Ashley's Baby Shower

I recently threw my sister, Ashley, a baby shower. She's having a little boy on Halloween! Exciting! It's going to be the first grandchild on my side of the family and to say my mom is tickled pink about it is a LAAAARGE understatement. Ashley's (or should I say the baby's?) colors are brown and green, so a turtle theme seemed very appropriate. My mom (who is the party planning queen) helped advise me in throwing this party, which was good since I've never really thrown a shower before and it was slightly out of my comfort zone. She really helped with designing and making the invitations. Aren't they just ADORABLE?

Our main decorations (besides the food table, hee hee) were this clothesline with lots of cute green and brown baby clothes hung on it and these cute pictures of actual turtles that we printed out. I tried to take a picture of the turtle pictures, but we'd stuck them to the window and the backlighting makes it so you can't see them. Also hard to see is a little robe for a newborn on the clothesline (completely impractical since he'll probably wear it once, but absolutely adorable!).

Here is the beginning of the food table. We ordered these cute turtle napkins and Mom imported the two baskets for the forks and the napkins from home in California. I should keep a tally of all the things she brought up for me to use - she's so cute and remembered EVERYTHING I had asked her to bring.

Ashley's mother-in-law, Julie, volunteered to bring SO MUCH - what a cutie. I didn't want her to have to do everything, but she ended up bringing two dishes and she did both VERY WELL. Here's the yummy pumpkin spice cake she brought on this gorgeous cake plate.


She also brought cheese and crackers. She went ABOVE AND BEYOND. Check this out. Cheese ball with crackers and mini baby cheese.


And an ENTIRE different tray with cheese dip and like at least 4 more types of cheese and 5 different types of crackers. Delicious!

Ashley's friend, April, made these really cute turtle cupcakes. The head and legs were made of Tootsie Rolls. Mom brought up her ADORABLE cupcake stand (another California import) and they basically were an edible decoration.

My aunt Kathy brought "turtle" brownies in that they had chocolate, carmel and walnuts (I enjoyed the pun even if no one else at the shower got it). They were really delish - I ate two. She also had leftover creampuffs from my cousin's wedding reception, so she brought those along, too. I got this double-tiered platter for my wedding and I was really excited to use it for the first time.


And now for my pride and joy. (This is the only food I made. ) I applied my engineering skills to making an ideal baby shower food. I wanted it to be healthy. I wanted it to be delicious. And most of all, I wanted it to be easy to eat. (A lot of times, it seems like the food at showers are delicious but the plates are small and it's hard to eat with plastic forks and you don't want to seem like a pig by taking a ton of stuff, even if you want to). I wanted to overcome these obstacles. And I decided to make fruit kabobs. My Dad is the "Fruit Salad Champion." Recently, he's gotten very into making fruit salads with a bunch of delicious fruit and he has a system and anyone helping him make the salad must conform to it. I decided to utilize his expertise (another good engineering technique) and recruited him to help me both pick out the fruit and make the kabobs. We went to Sunflower Market and he was in HEAVEN. It's a health-food grocery store that specializes in having a large variety of fresh, cheap produce. We ended up buying: pineapple, strawberries, kiwi, cantaloupe, peaches and grapes. We bought this the day before and then made the kabobs the morning of the shower. While cutting the fruit definitely took awhile, it was REALLY fun and I think they turned out great. I was only going to make 20 kabobs (approximately one for every guest I anticipated coming), but we ended up using all the fruit we had and making 36 (once we got going, we were on a roll). The hilarious thing is that ALL 36 got eaten and if we'd had more, those might have gotten eaten, too. I felt this a grand confirmation of the engineering process.


My aunt Jenny brought the veggies and dip. We put them out on a platter that came with the dishes my sisters-in-law (Janine and Ang) gave me as a wedding gift. It's really cute, but it's sad the design is covered up. I think veggies and fruit are cute and photogenic (and I suppose eating a lot of them makes us all so as well), so these two pictures make me happy. The tomatoes Jenny brought were little baby tomatoes that tasted AMAZING! I found out later that she'd grown them in her garden. Delicious! And I decided when I get my own yard, I'm going to have a tomato farm, because I love them so much.


Here's a picture of some of the drinks. I also served Simply Lemonade and Simply Raspberry Lemonade in addition to the water with the cucumber, but I didn't remember to take a picture until they were all drunk. I got both these pitchers for my wedding as well. I thought they were perfect for the shower, because it was like a mommy and baby set. We ended up calling the baby pitcher the "Fertility Pitcher" and told people to drink out of it if they were thinking about having another kid. :) We were being pretty goofy.


A couple pictures of the final layout. I never got a good one of the centerpiece by itself, but basically, I took a branch and stood it up in a square vase and then hung up little paper turtle ornaments. The ornaments were cute and easy to make - we just stamped the turtle from the invitation on little circles of paper and matted them.



The party favors. They were little, green apple soaps shaped like turtles. They were wrapped up so cute, and they looked and smelled delicious, so my mom was sure someone was going to think they were candy and try to eat one. She "encouraged" me to make an announcement at the beginning of the shower to warn everyone that it was soap (which I did) and then proceeded to warn every guest individually, as well, when they took one. It was pretty funny.

For party entertainment, I had a couple of ladies tell some fun or cute baby stories to help Ashley anticipate what she was getting in to. My mom told one of Ashley. Apparently, when Ashley was a little baby and my mom would pat her back, Ashley would pat my mom's back, too. So cute! My aunt, Kathy, told one of her little boy, Brandon, when he was about 4. They walked by a homeless man with shaggy, long hair and a beard, and Brandon, said, "Hi!" A few seconds later, he said, "Mom, I just said hi to Jesus!" It was fun to hear all these cute stories. Also, we had a couple baby shower "crashers." I should have taken a picture of them, but they were my Uncle Kevin (whose house it was at), my cousin Michael (his son who's my age) and my grandpa. Kevin even told a baby story for the entertainment. It was pretty funny how much fun they seemed to having at a baby shower.

Well, that's that. It was a lot of fun to plan and implement my baby shower ideas, and I KNOW it wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful without the influence of my mom. She's so cute. Thanks, Mom!