My Baby Shower!!

This past weekend my BFF threw me a book-themed baby shower.  Because she lives on the other side of Dallas from me and the majority of the invitees we decided to have the shower at my house, and it was PERFECT.  People loved getting a sneak peek at the nursery, and when it was all said and done all we had to do was carry the gifts upstairs! But enough of that logic and on to the amazing shower!

WARNING: this post is going to be total picture overload… bear with me!

When I got back to the house (I had been banished so they could transform it), a wreath they had made greeted us at the door:

Baby Shower wreath | www.amusingmj.com

I think I’m going to add a letter to it and take it to the hospital to hang on our door when baby girl is born! It is so cute! I arrived at the house with my mom about 10 minutes before everyone else, so I got to wander around and check out the decor.  It was a child’s book themed party, so there were nod’s to kid’s books everywhere!

Baby Shower | www.amusingmj.com

I get to keep most of the decor, so you’ll see some of these things hung on baby girl’s walls in the nursery very soon! The picture below on the left has book spines printed out, as well as copies of Mother Goose and some other kid’s books lying around on tables.

Book Themed Baby Shower | www.amusingmj.com

 

The pennant bunting was a DIY project made from pictures from children’s books, which was precious!  The whole room was ready for guests, I loved the attention to detail everywhere and how much thought was put into the whole party!

Book Themed Baby Shower | www.amusingmj.com

For food we had lots of my favorites: fruit, cheese & crackers, Paradise Bakery cookies, animal crackers and funfetti dip, and Nothing Bundt Cakes.  (if you aren’t familiar with Nothing Bundt Cakes… you should become familiar… they are A-MAZING).
Baby Shower | www.amusingmj.com

And to drink we had cute baby bottles with straws and tea or strawberry lemonade to go in them:

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And because baby girl is going to need TONS of hairbands, we had a crafting station where everyone got to make a headband or two for baby girl.  I’ve previously blogged about this idea for a shower and I still LOVE it! I first saw it at my friend Lauren’s shower in Little Rock, and was so excited that this little treat made it into my shower! Baby girl has some pretty amazing headbands after this weekend!

Here was the setup:

DIY Headband Station | www.amusingmj.com

And some of the final results:

DIY Headband Station | www.amusingmj.com

She made two display towers to put them on when complete (and even had tags so I know who made them and for what age!).  The display towers are just paper towel rolls wrapped in fabric and put on wide candle holders, but they were SUCH a cute way to display them!!

Can you tell I had both Jayhawks and Aggies at the party?? Baby girl is going to have good headbands for both football and basketball season!

DIY Headband Station | www.amusingmj.com

The other crafting activity was to put your finger print on her tree so she can have a tree of all of the people who came to her shower!

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The only game (I made her promise no cheesy baby shower games!) we played was a game to see if you could come up with the alternate title of the children’s book.  So “Pretty Girl Slumbering” was Sleeping Beauty and so on…

Such a fun game and you’d be surprised how hard they are to figure out! Then of course we opened presents:

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Instead of a card all my friends and family had a craft assignment to do! (Careful it is dangerous to be my friend!!)  They each picked/were assigned a letter to craft/purchase to create an alphabet wall for baby girl’s nursery! One of the things I had seen on pinterest and loved was the wall of letters, so Amy had everyone craft a letter to create her little wall of love! I am so excited that baby girl will have a piece of so many of my friends and family in her nursery and I can’t wait to get it all hung up.  Here are the letters (in no particular order!):

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Somehow we only snagged this iPhone photo of me and Amy, but I am so grateful for her friendship and guidance through this whole ‘pregnancy’ thing, since she has kids of her own and has been through the experience!

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But I did manage to snag a pic with my mom who flew in for the weekend!

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Baby girl is definitely feeling the love after the weekend shower and I am so blessed to have such great friends and family!!

Baby Shower in a Box

I’m going to start out by saying two things: 1. I don’t get credit for any of the creativity behind this idea, my only source of credit for this goes to having the best friends in the whole world.  2. If you want to make a pregnant woman cry happy tears… this is a fabulous way to do it.

Two of my very best friends in the whole world, Lauren & Emily, both live far away.  They were my roommates my senior year of college and somehow still put up with me!! (living with me… not so easy!)  And if it is possible we are better friends now than we were then.  We have been through a lot together and they are the best friends a girl could ever ask for.

