Jungle Animal Baby Shower

Since we are on the topic of baby showers this week, (see yesterday’s cool baby shower activity) and I’m waiting on a cool Edison bulb to arrive before I can show you the new light in my upstairs bonus room, so I decided to show you the pictures from the baby shower we threw for my best friend a few years ago.  Her precious baby boy Cooper is not much of a baby anymore, but I think the shower we threw was awfully cute.  She and her husband were decorating their nursery using some jungle animals for a theme, so we decided to run with that for the theme of the shower.  I can’t take credit for most of the cute things at the shower, Amy’s sister Beth is a craft genius and artistic to boot… so she painted and created a lot of the decor as well as making the cookies from scratch.  But take a look at all the decor:

To welcome everyone to the party, Beth painted a canvas with a cute stork.

The guest book was a copy of Goodnight Moon that everyone left a note for Baby Cooper.

Beth made the table runner, and we had a varying selection of food… including animal crackers and cookie dough dip, cupcakes with cute little animal decor, fruit and caprese skewers.

The one thing I can take credit for at the shower was the ‘diaper cake’.  I’ve seen some super elaborate diaper cakes, but I wanted to make one that didn’t require individually re-rolling the diapers and wasting them (I’ve heard a lot of the diaper cake diapers are unusable afterwards).

To make this guy I covered three different sizes of cardboard cake plates (similar to these) with fabric.  For the bottom layer I used diapers just how they come out of the bag.  For the second layer I used 12 of the DIY Burp Cloths rolled up.  Then for the top layer I used some of the full size baby products they had registered for to top it all off.  I finished them all off with some cute ribbon.  I think it turned out pretty well for my first diaper cake!

The rest of the decor included another canvas that eventually went into baby Cooper’s room and had the same decor as the invite did.  This was another of Beth’s masterpieces! It also included a cute fabric bunting hanging over the fireplace.

I mentioned in my post yesterday how much I despise cheesy shower games (like the candy in the diaper thing… yuck) so the only game we played was a memory game of how many baby items you could remember off of a tray.  I put the tray out for a minute, and then took it into the other room.  Guests had to try to remember everything they could.  At the end of the day, Amy got to keep all the items on the tray.  I tried to pick a bunch of little things off of her registry or random items that would make the game more interesting.  Here I am trying to explain the game… and my other friend’s beautiful daughter was finding new things to play with!

At the end of the day we didn’t want guests to go home empty handed, so Beth made some Elephant cookies to take home as a favor.  She used my favorite recipes from Annie’s Eats for the cookies:  the cookies are this recipe for Sugar cookies from Annie’s Eats with her recipe (and tutorial) forRoyal Icing.  Check back in tomorrow to see the bonus room light installation!

Check back in tomorrow to see the bonus room light installation!