By Lauren
For weeks I have been planning a baby shower for my husband's sister-in-law, who is expecting a little girl next month. Like our son, this baby is of the long-awaited variety, so the other hostesses and I wanted to make sure the shower was particularly special. If the comments from the mother-to-be and the guests are any indication, I'd say we succeeded. I thought I'd share a few lessons learned on what worked and what didn't.
What Worked
The Decorative "Clothesline": Several years ago, I attended a baby shower at which the hostess had hung a piece of string across the front of her bar and clipped several darling baby outfits along the string with wooden clothespins. I thought it was adorable and immediately promised myself if I ever hosted another baby shower, I'd make sure to duplicate the idea. I hung two lines, one in the dining room with the food, and one in our great room where everyone was sitting. I borrowed the outfits from a Southern friend who has two little girls and a fondness for smocked dresses. (It's lovely if the clothes can be a gift for the mom-to-be, but I had planned to purchase a different gift. Also, have you ever priced smocked dresses? Yikes!) I received a ton of compliments on this, and it was relatively easy to do.*
*Except for the Command hook debacle. See below.
Catering, catering, catering: I was pretty stressed about whether everything would go smoothly, and the thing that saved my sanity the most was knowing that someone else was taking care of the food. I initially thought we'd have about a dozen guests at the shower, and when it turned out that the mom-to-be's out-of-town sisters and aunts were all able to come (which is wonderful, but increased the party size by 50%), all I had to do was update the headcount from 12 to 18. I would have been panicked about making that much more food, but instead I just had to make a phone call. I dropped off platters with the caterer the day before the shower, and my husband picked everything up the morning of, plated and ready for the table. And the food was amazing.
Obviously, hiring out the food to a standard caterer isn't always in the budget, but there are ways to make this work that are surprisingly affordable. The deli/prepared food departments of most grocery stores offer party trays of sandwiches, cheeses, fruits, vegetables, and the like. My husband and I have ordered a Moe's Southwest Grill fajita bar for more than one party at our house. And I've never known anyone to turn up his nose at a Chick-Fil-A nugget tray. (A former co-worker of mine even insisted on having them at his wedding reception, alongside the fancier catered food. Guess which tray got cleaned out first?) You might also just order one or two more complicated catered dishes and supplement with easily home-prepared items like fruit skewers, Caprese salad, and artichoke dip with crackers or sliced baguette.
Fresh flowers: Can you ever go wrong with fresh flowers on the table? We had a mix of green hydrengea and stargazer lilies, with a few white roses and pink filler flowers, to coordinate with our pink and green theme.
What Didn't Work
Command Adhesive Hooks: Actually, I guess these halfway worked. I attempted to hang the "clotheslines" using Command hooks a couple of days before the shower. Although the line in my great room, with only five clothing items, held up just fine, I struggled with the line in the dining room, which was holding seven pieces. Even after I ran out to get hooks that purport to hold five pounds each instead of a pound each, they came down. I resorted to securing the line to two old drapery brackets left over from the previous owners of my house. That worked just fine, and I wish I'd thought of it first; I now have a three-inch-long white spot on my plaster dining room wall where the Command hook pulled the paint off the wall.
Lesson learned: You can only command those hooks to hold up so much.
Chinese Paper Lanterns: I bought a bunch of pink and green Chinese paper lanterns to hang from the ceiling in the dining room, but neither Scotch tape nor duct tape would hold the clear filament string onto the ceiling. The Scotch tape stayed on the ceiling, while the filament pulled out; the duct tape stayed stuck to the filament, but fell off the ceiling. In the end, I scrapped the lanterns altogether.
Lesson learned: Unless you're willing to poke holes in your ceiling, don't bother with the paper lanterns. Reassure yourself that less is more, anyway.
Favors--the Almost-Fail: My co-hostess ordered two dozen cupcakes from a local bakery, and later called to add custom iced sugar cookies to our order for shower favors. Unfortuantely, whoever took the cookie order either wrote something down incorrectly, or had such terrible handwriting that the date looked incorrect. She arrived at the bakery on Saturday morning to discover that our cookies had never been made. Thankfully, the bakery owner was wonderful and very responsive, and he offered to make up twenty individual boxes of macaroons, tied with pink and green ribbon. He even drove them to my house himself and refused to let my co-hostess pay for them. So this one actually turned out well.
Lesson learned: All's well that ends well, but call all vendors a couple of days before your event to confirm your orders. I honestly wouldn't have thought to re-confirm something like a cookie order, but you'd better believe I'll do it from now on.
Do you have any tried-and-true baby shower tips or lessons learned?
{Photo credits: Me.}
