Baby Shower #2

Today, we had our second baby shower. Michael's mom, sisters, and aunt threw it for me (us). The guests were from Michael's side of the family, and because of the location, my college friends were invited to this one, too.

It was an awesome afternoon with good family, good friends, and good food. Like my other shower, it was relatively small so I felt like I got to spend some time talking with everyone, which was great. We played a few cute games, enjoyed some cake, and I opened all over the (VERY generous) gifts.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of photos yet, but there are a few to share. Also, I missed out on getting a photo with all of my hostesses, which I'm really sad about! But everyone was running around doing so much that it escaped us until we were all home afterwards. Oops. :(

The cake. It was almond cake/icing and had like a strawberry cream/mousse filling or something; it was delish!

The gift table

So much stuff for the little one...

Laughing with Cristina as I open Bumbo chair #2... oops! Thankfully, we had very few registry screw-ups, but somehow, TWO people bought us Bumbos and it was never marked off of our registry. Things that make you go hmmm....

I had BOYS at my shower again. (The horror!) Our brother-in-law, Andy, and nephew, Logan. Also in attendance were our other nephew Brendan, Michael's uncle Mike, and Michael's grandfather. :)

Who knew plastic cups could be so much fun?? Logan was such a serious baby, but the last few times we've seen him, we've been amazed at how he has all of a sudden developed this huge personality. Love him!

With two of my friends from college.

We received many wonderful gifts, including our high chair, extra car seat base, the Bumbo and accessory tray, burp cloths, onesies, the changing table supplies, and more. We also received several gift cards and cash gifts--which will all be put to very good use, I assure you!

I'm overwhelmed by the generosity of others and am so grateful to my "other" wonderful family... it's so nice to have married into such a nice group of people. I can't wait to add another little person to the family! :)

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Baby Shower #1

On Sunday, I was given a baby shower by my sisters-in-law on my side of the family--Kara and Marie. It was a nice, but REALLY HUMID day, so I was definitely grateful for the central air conditioning at my mom's house, where the shower was held. It was a bummer we weren't able to be outside on the deck, though!

Everyone arrived around noon. The guests were all women, but we managed to recruit my brothers and Michael to attend so that they could grill for all of us. There was a lot of good food, and good times were had by all.

I'm so glad that I was able to split things into two showers this time. For my bridal shower, I just had one big shower, so there were about 40-45 people there. It was nice, of course, but it was overwhelming. I felt like I didn't really get to see or talk to anybody, and I felt badly that people had come to celebrate with me and had seen so little of me. This time, each side of the family offered to throw a shower, so I was able to split the guest list among two dates. Today, we only had 17 guests and it was fabulous! I actually got to visit with everyone.

Some photos:

Kara and Marie decided to do a bee theme, because they came across an idea online for a unisex shower that was, "What will our baby bee?" It was cute. Kara made the cake.

Obligatory diaper cake!

Little man Hunter brought up to the male to female ratio a little bit, too. Here he is, hanging out with Uncle Michael.

The guys left him inside when they were out on the deck grilling, and Hunter wanted to go out there with them SO BADLY. He just stood at the window, staring at them. They eventually gave into his cute little face and brought him out to join the guys.

He was sleepy, so he was toting his blankie everywhere. He reminds me of Linus from Charlie Brown. :)

After we ate lunch, we played a couple of games that Kara and Marie set up--they were fun, "brain-teaser" type games that I really quite enjoyed (I'm not usually a huge fan of shower games!). For one, we were given names of TV shows and had to name the kids that were on each show. For example, The Simpsons--we had to come up with Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. Or The Cosby Show--we had to come up with Sondra, Denise, Theo, Vanessa, and Rudy. It was actually quite challenging! Whoever got the most correct answers won that game.

For the second one, it was a word scramble, and all of the words were baby items. Whoever got all of them solved correctly first won. I had most of them done pretty quickly, but was stuck on one last one, and my cousin ended up beating me out! Damn! (The word I was stuck on? "Sunshade.")

Games were followed by presents:

We received quite a bit of stuff. Everyone was so generous. Hooded towels and wash cloths, diapers (we actually plan to use cloth, but we're still going to need disposables for the first few weeks at least!), onesies, pajamas...

...the baby bath tub, a bunch of Johnson & Johnson bath products, little toys, pajamas, blankets, and more. So much more! Notice my little helper in the pictures. That's my little cousin, Mia, who is almost 3 years old. She's going to become a big sister in just a few short weeks, and she's going to be the BIGGEST mommy's helper! She's hilarious! She retrieved all of my gifts for me, and helped me open them, too.

My mother-in-law crocheted this beautiful blanket. I love it!

After presents, we did cake, and soon after that, people started to take off. I was proud of myself and my hostesses for keeping things moving--I hate when showers drag and you're forced to sit around for hours. We were all business and got things wrapped up so that people could get on with their Sundays!

My good friend, Carrie, and me. We've been friends since high school and even though we very rarely get to see each other, I love her dearly!

And of course, my lovely hostesses and me. They did a great job and I'm so grateful to them for all of the work they put into everything. It's so nice to be "pampered" with a baby shower and I feel very lucky that I had these two to do it for me!

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Baby Girl Shower Favors

My cousin is expecting a baby girl in September. Today, her sisters and mom threw her a baby shower. A few weeks ago, my aunt called and asked if I could help her with the favors. We talked it through and agreed I would make something edible. And I had just the thing in mind.

