Homemaking, Baking, Cake decorating, Sewing, Quilting and Serving God!
My friend Clarissa is an amazing cook and mother. (I wish I had a picture of her cooking!) She has five children, here are her two girls, and when you have that many kids you have to know how to cook. She doesn't like to bake though. I needed someone to make the favors for the shower and I knew she would do a great job. I wanted cookies as favors, I was thinking simple chocolate chip cookies in bags tied with brown ribbons. I had not really thought about it, so I gave her my idea and let her run with it. She surprised me by making three different kinds of cookies, and they were delicious! She said she wanted something simple with very few ingredients, well these were great!
Cynthia made the milk shakes and then we put the milkshakes in my white pitcher which was sitting in a bucket of ice. Renee made homemade strawberry ice cream and Cynthia just did half milk and half ice cream for the milk shakes. Since we were adults, and milk is expensive I thought the milk shakes would be a big hit for the "milk" part of my theme. We also had tea and water in milk bottles for our friends who did not want milk shakes. 
Since I was busy baking and decorating the cake and planning the shower, I did not have time to bake cookies also (If I could have gone without sleep I might have been able to), so I passed a list around Sunday School and asked my friends to help out. Miss Debra made her famous homemade carob Oreo cookies (you can find the recipe in a previous post), Chrystal , who had made the cookie bouquets, made carob chip cookies and sugar cookies, and Julia made some type of coconut cookies. I must admit I was kind of worried when I saw that we only had four kinds of cookies, but the Lord blessed and we even had leftovers! I put the cookies on white dinner plates from home, I figured since cookies are usually served on plates at home it would be fitting!
First, let me say that I have no idea why the picture rotated once I downloaded it for the blog, but I have no idea how to fix it! I used my my printshop program to make the invitations, banner, games and everything else. I love Printshop because it is easy for me to use(and I am not very computer savvy!). I put our theme verse for the shower, "O taste and see the the Lord is good, blessed is the man that trusteth in Him." Psalm 34:8, on the front of the invitation to set the mood for the shower. Inside the invitation I asked all of the ladies to bring a bag of cookies for Kristi to put in her freezer to feed her family sweets, who wants to cook when they are pregnant? I also printed the gift list on the blank side of the invite.
Siouxsie did a great job with the gifts for the games! She wrapped her gifts in brown paper bag that had chocolate chips drawn on them and crumpled them to look like cookies and wrapped up the gifts in a round shape. Aren't they cute? I put them on the tables so everybody could see them. Since we had the cookie bouquets also, I gave them a choice of a "surprise cookie" or a cookie bouquet. 
We had one extra "cookie" gift left and I shamelessly asked Siouxsie if I could have it. Aren't these jewelry sets pretty? Cynthia, my neighbor, also got one so I had her let me borrow hers for a picture with mine. There were two other designs also. My heart has a prayer on it asking God to hep me walk in His path, and Cynthia's necklace and earrings says "With God all things are possible", Susan's is a circle and has the Lord's prayer, and Sherry's has the teacher's prayer on it. I don't like the showers where you are expected to give your prize to the guest of honor, what's the fun in that? After all she gets all the gifts we brought her.
I wanted her to have a corsage, but I did not know how to make one. I bought all the stuff and Cynthia made the corsage for me. Now that I think back, I should have looked in the scrap booking section and bought some charms that have cookies and milk to hang from the corsage also.
That is all of my pictures of the shower, now I want to go over just a few ideas for planning a shower. First, start early. As soon as I found out Kristi was pregnant I started planning what theme I wanted to do for her shower. Use the Internet for ideas; blogs are a great resource! After I had decided on a theme, I started planning the cake, which I had to redo after I found my paisley and polka dotted plates. I asked for help. People might not want to help plan or host a shower because of time or money, but they are usually willing to do one thing. As you can tell from my posts, I'm pretty good at delegating. Was everything done exactly the way I wanted? No, but that's okay, this way everybody was a part of the shower. Every shower does not have to be done the same way, just because "that's not the way we usually do it" is said a lot, it doesn't matter. You are giving the shower, do what you think the guest of honor would like. That's another thing, you might like the theme of cute little baby mice, but the mom-to-be might be terrified of mice. This party is for her, not you! Planning is essential. Type up a "schedule" for the shower and give it to the co-hosts and everyone who is helping. This will help you not to forget to play one of the games or something. I was constantly referring to my schedule to remember what to do next!
I looked at my invitations and drew the picture onto a piece of poster board and colored it in. I left a "blank" chocolate chip in the middle of the cookie. Be sure to keep up with who gets the closest, but if you have someone who is dead center, you need to move it so the other ladies don't cheat by finding that chip and using it as a guide for their chip. :)
We also played guess the chocolate chips game. I had Susan count the chips and the winner got to keep the jar of carob chips as their prize. (Notice I put a matching bow on the bottle?)
When I plan showers, I always try to plan one game on paper, one group game (pin the chip on the cookie), and one ice breaker (guess the chips), and then I finish up with a fun game like charades or pictionary. I had a hard time finding something that we could do on paper that matched my theme. I finally found on Ebay a game called Grandma's Cookie Jar. I took the same concept and printed up my own game. On one side I had a description of a cookie. For ex: A young girl scout = brownies, This cookie does NOT stick to the roof of your mouth=peanut butter, This cookie is in the shape of a peanut=Nutter Butter. The answers were on the other side. It was a lot of fun, unfortunately I threw the leftovers away so I don't have a copy to give ya'll.
As you can see I did have some help with cutting out the ribbon!, Squeeky had a blast with the one she stole from my pile! LOL!
My friend Pam, who was kind enough to open her home and let me host the shower there, had two blue tablecloths and was able to find two brown tablecloths at Ross. This worked perfect since I had four tables! In my sewing box I had three pieces of material that my friend Susan ironed under the hems and we used them as table runners to bring the colors together! On the cookie buffet, I used brown valances to wrap around my cake stands and hide the purple and greens that would not have matched! I would love some white cake stands! We used my white dinner plates to serve the cookies on (thank you freecycle!). I figured we always serve cookies on plates at home, so why not on the buffet? 
For my centerpieces I wanted to stick with the brown and blue theme, and cookies and milk. (You can tell the second picture is at my house because of the penguins in the background!) I couldn't find any flowerpots or buckets that were brown or blue. I bought cheap 89 cent flowerpots from Target and covered them with brown tissue paper. It took one sheet for each pot and I just centered the pot on top of the paper and pulled up all sides. I used double sided tape sparingly on the top of the outside and inside to attach the tissue. I wanted to be able to reuse the pots later. I bought a lot of ribbon, some it was brown with white polka dots, some blue with brown polka dots and my husband bought me a bigger one that was reversible polka dotted brown and blue. I used these ribbons on everything to bring the colors together, and they sort of matched the trim on the plates. I gave the pots to my friend Chrystal and she made the cookie bouquets for me. She used the no-fail sugar cookie recipe for the bottles http://cakecentral.com/recipes/2055/no-fail-sugar-cookies these are the best cookies ever, I make them all the time! She bought a big baby bottle cookie cutter from Hobby Lobby and I love the way she made each bottle different! She did need to use two sticks for the bottles. For the giant chocolate chip cookies she used the round cookie pop pan from Wilton. She used moss to top the cookie pots with, but some of it stuck to the cookies, so next time maybe just use tissue paper. We handed the bouquets out as prizes also. Double Duty!
