorite part?
Have we already mentioned that we love creative wedding showers?? Well here we go again – they are such a great way to mix up the typical wedding traditions and really express yourself. Â If you need some inspiration to get started, Sheryl Woodhouse-Keese of Twisted Limb Paperworks is here to get you started! Â For her sister’s shower, she got creative with a Scrabble theme – read on to learn exactly how she did it.
When my twin sister, indie publisher, founder of Lake Claremont Press and Everything Goes Media, avid reader, and kick-everyone’s-butt-at-Scrabble player, got married a few years ago at age 40, we know we had to do something unique.  An independent thinker who had been intentionally avoiding marriage was actually getting married! We wanted to throw her a smart wedding shower that reflected her interests and style.
And we sure did! We came up with a Scrabble-themed shower at an Irish pub that served a beautiful, tasty brunch. Silly games would’ve been a poor reflection of my sister, so instead, we placed Scrabble boards, cut into quarters around the tables, with Scrabble tiles and glue. Groups of four guests worked together to spell out messages for the bride and groom in crossword Scrabble form. When they were finished, guests glued the tiles onto the board and signed their artwork. They fit perfectly into a game box, which my sister totally loved!
Preparation was easy. We simply bid on used Scrabble games and extra letter tiles on Ebay. Who knew? There are loads of people out there selling bags of 200-400 extra Scrabble tiles. With a heavy duty paper cutter, we sliced the game boards into quadrants.  As party favors that also reflected my sister’s love of reading, we glued a tile with the first letter of each guest’s name onto hobby wood to create bookmarks. Guests really loved them and had a totally fabulous time making the Scrabble messages!  A creative shower is a great time for the bride, and the guests!
***********************************
Twisted Limb Paperworks is a pioneer in the green wedding industry. They have been sustainably creating their handmade 100% recycled, seeded papers and invitations and thank you note stationary in Bloomington, Indiana since 1998. Follow them on Facebook and Twitter. Contact them atinfo@twistedlimbpaper.com
