Greg Baugues and Rachel Lazelle Got Married

“Though we’ll have only 10 guests at our wedding, we wanted an opportunity to celebrate our marriage with old friends.  So, my parents are throwing us a shower on May 8 at my dad’s church...”

With our small wedding guest list and Paperless Post, I really thought we were going to dodge the necessity of invitations sent through the USPS.

But, a bunch of the people we would like to invite to our shower in Indianapolis are from the church my father pastored for most of my childhood, and for many, we don’t have email addresses.

I looked for the most technologically saavy (read: lazy) way to do this.  I looked for a service that would let me create a card online, feed it an address list, and automagically send the cards through the USPS.  When I came up short, I went looking for invitations I could feed through a printer, only to find that all stationary stores within a couple miles of my house are closed on Mondays.

That’s when I realized I was spending more time trying to optimize this task than it would take to just do it.  There’s only about 20 of these invitations to be sent, and it seemed like a good opportunity to slow down and do something that was more about people than convenience.

And so I bought a bunch of simple, blank cards, and hand wrote invitations for each of our emailess guests.  It’s required some work, but it’s been rewarding and has caused me to reminisce about some people I haven’t seen in 12 years, and the roles they played in my life from third to twelfth grade.

If you are reading this, you are invited to join us on May 8th at Good Shepherd United Methodist Church.  And if you’d like a handwritten invitation, drop me an email, and I’ll send you one.

Let me preface everything I am about to say:

We don’t expect you to get us anything. Really.

It kind of feels like cheating to get wedding gifts when you’re only having ten guests at your wedding. Still, we know a bunch of you would like to get us something, and for that we are grateful and would hate to deny you the warm and fuzzy feelings that come from gift giving.

We’ve set up three flavors of giving:

Kiva Gift Certificates

With a Kiva Gift Certificate, you are contributing to a fund from which Rachel and I will make micro-loans to help people in developing countries start new businesses. Watch the video below for more info on what Kiva’s all about, and then purchase a Kiva Gift Certificate with greg@baugues.com as the recipient.

Bed Bath and Beyond

If you want to get us something tangible, so that every time we use it we think of your face and smile, the Bed Bath and Beyond registry is the option for you.  You can order online, or walk into any brick and mortar location and shop the old-fashioned way.

The Couch and Bed Fund

Apartments are pretty small here in Chicago. Truthfully, we don’t have space for a lot of small gifts.  There are however, two major purchases we will be making in the next month: a couch and a bed.  We set up a PayPal fund so that you can help with these two purchases by pooling contributions.  To donate to the Couch and Bed Fund, click the button below:

Also, if someone wants to buy me… I mean, us…. an iPad, that’d be cool too.

Our Bed Bath and Beyond Wedding registry is now online.

Registering at Bed Bath and Beyond was such a better experience than Target.  A third of the store is kitchen stuff instead of Target’s meager three aisles, the prices seemed more reasonable that other places we looked, and the return policy is more wedding friendly.  So we are doing away with Target and sticking with BB&B.

We will be adding a couple other gift giving options in the next couple days, so if buying fancy kitchen widgets isn’t your style, stay tuned.

Guess which one of us registered for this apron