I ended up making two different flavors of cupcake bites. I've made these before--you've even seen them on my blog. I made them around Thankgiving, and then again at Christmas.

Each favor consisted of two of the cupcake bites, arranged in a truffle box, and tied with two different ribbons. I wanted to use the sparkly "It's a Girl" ribbon I found at Michael's, but I also wanted to incorporate the style of the shower and of the baby's nursery--pink and brown. So I found a way to use both.

I had to make up 50 of these boxes, so more than 100 cupcake bites! Needless to say, it was a bit time consuming. Totally worth it, though, as everyone enjoyed them and I received a ton of compliments.

Here are the two different flavors of cupcake bites, nestled in the box. (I just realized that I didn't take any photos of them outside of the boxes, which is a shame since they are so damn cute on their own. Oh well.) The one on the left, with the dark pink M&M, was made of strawberry cake with vanilla frosting. The one on the right, with the light pink M&M and sprinkled with non pareils, was made of chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting.

Delicious.

And congratulations to my cousin. I can't wait to meet her little girl.

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Dirt Cake

For the baby shower, in addition to the cookies I made for favors, I also made a bugs-themed cake--you know, for dessert. :)

I used my big jelly roll pan (10.5 x 15.5") and made a gigantic chocolate fudge cake. And OK, I'll admit it. I cheated. The cake was from a box. Good ol' Betty came to my aid yet again. (It was good stuff.)

Once it was done, I did cut it into two layers. The filling? Oreo buttercream. Then I frosted it with vanilla buttercream that I colored bright green. I put a couple handfuls of Oreos through the food processor to make "dirt," and then spread that around on the top of the cake in a big rectangle. Then, using one of my Wilton piping tips, I piped all of that awesome looking grass onto the top edges and the sides. It was a bit of a pain in the ass, but it was worth it in the end. I absolutely loved how this turned out.

To finish it all off, I placed several gummy worms on top, then made a little sign with a quote on it that tied the cake back into the "baby boy" shower theme. "Boys are meant for kisses and hugs, for watching rainbows, and catching bugs."

Perfect!

We didn't stop with just a "dirt and grass" decorated cake. No, sir. On Friday night, when were doing the food preparation at my mom's, Marie and I also threw together a "real" dirt cake. And we served it right out of a bucket!

It was the cutest. Vanilla pudding, cream cheese, cool whip, butter... all mixed together and then layered with... you guessed it, more "dirt." The dirt for this dessert was made up of about 1.5 packages of Oreos. It was a lot of dirt!

Topped it off with more gummi worms and stuck a small bunch of fake flowers in it. Also made another little sign with another quote on it that related to boys and dirt. "Trucks and dirt and shades of blue, little boys are angels, too." Put together, and with the rest of our decor, it was really quite adorable.

Here is what it looked like once it had been mostly devoured. It was a huge hit! (Such a hit, in fact, that Kara's 6-year-old cousin told me she wished I was her mommy! *gasp* It was really sweet, I just wish she hadn't said it right in front of her real mommy!)

I wasn't sure how many people were going to want to eat the dirt cake AND the chocolate cake, but everyone wanted both. Since the dirt cake was kind of like "cookies and cream," it went really well with the chocolate cake--it served as a good ice cream substitute. In case you're interested in trying this out, I'll share the recipe that we used.

Dirt Cake

(Source: Allrecipes.com)

Ingredients:

- 1/2 cup butter, softened

- 1 (8 oz.) package cream cheese, softened

- 1/2 cup confectioner's sugar

- 2 (3.5 oz.) packages instant vanilla pudding mix

- 3 1/2 cups milk

- 1 (12 oz.) container frozen whipped topping, thawed

- 32 oz. (2 packages) Oreo cookies

Directions:

1. Chop Oreo cookies very fine in a food processor. The white cream will disappear.

2. Mix butter, cream cheese, and sugar in a bowl.

3. In a large bowl, mix milk, pudding mix, and whipped topping together.

4. Combine pudding mixture and cream cheese mixture.

5. Layer in flower pot or bucket, starting with cookies, then cream mixture. Repeat layers.

6. Chill until ready to serve.

7. Add gummy worms, artificial flowers, and trowel. Enjoy!

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Bug Cookies

I spent much of last week working on baking and decorating bug cookies for the baby shower yesterday.

The process was even more time-consuming than usual because I was making so many different shapes, and each of them was so detailed. I was pretty happy with how they came out, so in the end, it was worth it. Everyone at the shower loved them, and I think it was a pretty nice favor for each of them to take home!

Here are some photos of the cookies. One of the whole group:

And then each cookie individually:

The caterpillar

The bee. The details on his wings are difficult to see, but there was a pattern of lines on the tips of his wings, and then polka dots toward the middle.

The ladybug. I think these ones were my favorite.

The snail. Cute, but the swirl of the shell was really hard to do well.

The dragonfly. Probably my other favorite. I used a toothpick to combine two different colors on the wings, and I loved how it turned out.

This is how the favors were put together. Everyone got one big cookie, and then a small bee. I put them into cookie bags, and tied them with curling ribbon, and added an "It's a Boy!" charm.

As always, I used this recipe for the sugar cookie cutouts.

Tomorrow, I'll share more details about the cake!

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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!

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