Ten Steps to a Well Planned and Original Baby Shower

I had rave reviews on the last baby shower I hosted, and many commented on how much fun they had. Baby showers are a celebration of the arrival of new life, and the guests should enjoy themselves as much as the expectant mother. With an eye toward detail and some imagination, your shower can be fantastic!

1. Get with the expectant mother and choose two dates that would work with her. Saturday afternoons are a perfect time for most people who work outside the home and also for getting babysitters. We had our shower on a Saturday at 2 PM.

2. Decide where the shower will be held, and who will be willing to help you with it. Both of these can affect the date, so with two possible dates, you will have options. If it seems overwhelming to have the shower at your home, or if you don't have room for a large gathering, consider community clubhouses, local community centers, restaurants with party rooms. Reserve your location for the entire afternoon, in case there are stragglers who stay to chat, and also so you will have time to clean up afterward.

3. Make a list of the menu you plan to serve, what decorations you plan to use, games and activities, and guest lists. Keep a running shopping list of things you need and check them off when purchased. We decided to invite husbands to our shower, so our menu consisted of more substantial foods. We had punch, petit fours (small individual cakes decorated with booties or rattles made of icing and available at your local bakery), nuts, mints, rolled sandwiches, sweet and sour meatballs, a chicken spread with crackers, a layered mexican dip with tortilla chips, cream puffs, and a fruit platter. Excellent recipes can be found on recipezaar.com or recipesource.com for appetizers and punch. Decide who will be responsible for buying the ingredients and preparing each dish.

4. Don't forget to plan for serving dishes. You will need platters, a punch bowl, larger bowls for chips, and serving untensils. We tried to use silver or glass serving dishes to keep an elegant look. Many party supply stores sell disposable silver trays that look very much like the real thing. Check your local dollar stores for glass serving bowls or plastic that looks like glass.

5. Choose your invitations. This can be a major expense if you choose to order them from an engraver. We purchased blank invitation stock and printed our own. We had a lot of fun picking fonts, wording, etc. The invitation should state something similiar to: You are Invited to a Baby Shower in honor of : (Parent's Names), Date, Time, Location and in parentheses "directions enclosed," (print these on a small piece of paper to enclose in the envelope), Who the Shower is Given By, and where the expectant parents may have gift registries. Be sure to ask the expectant mother to choose a long list of "wants and needs" of different price ranges. Also, if it is important to you to know the exact number, you can ask for an RSVP or put Regrets Only to your phone number. A good rule of thumb is 2/3 of the guests invited usually attend.

6. With the mom's help, plan your guest list and assemble a list of addresses.. Invite family, friends, co-workers of the expectant parents, etc. Mail out invitations three weeks to a month ahead of time. Be sure to send an invitation to the expectant parents to keep for their baby book.

7. Three weeks ahead, go and purchase the paper plates, cups, napkins, and flatware in the design you plan to use. We chose a "clothesline theme" and found cute plates with baby's clothes on a clotheline. You may want to go with Teddy Bears, Balloons, etc. Decide what you will use for your centerpiece. Besides the paper centerpieces you can buy at party stores, consider fresh flowers, or a diaper cake (see picture). These are really cute and can be filled with small gifts for the mom to be, such as lotion, comb and brush, etc. They are available on Ebay, internet stores, and at some florists. Our diaper cake also had a little clothesline theme to match our plates. Choose small gifts to use as prizes for the games. If men are invited, have gifts for men as well as women. We had small containers of hand lotion and bath gels for the women, and keychain flashlights for the men. These were wrapped in tulle circles and tied with blue or pink ribbons to differentiate the men's gifts from the women's. Gather needed tablecloths and ink pens for the games.

8. Two weeks ahead, call to confirm that the place you plan to have your gathering has your reservation and that all is well with that. Finding out on the day of the shower that someone accidentally overbooked or forgot to record your reservation can be a nightmare. Ask how early you can come to decorate. Ask someone to keep a list of the presents and the givers for the expectant parents, and also plan on a friend or family member to to take photos or video.

9 . There are many sites with free shower games online. One fun game is baby scrabble, scrambling words that have to do with babies and their care, such as "diaper bag" and "sleep deprived." We also played a game of "Guess the Gestation" in which the player matched the animal to the number of days of it's gestation. This was a lot of fun and had everyone laughing over their math skills of how many days are in 9 months for a human's gestation. A game to keep everyone paying attention during the opening of the gifts is Gift Bingo. Make bingo cards with the name of a common shower gift in each square. Make sure to make each card in random listing. As the mother opens each gift on the player's card, he or she marks that square, and as in traditional bingo, tries to get a line horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. We also planned an activity to paint onesies with fabric paint. We covered a long table with a plastic tablecloth, placed solid white onesies of various sizes, tubes of fabric paint, and asked each person to decorate a onesie for the baby. We hung these (you guessed it) on clotheslines to fit in with our theme. Onesies can be purchased in packs of five to lessen expense, and many friends probably have fabric paint you can borrow. Everyone really enjoyed this and the parents received such cute, original onesies for the baby. Buy a package of economy paper plates to insert into each onesie to keep the paint from bleeding through. Buy or borrow clothespins and clothesline if needed for a drying place or plan an alternative.

10. Two days before the shower, shop for the needed groceries. The day before the shower, begin to pepare any dips, spreads, etc. that can be made ahead. Pick up the cake or petit fours. Assemble everything that needs to be transported to the location in one spot so nothing is left behind. The morning of the shower, delegate someone to transport your things to the party location and to decorate while you cook, or vice versa. Then dress for the shower, take a deep breath, smile, and enjoy yourself !!