The food was a lot of fun to plan. We had a cookie buffet and strawberry milkshakes.
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. Clarissa made the favors. She made three different kinds of cookies (I'll post the recipes tomorrow). She wrapped them in plastic wrap then wrapped them in blue tulle and tied a brown ribbon around the tulle. She printed a copy of the verse and a copy of one of the recipes and attached them to the favor with the cookies. Not only did they look good, but they were delicious!
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.Marie gave the devotions for Kristi, and talked about how Kristi trusted the Lord for this baby she is having. I think it is very important to have a devotion at special events like this. It gives us a chance to stop and think about what a true gift from God this baby is.
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!When planning the schedule I printed off one of the generic baby shower planners off the web, then I typed up a list of things to do and put blank lines beside each thing so I could make notes and stuff as I went along. This helped me not to forget anything.
The main thing is to remember to have fun! This is a baby shower after all and if you are totally stressed and demanding everything be perfect, then your friends and guest of honor won't have any fun either. Thank you for reading my blog posts about the shower this past week, I hope I haven't forgotten anything. If you have any questions, just ask! I'll start posting recipes for the cookies tomorrow!
Happy Baking and party planning!
Missy
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