How To: Throw an Awesome Baby Shower

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My sister-in-law and I threw a baby shower for our friend, Christine, over the weekend. On the whole, the shower seemed pretty typical: games, food, cake, gifts. But we added little touches to each of those things to make the shower unique and special for Christine.

Here's what we did:

Games

We played four games: Guess the Celebrity Baby, Never Say Baby, Word Match, and Complete the Nursery Rhyme.

I chose to do the celebrity baby photo game because it's difficult to get people to send their baby photos ahead of time to play that version of the game. I just borrowed baby photos off the internet and printed them on my printer. We cut the letters out of construction paper and glued loose glitter on the edges of the letters for 'CELEBRITY'. Each photo had several opportunities for points: people could name the babies, but also their celebrity parents.

The game that I was particularly proud of was Word Match. You see, Christine is from South Africa. I printed worksheets with ten Zulu words down the left side of the paper and ten English words down the right. Guests had to draw a line from the Zulu word to what they guessed was its English counterpart. I chose words that were baby-related, such as blanket, bottle, mother and father. There were several guests from South Africa at the event and they obviously won the game, but even they didn't know all the words.

Prizes

It's difficult to find inexpensive prizes that aren't junk. I think we did pretty well, though. I bought some pink candle holders and pink tea lights at Ikea, put them in bags with tissue paper, and gave those away for two prizes.

But I think the best prizes were my sister-in-law's idea. She bought some brightly-colored flower pots and planted flowers in them. We decorated the pots with little pinwheels and a South African flag (conveniently, one of the South African guests won that prize!).

Crafts

When Christine threw me a baby shower, she had all the guests decorate picture frames for us. While it was a great idea, we ended up with more than a dozen frames and we just don't have space for all of them so ten of them are in a bag in Elliot's closet. My sister-in-law, a spectacular craft-tress, came up with the idea to create just one photo frame for the mama-to-be. She cut 10 squares of scrapbook paper for the frame and put out ribbon and flowers made of construction paper. Guests wrote their own message to Christine and her baby and decorated their own square.

The end result looked like this:

Food

Since this baby shower was in the mid-afternoon, we just chose some brunch-style food. One of our friends made a big quiche in a casserole dish. I made a strawberry and spinach salad (I'll post the recipe another day) and we also had chips and salsa.

 

I also made this punch by dumping one liter of 7-UP on a whole container of raspberry sorbet. Note: I recommend cutting up the sorbet beforehand. I just put the whole rectangular piece in there and it looked kind-of funny for a while until the 7-UP finally melted the sorbet. It ends up being sort-of a creamy drink that isn't too sweet (we also had plenty of ice water and iced tea).

Since there were 16 guests, we bought a big cake at Costco. There's only one design for a baby shower, but it was pretty cute. The cake was really, really good. I think it had only been baked a few hours earlier because they were still putting the icing on it when I picked it up at about noon.

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