Baby shower

My cousin's oldest daughter recently turned 18.  I am not using names and am not sharing pics of her, since I didn't ask her if that would be ok.  Her short story:  She graduated a year early, and had plans to go to Tarleton and major in Veterinary Medicine.  She was a bit of a tomboy and had not had many boyfriends all throughout high school.  She thought she had met the love of her life last year, and got pregnant.  The plans changed.  The boyfriend turned out to be a jerk, and his entire family was unsupportive of her.  She has since moved in with her grandmother, and is fixing up a room for she and her baby boy.  She still has plans to attend Weatherford Junior College in the evenings, while her grandmother (who has worked in a day care with the 6-12 month old babies her entire adult life), watches Aiden.  

In a moment of craziness mixed in with love for my cousin, I offered to host a baby shower for her.  I think I was also influenced by an understanding that we all make stupid mistakes when we are young, and even though those mistakes can turn out to be wonderful, I wanted her to know that our family fully supports her and celebrates this baby.  I have never even co-hosted a baby shower.  But I have attended many, including my own.  The family immediately started thanking me, saying they had been looking for a place big enough to have it.  Oops.  Should've talked that over with my husband.  They wanted to have it the weekend before Gabriel's birthday.  We decided to postpone his party a week so I could have a weekend off to rest up in between the crazy.  But I really got lucky, because Little Momma's grandmother helped out so much that I was left with three main responsibilities:  Decorating, games and the food.  She took care of some decorations, all paper products, party favors and the cake.  

Little Momma wanted a jungle theme, and I found a zebra tablecloth that I knew I wanted to use.  I also thought about palm trees and rope for vines.  I had been wanting to get some new house plants anyway, and I found the two ponytail palms below on sale.  I also bought one big palm to sit on the floor somewhere around where the guest of honor was opening gifts.  My sweet dad came and helped me get the rope vines hung all around the table and the living room, and I wrapped green crepe ribbon around the rope.  I also bought several stuffed jumgle animals at Toys R Us that I thought were adorable, and that I gave to her to decorate the nursery after the shower.  I hung our Curious George monkeys from the vines.  I got a huge giraffe balloon to tie to Little Momma's chair.  The crowning touch on the decorations were the big bowls of bananas I put everywhere in the house, including the bathroom.  Of course, I realize that I probably got jungle and African savannah confused, but I don't care, I think it looked really cool.

I came up with 2 games, a celebrity baby name game and the Bag Guessing Game, showcased in the picture above in front of the mirror.  My boss has given around 30 baby showers, and this is the one game she's led in all of them.  Each bag is labeled with a letter of the baby's first and middle name.  Then, inside is something that starts with the corresponding letter and is an item for babies.  Whoever gets the most guesses right, wins the prize.

On the food, since this is the Most People Don't RSVP era we are living in, I decided to aim for 25-30 people (they had invited around 40).  Little Momma had been sending me food Pins from Pinterest that I saved in a big folder.  I decided on going with a watermelon bowl fruit salad, Skinny southwest chicken dip, caprese pasta salad, tortilla pinwheels with cream cheese, bacon, pesto and smoked turkey, chocolate covered strawberries and apple pie bites.  I am determined that from now on I will remember to take pictures of the food, because it all looked amazing in my opinion.  I worked my tail off Friday, then had help from Little Momma and her family with getting the fruit cut up for the watermelon bowl and making the tortilla pinwheels.  My cousin and I grew up together and spent around 7-8 years drifting farther and farther apart for various reasons.  Then we found each other on Facebook, and have been a part of each other's lives again ever since.  We were laughing and reminiscing in the kitchen before the shower started and having so much fun.  It's true that your cousins are your first closest friends

It turned out that out of the 40 people they invited, Little Momma had assured me that 10-15 were close family and would be showing up.  But that was all who came.  NONE of her friends showed.  I thought that was pretty lame, even if I do live 20 minutes or so from where she and her friends live.  But we still managed to have a really fun day.  And she felt special and loved by the 15 people there, so it was a success.  And Jav and I got to eat tortilla pinwheels in our lunches the entire next week.  Yum!