Let's talk about china patterns. Because that would be fun.

It's a raining day today. The kind of day you'd never want to get married on. But the perfect day to catch you up on the china pattern drama my fiance and I went through.

Originally, we hadn't planned on registering for china at all. When I told my mother this, it got ugly. Really, brutally ugly. I'd never imagined that china patterns would be a fight I'd ever have, yet there I was screaming into my cell phone on my front stoop over a year before we were even getting married.

My arguments: We live in NYC and our kitchen is the size of a small walk-in closet.

My mom's arguments: We won't always live in a tiny apartment (though I can't imagine giving this place up) and we're going to want china one day and host nice dinner party and have holiday meals and be a real family.

There will be a whole post, maybe even multiple posts, on the topic of mothers and brides. For now, let me just say this: learn to compromise.

I didn't think picking a pattern would be so difficult. They're just plates we're going to use maybe twice a year. But once we decided to register for china, I started caring about it. A lot. There were so many factors. First of all, our style now may not be the style we like ten or twenty years from now, so it was important to pick something classic and simple. In addition, we're registered at both Macy's and Crate & Barrel so we wanted to pick something at one of those two stores. I'd say we went to Crate & Barrel at least three times over this. And Macy's probably five times. It was tough. Now down to the individual challenges.

Crate & Barrel doesn't have a big selection, though they had one pattern we liked called Kensington Pearl.

It's very lovely and very plain. The rim has little light yellow lines between those two gold lines. And the salad plate has just a pale yellow rim. We were all for it, before we started thinking it through. The ones at Macy's seemed nicer in general. More delicate and pretty. And also, china is a more traditional gift. And people who buy traditional gifts like to go into the store to buy them. And not many of them shop at Crate & Barrel. So we were off to Macy's.

We live in New York so imagine your Macy's and multiply it by 10 or so and add about 300-500 people. Make all of them tourists and slow down their walking speed by 20%. Now you've got the idea.

The china is on the 8th floor, right next to the registry section and the bridal salon. Makes sense. And there are so many patterns to choose from. It's intense. My first instinct was this Lenox one:

But my fiance deemed it too plain. And I kind of agreed. (We did like the shape of the teacup though.) His first instinct was this Lenox one:

But I decided it made me dizzy (it has very light lines around the rim.) So we searched on. I liked the salad plate for this one from Vera Wang:

But hated the little dots around the edges of everything else. Honestly, it probably would've made me dizzy too. Finally it came down to two. This Vera Wang one:

(The one at the bottom left.) And this Kate Spade one:

We felt like the top one fit our style now. It was unique and kind of different. It was very tempting until I remembered our original mission. We wanted something classic and simple. And the Kate Spade set was just that.

It seemed nicer than the Crate & Barrel set. It was more unique than the "boring" Lenox set, though similar (sadly, it doesn't have the same shape tea cup.) It doesn't make me dizzy. And we feel like it would stand the test of time.

Added to the registry. China drama over.
Through this whole engagement, I've started to feel like such a grown up. I'm getting married and I registered for china. We also got a new mattress the same week (the first I've ever bought myself) so that compounded the adult feeling. It's odd but satisfying.