Here are some of the things I organised for Clare's baby shower.

Shower memories

I combined an idea from Pinterest (have you discovered Pinterest yet? Watch out, it's addictive) and a present Ange put together for Clare after her Hens' Day. I asked everyone to write some advice for Clare or a message for the baby on a photo-sized piece of paper. After the shower I printed out the photos from the day and put the advice and photos together in a little photo album. (Make sure that you take a photo of everyone on the day. I didn't manage to capture everyone.) This is exactly what Ange did for Clare's Hens' Day. Now Clare has a matching set of little memory albums for her bookshelf.

Afterwards I realised that new mothers are often overloaded with "advice" and that they soon get sick of it. I think the Message for Baby is a better idea but people needed a bit of help. Next time I'll print out the prompts and have them available as inspiration.

Shower games

Rather than play silly baby shower games, I decided to adapt some games that we actually enjoy playing and make them baby themed. I organised a Guessing Competition, Celebrity Baby Head, Guess Who? and Baby Taboo. In the end we didn't have time for all the games but it's better to be over than under-prepared.

Here are the instructions, just in case you were keen to play them at some point in the future.

Guessing Competition
Guess the arrival date and time of the baby and the baby's birth weight. If the gender is unknown, then you can also guess that. Here are the guesses from the day recorded for posterity.

Celebrity Baby Head
To prepare:

1. Brainstorm a bunch of celebrity baby names, famous babies, movies with "Baby" in the title etc.
   
   My list included: Louise Brown (first IVF baby), Lindbergh Baby (famous baby kidnapping), The Dancing Baby (viral internet video), Princess Mary's twins, Three men and a baby (movie), Apple Martin (Gwyneth Paltrow), Ethan Smith (Dannii Minogue), The Muppet Babies (TV Show), Baby Jesus, Octomum's octuplets, Ava Sydney Hewitt (Lleyton and Bec Hewitt), Shiloh Pitt (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), Million Dollar Baby (movie), Baby Einstein (product), Baby steps (saying), Sleep like a baby (saying).
   
   
2. Write these on adhesive stickers / labels. If the clue was difficult I included an explanation in brackets underneath.
   
   

To play:

1. Stick a label on each person's forehead.
2. Participants try to guess what's on their forehead by asking Yes / No questions.
3. They get to keep asking questions until they get "No" for an answer.
4. Play until 3 people have guessed their celebrity baby.

Clare won guessing The Dancing Baby, Julia came 2nd guessing Million Dollar Baby and then Marie came 3rd guessing Princess Mary's twins.


Guess Who?

I asked everyone to bring in a baby photo of themselves. Clare had to guess who was who in the photos. You could make it more organised by having answer sheets for people to fill out if you like. I wanted to keep it casual.

Baby Taboo

In the game of taboo people have to describe an object or phrase without explicitly stating what it is. For example, describing the Sydney Harbour Bridge without using the words Sydney, harbour or bridge. With baby taboo, I came up with a bunch of clues which were pregnancy and baby themed. Some of the clues were a bit difficult, especially for those people who aren't parents or planning to become parents in the near future.

Some of my clues included: basal body temperature, cervical mucus, episiotomy, fundus, braxton hicks, meconium, kegel exercises, modern cloth nappy, bugaboo pram, hypnobirthing, birth ball, tummy time, love and patience.

In the end we didn't get time to play this game. Probably a good thing as I may have scarred the non-parents in the group for life. Or at least put them off the idea of ever having children.

Babies! The baby boom continues. Clare and Brendan are expecting their first child in mid-April. I offered to organise a baby shower for Clare because (a) she is a good friend and (b) I love to organise stuff (have you noticed?). It wasn't a huge thing to organise though as I had heaps of people helping out. Clare's parents provided their home as the venue and I asked all the guests to either bring a plate for afternoon tea or a bottle of soft drink. There wasn't much for me to do except send out the invitations and organise some shower games.

