If you're planning a baby shower for a friend here's a few tips on decorating, gifts, favors, music and more.
If the mom already knows the sex of the baby, even better. Then you can decide on pink or blue decorations or girl or boy themes. A blue satin or pink lace tablecloth will be beautiful and very impressive. Depending on your sense of humor you can use cloth diapers for place mats at the table and pink or blue pacifiers for the napkin rings. Requests can be put in the invitations to wear all pink or all blue to the shower. Or ask the guests to dress up like small children with pigtails or sleepers with feet. Give the guests candy pacifiers that they can enjoy during the shower. Or go way out and ask the guests to tuck a pillow under their clothes so that everyone at the party is "pregnant". Play children's music during the shower like "˜Mary Had A Little Lamb", "˜Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' and other classics.
Do something completely out of the ordinary like showering the mom with gifts rather than the baby. Consider a foot or back massager, homemade coupons for free babysitting services or housecleaning help, or a gift basket with relaxing bath salts, candles and eye pillows. Other suggestions include a gift certificate for an afternoon at a spa or for a candlelight dinner with hubby. Or how about a gift basket full of baby bottles, each one containing something for Mom like milk bath, hot cocoa mix, candies and so on.
There are lots of games you can play during the shower that will be fun and entertaining for all. Fill a baby bottle with small candies and have the guests guess how many there are. The person who guesses the closest wins the candies. Another game you can play that is unsuspected by the visitors is to mark one paper towel with a brown crayon and fold that paper towel and others in to diaper shapes. Pin the diapers on the guests as they arrive and later have them open the "diaper". The one with the brown crayon mark wins a prize. Another is to have guests bring baby pictures of themselves. Align the pictures and have the guests write down who they think the first picture is and so on. The person who guesses the most correctly wins a prize.
Instead of purchasing a lot of expensive items for the shower you can make much of it yourself. Shape a clothes hanger into a circle and tie diapers on with fishing twine or dental floss to form a wreath. Alternate the diapers so that one has the tabs facing the center while the next has the tabs of the diaper facing the outside of the wreath. The diapers should be scrunched together to make the wreath very full. After the diapers are attached glue on small pacifiers, bottles and pink or blue ribbons and bows.
Make a nice hooded towel for a baby gift by sewing a wash cloth onto the end of a towel. Fold the wash cloth in half. On the wrong side sew up the center of the washcloth then across the top of the fold. This makes a hood on the towel. Attach appliques appropriate for a baby.
