BABY 2012 Party

I know a lot of women having babies this year, maybe you do too? For some reason 2012 is a very popular year to be having a baby. Most of my pregnant friends are having second, third, fourth, or even fifth! babies and most have both genders already so they probably won't be having showers. I wanted to have a girls night to celebrate all the new babies coming this year. This being an election year, I thought it would be fun to have a pink, white, and blue campaign theme. This would work well for a regular baby shower too.

For invitations, I used a patriotic themed evite. For decorations, I started out with some pink, white, and blue paint chips. Using a 1" circle punch, I punched out many paint chip circles.

I sewed them into garlands, alternating pink white and blue and hung them from the ceiling with regular old scotch tape. I used a few of the three colored chips and cut them into flags. They probably would have looked nicer if I had made all the edges straight or cut them with a shaped pair of scissors. This garland ended up a bit heavier than the little circle ones and I had to knot the ends of the string so they wouldn't slip out of the tape holding them up. I had a few pieces of pink and blue paint chip flags left over and I used them for food label cards.

I made three posters for the mantel.

I've included them as pdf files below (vote pink, vote blue, and undecided). I also printed the same design out 6 to a page and used my 3" circle punch to make buttons out of them. I taped on a safety pin to the back of each. For the finishing touch, I bought pink, white, and blue balloons and filled them up with helium.

Baby 2012 Vote Pink

Baby 2012 Vote Blue

Baby 2012 Undecided

For food I tried to have pink, white, and blue items.

My girls helped me make candy coated pretzels with patriotic sprinkles. I got some pink wrapped candy and some pink and white m&ms after Valentine's day. I bought some regular m&ms and sorted out the blue ones. I also bought some cookies and cream hershey kisses which are wrapped in blue foil.

I made pink lemonade, had water with lemon slices in a large white pitcher, and I made a foamy blue punch. My family didn't care too much for the blue punch.

I had found a recipe online that looked good but couldn't find it again when I went to make the punch. Perhaps winging it wasn't the best idea. The food table was filled out with other appetizers, mostly stuff from the frozen food section at the store, and other items a few people volunteered to bring. One of my friends made that gorgeous cake with pink and blue fondant dots and a green fondant bow.

I figured we would mostly just eat and chat, but I did plan one little activity.

I set up a ballot box on a table near the door and asked people to write on strips of paper either funny/weird advice they had been given about pregnancy/babies, or funny things kids had told them about the same. We read them during the party.

At the end, I sent all the moms to be (and two who had already had their babies) home with a little gift bag.

I made each one a crocheted blanket and a nursing cover clip. I also included a little bundle of diapers tied up with ribbon.  You can read more about the gift bags here.

It was a very fun evening!

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