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.