Shower for a friend

OK, so being a 'blow in' I know I'm by no means the authority on throwing a Baby Shower. I'd never even been to a baby shower until last fall and the only other shower I'd been to before that was  the one my Mother in Law threw for me before our wedding.

But, none of that stopped me from offering to throw a shower for a good friend of ours, and I actually thought it'd be a fun thing to do.... so I jumped in feet first, giving myself less than 3 weeks to plan the whole thing.

The shower is coming up this weekend - and I think it's going to be fun, I really HOPE it's going to be fun - for the Mom-to-Be's sake at least!

As someone who's career in marketing involved throwing parties and events all the time I figured I could do it.... I discovered that throwing a baby shower isn't really much different from putting together any other kind of party - design and mail invitations to the guest list, plan food and refreshments and some kind of entertainment for the guests and also it's nice to have a little treat bag or favor for the guests to take home with them as a thank you for coming.

The expectant Mom is a lot like me in the aspect that she didn't want a lot of pinky, pink stuff... even though she's having a girl. I will say, I'm glad of this fact, because I think it may have killed me to plan a OTT pink baby shower - instead I made up some invites with a black and white damask theme and a little stork - the only hint of pink is the bundle the stork is carrying. I thought they were simple and cute, and not OTT!

Treat Bags!

For the treat bags I thought it would be cute to carry the same theme through from the invites, and so I got a variety of candy and  put them into little clear treat bags (the kind you'd use for single packaging cookies etc)... then I made a little card to seal the whole thing. They're personalized and I thought they were pretty cute - but hey, I guess I'm probably fairly biased.

The food was also fairly easy to figure out, since we're having the shower mid-afternoon and the mother of the guest of honor is helping with the location and getting the food together. She's making sandwiches, veggie platters, fruit salad (I think) and pie - and since we're hosting it at their family cafe we'll have their coffee girl there making hot drinks and lattes for the guests too!

For the decoration I'm again going with  the simple theme - nothing to pinky, pink but definitely something with a splash of color. So, I'm making these tissue paper pompoms... now, they're not something I've made before and I'm not exactly what I'd call 'light handed' with things such as tissue paper, but these are today's task and I'll hopefully be able to make something that doesn't look like Edward Scissor hands was involved in.

The hardest thing was probably the entertainment part of it.... Baby Showers generally have a time for games, usually 2-4 of them and at both showers I've been to they were exactly the same games. I didn't want to do that at this shower, I wanted to have something just a little bit different.... so I'm hoping I can pull it off - I guess we'll see!

Anyway, that's about it - this "blow in" is trying to not butcher a very traditional American event, and I'm really just hoping that people will come (it seems people don't like to RSVP these days, ugh) they will eat, drink and have fun, and that the Mom-to-Be will have a great time and get lots of wonderful useful gifts and advice!

Until it's over, I'm holding my breath!  ;-)