On Saturday, August 28th, my mom and I hosted a baby shower for Elizabeth in Cincinnati. We had it at the clubhouse in my grandma's neighborhood.
food
My mom and I planned a light and fresh menu for the shower.
The cupcakes were from
Holy Cow Cupcakes in Carmel, Ind. The were well worth the trouble of trying to keep them from melting while driving to Cincinnati.
The pineapple fizz was a great fresh drink for the hot summer day, and even matched our color scheme!
The italian chicken salad is something I make pretty regularly. I am not a fan of heavy, mayonnaise-based chicken salads, so this is the perfect alternative. I have listed the recipe at the end of this post. We used small hawaiian rolls to serve it on.
Caesar salad served in endive is a great way to make a portable appetizer-style salad. The endive is a sturdy lettuce-like leaf that holds the romaine lettuce tossed with caesar dressing. We top it with some parmesan cheese.
decorations
I made some custom decorations for the party.
On the right is the sign I made. It added a nice custom touch and also allowed us to have our own color palette instead of using the traditional baby blue pastel colors.
For centerpieces, we used orange pails filled with green tissue paper "grass" and stuffed with handmade chocolate spoons. Then we tied on some blue and yellow balloons to fill out the color palette. There were dark chocolate and white chocolate spoons with a variety of sprinkles on them. They were cute and delicious!
games
We played a few games. First we played the game where everyone has to pull off the amount of string they think will fit around the mom's belly. Buff won by pulling off literally the EXACT amount for the size of Elizabeth's belly. We thought my cousin Sarah Music had it won when her string was only about a centimeter too long. I've never seen such close guesses on this game. I am usually terrible at it!
The other game we played definitely got everyone laughing. We passed out parenting/baby magazines to groups with 2-3 people in each and asked them to create Baby Music's first portrait. Everyone went through the magazines and pieced together a baby for Elizabeth. They were all pretty creepy! Elizabeth chose Sarah O'Brien and Grandma Riedy's portrait of Baby M.
I also created an activity for all the moms at the baby shower to write down their best advice for Jake & Elizabeth for different ages. The ages were 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and 1 through 5 years. When the mom finished writing out their card, they sealed it in an envelope for that age. Jake & Elizabeth will get to open each of these when Baby M is the specific age and get some advice specific to having a baby/child of that age. I can't wait to see some of them!
I can't wait to meet my nephew sometime in the next week! So exciting!
