Registry Woes...

Before I talk about where we registered and what we registered for, I would like to discuss a looming cloud hovering over our registering experience. As most of you are aware we live in New York City but we are getting married in Califonia. So when we talk about registering it always comes back to this question: How are we going to get gifts back to New York?

Image via onewed.com

The easy answer would be, we'll ship them back, or just have people send them to New York to begin with. I wish it were that simple. We live in a pretty large apartment building, and we live on the 4th floor. We have a hard time getting packages delivered to us period. Either we're not home, because we both work pretty full time, so UPS or FedEX can't deliver them without a signature. Or we are home but the post office doesn't want to walk up four flights of stairs so instead of even attempting to deliver something they put a slip in our mailbox to come pick it up at the post office. And an even worse scenario that has happened, we buzz them in and they just leave our package on the first floor by the mailboxes. I wish I could say I trusted my neighbors, but unfortunately I don't.

(source)

None of these options seem to work well for us...

So what can we do? We could have our gifts sent to my Mom's house in California where they have a better chance of getting delivered and they won't get stolen. But then how will we get them back to NY? We can't ship them because then we run into the same problem...We could just not register and tell people to give us gift cards or do a honeymoon registry which (spoiler alert!) we are. But I really want the experience of registering and receiving actual gifts that we can look back on and say, "Oh those were a wedding gift."

So I am at a loss. I really don't know what our best option is. Someone suggested we get a PO Box and have things delivered there, but I found out UPS and FedEx will not deliver to PO boxes. My thought as of now is to just have things sent to my Mom's address. We are not registering for that many large items, so we can try and carry as much possible back with us to NY, and then ship anything we can't bring back via the post office. At least we know the post office won't even try and deliver anything. We'll end up having to go pick it up, which is a hassle, but it's better than them not getting delivered, or worse getting stolen while left downstairs...

Any other suggestions would be awesome. Anyone else run into this problem?