We had a lovely afternoon. The weather was quite warm so we sat out in the garden. There were lots of afternoon tea treats and I can tell you now that I sampled every one (oops!). There were also lots of babies - Erin's twins Arnie and Rosie, Emily's little boy Marcus and Hyomee's little boy Marshall - so there were lots of opportunities for cuddles. An afternoon of girly chats, cake and baby cuddles. A winner in my book.

Congratulations Clare and Brendan. We're looking forward to meeting your new arrival. Soon! Exciting!

More photos (slideshow) on Flickr.

Yup, that's right a babies shower. On the weekend we celebrated the impending arrival of Caitlin and Jack's twins (two babies! at once! eek!) at Caitlin's baby shower. We had a lovely afternoon in the summer sunshine. We played a few baby shower games and ate sandwiches, cakes and scones for afternoon tea. Any afternoon that involves cake is a good one.

In one of the shower games we had to try to estimate the size of Caitlin's bump. We had to cut a length of string which represented the circumference of her bump. Most of us grossly over-estimated the size of her bump. Either she's not as big as she looks or we're really bad at estimating (I suspect the latter.) Here is a photo of Caitlin at 34 weeks. She definitely looks very pregnant.

For the shower afternoon tea I made my Ducky cupcakes. I used Martha Stewart's chocolate cupcake recipe which is the best one I've come across so far. I think the sour cream makes for a lovely moist cupcake.

And of course, the twins were gifted a lambykins each. That's five lambykins that I've sewed in the past few months. Caitlin is having a girl and a boy so I made a girl lambykin and a boy lambykin. I made them so that they can face each other and have a chat or give each other a little kiss (or, as Andrew pointed out, they can face away from each other if they are cranky.)



Good luck Caitlin and Jack! We can't wait to meet the new additions to your family.

Photo of Caitlin was borrowed with Caitlin's permission from her facebook account

Bel and Dan are welcoming a new member to their family at the end of November. To celebrate the impending arrival of Monkey (the baby's nickname, not what the baby is... hopefully) we held a baby shower for Bel last weekend.

I'd volunteered to host. I figured that it would be a nice sunny day and we could have a little picnic in the green area in our apartment complex. I had visions of lolling in the sunshine and a few games of boules or frickets. Of course, the weather had other plans and the forecast for the day was 40km an hour winds and a maximum temperature of 12 degrees (in spring! It snowed in some parts of NSW.) With this news I had a minor panic attack the day before the shower and decided that I'd have to have a contingency plan. The only contingency I could think of was to hold the shower indoors in our apartment. So, Andrew and I did a mammoth clean (actually, a mammoth shove everything into the study and close the door) so that the apartment looked presentable. Lucky we did this because it was very windy on the day. I ended up hosting the shower in the apartment.

I think everyone had a good time. I'd asked people to bring a plate or a bottle of soft drink so we had lots of yummy goodies for afternoon tea. We hung out and chatted and ate and Bel opened some presents.

I'm not a massive fan of silly baby shower games (melted chocolate in nappies anyone?) so I didn't organise any of those. I did ask everyone to enter a guessing competition. Everyone made a guess on the date of Monkey's arrival and how much they think Monkey will weigh when he / she arrives.

Congratulations Bel and Dan! We're looking forward to meeting Monkey soon.

Photos from Annie's Baby Shower are now up (Click here). It was a little bit crowded in Annie's house with about 40 people at the party but we all managed to squish in. The Dinglet is already a very spoiled child, he/she got lots and lots of presents (some pretty cool toys). We ate nibblies, drunk wine and strawberry daiquiris and played a game of "Guess Who?" using everyone's old baby photos. I'm sure everyone had a good time!

From Annie:
Just wanted to thank everyone who came along to the baby shower on Saturday. I had a fantastic afternoon and I hope you all did too. Baby Bell certainly received many lovely gifts! So thanks again. Love from, Annie, Richard and baby bell in the tum!