Bugs Baby Shower

You may (or may not) have noticed my lack of every day blog posting this past week. I tried to stay on top of it, but I missed a day here and there because I was just too busy! I spent the entire week preparing for Kara's baby shower, which was this afternoon. As you may recall, Kara is my brother's girlfriend, and they are expecting a baby boy in just eight short weeks!

My other brother's fiancee, Marie, and I hosted the shower, with help from my mom (and well, um, the use of her HOUSE, which needless to say, was pretty important). The party went as planned, everybody showed up, everyone had a good time, and the mom-to-be was, of course, appropriately showered with gifts.

I posted a photo of the invitations back when I designed them in January, but here it is again so you can see how it ended up fitting in with the theme. Marie and I made and mailed the invitations back in February.

I did my best to take a ton of photos so that Kara wouldn't have to worry about it. I found out I did a pretty good job when I came home and uploaded nearly 200 photos to my computer. Anyway, I just e-mailed over 100 pics to Kara, and figured I'd share several of them here, too.

Before the guests arrived, I went around and took photos of our setup.

This is my mom's dining room, where we set the table up for a buffet. I didn't get pics once the food was set, but we served Italian bread, salad, baked ziti, and meatballs.

We set up the cake and the buckets filled with favors (bug cookies) in the dining room as well, on a table next to the windows. (I made these, but we'll talk more about the baked goods later!)

Cake and dirt cake (again, more on that later--probably a post tomorrow!)

Close-ups of the favor buckets. I bought these felt bug buckets at Michaels. I was in there one day for something else and happened upon these. I couldn't believe my luck--they fit in with our theme perfectly!

In the kitchen, we set up the island with the snacky stuff. We kept it simple because we wanted people to still be hungry enough to eat the lunch we were serving. Cheese, crackers, chips and dip (an absolute necessity at any function in my family), and a veggie platter.

On the kitchen table, we put the diaper cake I made. This was my first crack at one of these, and I was really happy with how it came out. I just realized I didn't take close enough pics to show this, but the diapers? They actually had bug designs on them. That was another coincidence that completely worked in my favor.

I purchased Target diapers to use for the cake, and as we were walking to the checkout, I noticed through the sides of the package that there were designs on the diapers. At first I thought, "I can't use these!" because I wanted them to be plain white diapers. But as I looked more closely, I realized that the designs were bugs. Could it have worked out more perfectly?

For the diaper cake items, I bought a 6-pack of baby socks, a 3-pack of little teethers, a 6-pack of baby spoons, a 2-pack of pacifiers, and the little frog rattle/teether toy for the top. I made the little wooden sign with the baby's name (Hunter) on it to lean on the front. The colors and theme of the sign match the baby's nursery. I figured they could reuse the sign by hanging it on the nursery door (which they plan to do).

Drink station. The punch was spiked with a bit of champagne, so the mommy-to-be had to avoid it. Everyone else enjoyed it, though!

Marie took care of coming up with and putting together a few games to be played throughout the shower. This was the setup of the baby food game. The baby food containers were unlabeled, and everyone had to guess the contents (without tasting or smelling).

It was cute: Instead of just numbering the containers, she labeled each one with a letter from Hunter's name.

Before we knew it, Kara arrived, and the guests started coming shortly after.

The mommy-to-be, Kara.

My 20-month-old cousin, Mia. She was so well-behaved!

Shower hostesses! Marie and me.

We had prepared the pans of ziti on Friday night, so we put them in the oven to bake shortly after people started arriving. Once all of the guests were there, we still had a bit of time for the ziti, so we decided to keep everyone busy with a game.

Marie had planned a "Price is Right"-type game with baby items. We split everyone up into teams of 4-5 people, then gave them sheets of paper Marie had prepared with a list of 10 baby items. On the bottom of the sheet was a "bank" with prices listed, and the groups had to work together to try to match the correct prices to the correct baby items. Apparently it was pretty difficult, because most of our teams were awful at it. :) Our winning team only got 4 correct!

Marie had purchased some really awesome prizes (Tote bags filled with different types of goodies. One was movie-themed, with a Blockbuster gift card, tons of candy, and popcorn. Another was wine themed, with two bottles of wine, wine glasses, and a wine stopper. The last was beach themed, with a beach towel, manicure/pedicure set, flip-flops, etc.). Because of this, we only planned to give three prizes away. As a result, we knew from the beginning that we couldn't have the whole team of people win the "Price is Right" game. Instead, we had the members of the winning team move onto a bonus round.

The bonus game? They had to properly diaper a baby while blindfolded. Whoever did it correctly the fastest won. Even though Kara wasn't on the winning team, we thought it was only fair that the mom-to-be got to participate in the bonus round, too. And guess what? She won! Good to know she is prepared for those late nights changing diapers in the dark. :)

Mia sitting quietly and reading with another of my little cousins, 4-year-old Kiara.

After lunch, we decided to keep moving things along and got Kara situated in the living room to begin opening gifts.

One of my favorite gifts that she received. It was from my mom, and it's a bib that says, "cute but messy... just like daddy." Given that daddy is my "baby" bro, I can tell you from experience. SO APPROPRIATE. :)

GO BILLS!

Big gift from my dad--the travel system.

From Michael and me... the pack 'n' play!

After gifts, we wanted to wrap things up with dessert. Once everyone ate the tasty treats, people began to head out. Successful baby shower, for sure!

The parents-to-be. My brother, Trevor, showed up at the end to thank everyone and start loading gifts in his Jeep to take back to their apartment. I love this photo of them; it's so cute!

After we had cleaned up most of the shower mess, I stopped back to Trevor and Kara's apartment to see how the nursery looked with all of the furniture set up in it (since we painted it last weekend!). I realized that we hadn't gotten a photo of Kara and me, so we took one while we were there.

I'm so relieved to be done with all of the shower planning! Marie and I had a great time doing all of it, but it was a lot of work (especially this past week), so it's nice to know that it's done and it was a success. I was so happy to do it for Kara and Trevor, and of course my little nephew. I can't wait to meet him!