It's Going To Be A Boy! - America's Table

One of my friends is expecting a baby next month, so a group of us got together to give her a shower. It’s her first child, and they know that it’s going to be a boy, so we went with a classic blue-and-white theme. We invited guests for 4 PM, and served tea and a baby blue cocktail, along with tea sandwiches, a hearty salad, and lots and lots of sweets – cake, cupcakes, cookies. There are so many clever ideas for shower foods that we decided to go with…all of them! The cocktail was very pretty, and based on one I found on Pinterest: lemonade with UV Blue Raspberry Vodka (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it – yes, the color is ultraviolet blue, but it melds nicely with the lemonade).

We kept the games to two simple activities: there was a suggestion box for baby names, and we provided blank wooden blocks for guests to decorate for the baby –two ideas I also found on Pinterest. Are you sensing a pattern here? The signs and other paper products were from Loralee Lewis, and the overall theme came from a blue-and-white baby shower I found on…Pinterest! There is a brilliant baby shower idea website called Bumpsmitten, and if you’re planning a shower I would go there now – don’t even wait to look at these photos. It’s that good.

The lesson here, I think, is that if you can Google, you can put together an amazing party of any kind. I hadn’t given a baby shower in a long time, and the world has changed so much because of technology that, for all I knew, it could be something people do via videoconference now, but with Pinterest you can find an endless supply of current and clever ideas. There’s no excuse not to give a party now!

It was great to catch up with old friends, since I hadn’t seen many of the guests in years, and, as it turns out, some things never change. We all oohed and ahhed over the gifts, and made jokes about changing diapers – and my husband even managed to slip a name suggestion for the baby into the box before we shooed him out. (He likes ‘Wayne’.) I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.