It’s Raining! ~ Or A Baby Shower

It was a very busy weekend (hence delaying this post until Tuesday) with friends and family as we showered my Sister for her second baby girl due in May.

My family is in the Philadelphia area, while I sometimes live in DC or Pittsburgh.  This made for a challenging planning process.  Officially, my Niece Leigh-anne was the primary host to prepare for her new little sister.  She’s only 8 though, so together with my Mom and my sister’s Mother-in-law, we ‘helped’ Leigh-anne put it all together. 😉

Since my Sister is a huge Disney fan, and the nursery is already Pooh themed from when Leigh-anne was a little one, it was obvious we had to keep the Pooh theme going.  So now we had to decide what food and decor we should use.

To help keep Leigh-anne involved early on in the process, I created this ‘top secret’ packet of info for her filled with the options I’d narrowed things down to, and then gave her the chance to vote which she’d like.

There were questions about what type of cake (Chocolate, vanilla, or funfetti? She picked Funfetti!), whether we should do balloons or lanterns, what types of foods we should do, etc.  I emailed my Mom a copy of the document and she ended up sharing it with her.

Most of the decorations I found through a little Pinterest hunting or googling around until I found these printables from Peonies and Poppyseeds.

So the day before the shower, we had Leigh-anne sleep over my Parents’ house so we could spend the day prepping all the decorations.  Like cutting out the cupcake topper and cups…

And assembling them with a little glue-stick and patience…

We even put together a super cute banner that I found on Disneybaby.com:

The website has a handy PDF download that you can print out and string together.  It even matches a set of paper party goods you can pick up from Part City.

After all the taping and spacing we picked it up to find that……

…WE ASSEMBLED IT BACKWARDS.  Oops!  Fortunately tape is easy to fix.

Next we had to put the sweets together.  Bake and ice the cupcakes, then put the picks and linings on them.

Then we had to set out the rest of the food and wait for the Mommy-to-be-(again) to arrive.

The party turned out to be a great success, with plenty of adorable tiny pants and even a good collection of DIY gifts from friends! (A Barrett display frame and home-made baby clothes detergent and even canvases hand painted to spell out the baby’s name!)

All in all, it was a great way to spend a Sunday, with family, friends and celebrating the expansion of the family!

~ Beth