Once upon a time, I used to think the only way to improve my relationship was to doggedly harp on the change I wanted to see until something broke and change manifested itself. Unfair distribution of labor? Work work work work work until it gets better. Not enough time together? Work work work work work until it gets better. And while that is often the way that my relationship has matured over time (they don’t say it’s work for nothin’), what I’ve learned over the past few years is that sometimes it’s okay to take a shortcut. In fact, sometimes we have to cheat on the little stuff, so we can focus on the big stuff that actually matters. To order takeout when neither of us has the energy to cook dinner. To use an app to manage our schedules instead of hoping that one of us remembers where we’re supposed to be all the time. And it’s why I’m unabashedly in favor of anything that makes housework easier or simply does its job really well.
So when Macy’s invited us to explore the more modern side of wedding registries with Vitamix and iRobot, I was like, “Please can we talk about all the things that make life easier?” Because as much as I love our plates and cookware, the stuff I’m really grateful we registered for and have accumulated in our house over time are the things that have buttons. So I polled the APW staff and surveyed my house, and came up with some of our favorite #lazygirl household hacks. (Fun fact: A cool feature of the Macy’s Registry is they have a kind of cash registry/physical registry hybrid option called the “Dream Fund,” which lets your guests add to a collective gift card that you can use toward your registry. So if you’ve got some higher ticket items on there, your guests can contribute an amount they can afford, and then you get to decide what to do with it later.)
A KILLER VACUUM: I have long said that our vacuum is one of the best things we ever registered for because there is so?much?pet?hair?in?my?house. But when Meg went to speak at an iRobot press event last year, I got to live out my fantasies of testing a Roomba. And, um, the difference between an amazing vacuum that you have to use your hands to move and one that moves by robot magic is literally anything you want it to be, because you just got thirty minutes of your life back. When will robots do all the work for us, I ask? Editor’s Note: GIF is for demonstrative purposes. The Roomba is basically the best at picking up confetti, but I would advise against leaving your mini disco balls just lying around the house.
#Lazygirl Cooking Appliances: You know that I’ve been struggling with dinner since forever, and am always looking for solutions that meet both my culinary needs and my procrastinator tendencies, and our own Kate has basically convinced me I need one of those electric pressure cooker slow cooker combos. She says:
I love to cook, but I hate it on weekdays. I get home around 6:30 at night, and after sitting in traffic, walking the dogs, and greeting my wife, the last thing I feel like doing is whipping up a lavish meal. But after months and months of relying on the Trader Joe’s freezer aisle to fill our bellies, we got one of those all-in-one electric pressure cookers based on recommendations from several friends. It’s basically a crockpot on steroids. It uses pressure cooker technology to cook your foods fast, even ones frozen solid. Like, I can make rice in ten minutes, fast. Or have from-scratch minestrone soup prepped AND cooked in under thirty minutes. You can also do regular things like sauté or bonus things like popping popcorn. Bye-bye, frozen pizza.
A really good blender: We have a small personal blender in our house for things like smoothies, but APW contributor Aly swears by her full size Vitamix. She says:
If you don’t have one, you’ve probably watched a demo somewhere and wondered if it was really, really worth all that money. I was you once, and courtesy of my mom’s generous nature, I can tell you the answer is yes, yes it is. If you have kids, Vitamixes are perfect for sneaking vegetables and flax seeds into smoothies completely undetectably. But my favorite thing that my Vitamix can do is make this incredibly silken, almost mousse-ish avocado pesto of my dreams. (It can do a lot more, but I haven’t explored all of those superpowers yet.)
I haven’t tried confetti smoothies yet, but I imagine they are delicious.
Low-Tech Awesomeness: And sometimes the best tech has exactly no buttons at all. As Stephanie put it:
We live in what is decidedly a low-tech home (I can’t even talk about how long it took to convince my husband that our twenty-nine-inch TV was a good purchase two years ago), and so unsurprisingly, one of the single most useful items we have is a bagel slicer. I know! But hear me out. My husband is a “single-use-only products are wasteful” person, and I am an “OMG I eat all the bagels and they aren’t pre-sliced and can’t I just have this one single-use thing?” person, and we finally, after literal months of back and forth, agreed to try it out. It turns out that bagel slicers are tidier than slicing your bagel on the counter with a bread knife, which means there are fewer bagel crumbs to clean in my wake, which means my husband begrudgingly accepts the bagel slicer as a happy addition to our life together, and even uses it from time to time.
But I want to hear from you. What household tech (of the high or low variety) makes your life and your relationship easier? What did you register for that was a godsend? What did it turn out you kind of didn’t really need at all?
This post was sponsored by Macy’s Registry. With Macy’s you get personal registry advisors to help answer any questions you might have. Plus exclusive perks and savings (like 20% anything you didn’t get, but still want to buy—like that time I gave away all of our pots and pans just before we got married and suddenly had nothing to cook on). You can even get rewards on your regular purchases and use those toward your registry too. Click here to explore Macy’s Registry and get signed up today or click below to see some of our favorite sanity-saving tools.