My baby shower is this weekend, but due to the distance and their own little ones, they aren’t able to come to Dallas to celebrate.  So instead they went above and beyond and sent me my own shower in a box to celebrate especially with them.

Here’s how it went down: Wednesday in my mail I got a package from them.  So after texting Emily to see if I needed to wait to open it until Saturday, she assured me that I didn’t.  So, I sat down on the floor in the dining room and opened it.  Here’s what was inside:

The perfect gift when you live far away from those you love... A Baby Shower in a Box! | www.amusingmj.com

They had carefully and completely filled a box full of everything you would need for a baby shower! So I sat down on the floor, “hung the decorations” (around my neck because I was too impatient to hang them up on the wall) and my husband and I had a little mini-shower.

Here are the details on what was inside:

Baby Shower in a Box! | www.amusingmj.com

  • Instructions
  • Decorations- Confetti, Balloons, & two garlands (shown in other pictures)
  • A Game- because of course you need a game! (Which PS– I showed you the answer one in here because I guessed about 1/2 of those wrong… not sure whether I am proud or disappointed in myself!)

Baby Shower in a Box! | www.amusingmj.com

Gifts for pregnancy (many of which match my nursery color!):

  • super comfy slippers– (funny sidenote story: I have a pair of booties from Restoration Hardware that are the most comfortable things ever, but they definitely make me look like a clown, which my roommates good naturedly mocked me for in college… until they discovered for themselves how awesome they are… so Booties are actually an inside joke between all of us, which means these slippers DEFINITELY made me laugh uncontrollably when I opened them!)
  • Trail Mix
  • A Water Bottle
  • Chapstick

Baby Shower in a Box! | www.amusingmj.com

Gifts for the baby:

  • Diapers- complete with funny messages written on them!
  • A Book to record moments from her first 5 years
  • A Hand-stitched Kite onesie (we were thetas in college, so this kite is extra special as well!)
  • The hand-made garland which will definitely find a home in baby girl’s bedroom!

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And last but certainly not least: food!! Because what shower is complete without food! I covered the corner of the M&Ms that are already opened… I’ll spare myself the embarrassment and just pretend they haven’t been eaten and mostly consumed.  And then they were more than generous and bought us our monitor as well!

I am so very lucky to have the best of friends who are sweet and creative and already love this baby girl so much!  I can’t wait for baby girl to get to grow up with their daughters!!

Baby Shower in a Box! | www.amusingmj.com

Paper Dot Garland

When we started planning the shower for my brother and his fiancee, I went where I always go for inspiration… PINTEREST!! I had been seeing these cute paper dot garlands around the web and thought they would be perfect for the shower! (the picture below was my inspiration, but whoever pinned it originally didn’t put a link the original site… after some googling you can go here if you want to see the rest of that party)

Pom poms and matching garland.

So although this was about the complete opposite of our color scheme, this was our inspiration pic! But of course I had never made a paper garland before, but it looked like they were just sewn on a sewing machine… so I gave it the old college try! And you better believe you will see more of these at my parties!! IT WAS SOOOOO EASY (and quick and cheap… can’t beat that!).

I bought this guy at Joann’s with a 40% off coupon (seriously if you ever shop at there or Hobby Lobby, download their apps for coupons, they ALWAYS have a 40% off or more coupon!).  I think it cost me about $9.

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I also bought 6 sheets of cardstock paper (and I swear those two gold sheets are the same, but they look very different here!):

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And then I had a date with my couch and Modern Family, so I cut out all my dots

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I made them as close to each other as possible, going around the edge of the paper, then cut off the scraps and kept going on the inner square.  And about one episode later (don’t you love projects you can measure in episodes watched??) I had this:

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Now the really complicated part (here is where I need a sarcasm font): lay them out in the order you want

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And feed them through your sewing machine one by one.  I had my foot pushed down about medium speed and would just wait until the dot before it was just past the needle and would stick the second dot in, that left about an 1/16th of an inch in between each dot.  But since my coordination skills leave a bit to be desired, some have wider spaces than others.  And ladies and gentlemen, we call that character.

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The only other note I have is to leave some extra string at the beginning and end so that you will have something to hang them from.

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And there my friends you have awesome color coordinated decorations for less that $5. (not counting the dot puncher since by the time I’m done making these for every party from now on the cost per garland will be negligible!)  But that’s enough finance talk… lets take a look at the final product shall we!?

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And because I had a few extra gold ones I added them as a garland for the cheesecake

Paper Dot Garland | www.amusingmj.com