Who wants to shower with me?

Diapers in the lawn can only mean one thing. 

Saturday was baby shower time.

My mom, sister, and stepfather arrived Friday night. They put forth an amazing amount of time and effort planning the shower. My dad, mother in law, and aunt-in-law? (Eric's aunt) also spent half their weekends in the car coming down to celebrate baby L'4yeous. I don’t know if it’s the hormones or I just don’t remember my wedding shower emotions that well since I’m an old, long married lady, but I got choked up all day with gratitude just thinking about it.

Not to mention that my BFF Carolyn just had her own baby barely two months ago, and was gracious enough to host the shower and allow tons of strangers to infiltrate her house.

I would seriously love to look that good when my baby is only two months old.

Just in case all that wasn’t enough, my sister was kind enough to give a pedicure to a lady too pregnant to paint her own toenails.

That's true sisterly devotion.

We also prepared for the shower by finishing up favors and making cookies as big as our faces. My mom found a recipe for the best chocolate chip cookies, and she thought that might be something that would interest me. The really were the most amazing cookies (I’ll post the recipe when Comcast isn’t ruining my life with no internet).

Cookies give me crazy eyes. I THREW MY PIE FOR YOU.

The favors. Homemade pickles, to eat with your ice cream. How cute is that? And my sister hand made all those labels!

My one request was that our baby shower be actually fun and not stupid (and also no unnecessary touching of my belly, which falls right in line with that request in my opinion). I knew the organizers wouldn’t disappoint, and hopefully the guests would agree. This young lady, famous among some blog circles, did beg to return the next day.

Do you recognize this child?

Here’s the three main components of any baby shower and how we kept them all intact yet improved.

Food.

This one you really can’t go wrong with unless you serve a bunch of healthy stuff or don’t provide enough. Since the main party planners were coming from out of town, we decided to go simplistic yet indescribably delicious, and bring some of the local cuisine I grew up with to my current city.

Rochester delicacy – the garbage plate. You just need to trust me and try it. Except you can’t fully experience it without meat hot sauce which you can only get in Rochester, so just go there.

My garbage plate – cheeseburger, mac salad, home fries, mustard, onions, meat hot sauce, pure heaven. Wegmans brand mustard, not French’s, FYI. The fruit and veggies are from the farmer’s market so we could all feel smug while eating them.

Because everything is better in bar form.

                        

Games

We can all agree no one wants to smell diapers smeared with candy that looks like poop. We can also all agree that everyone wants to participate in drinking games. So we had a beer baby bottle chugging contest instead.

Don’t get your panties in a wad, I was just posing with this incredibly dangerous two ounces of beer. I was actually going to use lemonade and participate in the second heat, but after seeing the pain on people’s face the first time around, I decided watching and laughing was a better bet.

Yes, Eric participated twice.

That was the only “organized” game, the rest were just lawn games set out for people to particpipate in at their leisure. We replaced the bean bags normally used in Corn hole with diapers filled with beans (or lentils or rice when I ran out of beans from my pantry).

Presents

Another thing we can probably all agree on is that receiving gifts as equally as wonderful as watching someone else open a ton of presents is terrible. Also, I know you can’t fully appreciate this over the internet, but I am really awkward and horrible at being the center of attention. I would much rather use my words to express myself from the safety of my keyboard. Eric’s quite the opposite and was born with the gift of being a natural entertainer and is just ridiculously charismatic and never gets uncomfortable and creepily chugs water to avoid eye contact like I do. I really hope the baby takes after him socially. I loved the co-ed shower idea the whole time, but it was especially fantastic when I could sit back and eat my s’more while Eric opened gifts and entertained the crowd. We were also able to tag team and got through the gifts pretty quickly, or at least it seemed that way to me, so our guests could get back to drinking and eating.

My main takeaway was that I need to up my gift giving. I knew we have awesome family and friends, but they really went above and beyond and blew my mind. Some highlights were an already packed, ready to go diaper bag, complete with butt paste from Kara, and a “New Mom Survival Kit” all labeled with personal notes from Carolyn (you know, the person who was also letting me take over her house to even have the party).

BUTT PASTE

He’s good at entertaining, I’m good at closing my eyes in pictures and sitting in an unladylike fashion.

When I’m the center of attention, people look like this:

When Eric is the center of attention, people look like this:

Thanks to some incredible generosity, we are now pretty much set with gear. I guess now all that’s left to do is….have the baby. 

What's your skill/comfort level with being the center of attention?