Baby Shower Bliss

This Saturday a few friends and I hosted a baby shower for our friend Haley. Since this was just one of a few showers various people were throwing in her honor, we decided it would be fun to do a Nursery-Rhyme/Story-Book theme. The color scheme was lavender and light green - a take on the colors of baby Carlyn's room. We set the theme with the invitation featuring a rhyme about various well-known Mother Goose characters.

Luckily for me I subscribe to Martha Stewart's email newsletters because this month's featured this link about ideas for a Nursery Rhyme themed baby shower. I swear we came up with the idea before I saw this article!
However, I liked a few of the ideas and decided to put my own little spin on them. For example, the story book garland...

Here are the materials I used:

• Leftover card stock from the invitations
• 2 pages of white folded inside colored cover to create "books"
• Ribbon
• Star Punch
• Regular hole punch

It was much simpler to just hole punch the books and the stars instead of stapling them together and attaching them to the ribbon with clothespins as the Martha article suggested. I simply strung the books and the stars onto the ribbon to create the garland. The ribbon was also thick enough that the books and stars didn't slide around on them.

Here is what the garland looked like when I was done with it:

We even made a few to put outside on the gazebo:

Another idea of Martha's that I really liked was to give the menu items Nursery-Rhyme themed names. The Mary Quite Contrary Garden Salad, Baker's Man Brownies and Little Boy Blueberry Scones were good ideas,  but who wants to eat Peter Piper Pickled Prawns and Miss Muffet's Lemon Curd? Not this girl. We had actually already chosen a lot of the menu items and just found names to fit. The menu we finally used consisted of the following:

Entrées and Sides

•  Mary Quite Contrary Garden Salad
• Jack Sprat Non-Fat Veggie Tray
• Yankee Doodle Dandy Macaroni Salad
• Three Blind Mice Cheese and Cold Cuts
• Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Chips and Dip
• Man in the Moon Meatballs

Desert

• Little Boy Blueberry Scones
• Bakers Man Brownies
• Hungry Caterpillar Cake Pops

Beverages

• Peter Piper Sherbet Punch
• I'm a Little Tea Pot Iced Tea

I even used left-over card stock from the invitations to make name tags to stand in front of each dish. 

Here is what the spread ended up looking like:

Overall I think the shower was a hit. We played four games including a "finish the Nursery Rhyme" fill-in-the-blank type game and a game of guessing flavors of baby food by taste test (yum). It was interesting trying to get everyone to fit in my tiny front room, but nobody seemed to mind. Now we are just all excited for baby Carlyn to arrive. A few more months and she will be here!