The Baby Shower

Yes this is way late. This post is incredibly overdue. But you know what isn’t over due? My baby, she came on her due date. Impressed? You should be.

Sorry, it’s 2:00am. My brain wanders at 2:00am.

Anyways, to the matter at hand, our baby shower…

You see we never really had a wedding shower cause we got married in a fever. Hotter than a pepper sprout. Not really though, but isn’t Johnny Cash great? Truthfully, we had a decently long engagement, 10 months, but it was 2008/2009, the market was bad, we were kinda freshly out of college, and we lived in Tulsa with our other freshly out of college (or still in college) friends. Basically there wasn’t a lot of money. And while I’m sure family and friends in other cities would have thrown us a shower, we didn’t have the cash money to fly out there. And we preferred people spend money to be in Tulsa for our wedding and make memories with us rather than give us things. So we had a freaking fantastic wedding on a tight budget, I mean I used mason jars as center pieces before it was trendy, and we partied, and it was epic and people still talk about how great our wedding was. I’m lacking humility here because really, it was that great. Ask anyone who was there and they’ll tell you.

So when I thought about having a baby shower I was stoked. I wanted to recreate the fun, epic nature of a party that was our wedding, the goal: for people to have fun and for it to not feel like a traditional shower. No one would be smelling melted chocolate in diapers, and seriously no one needed to guess how big around my belly was. Whoever made up that game should be beaten with a wet noodle.

I LOVE planning parties in a weird Sandra Lee, Martha Stewart kind of way, it’s what brought about my party printable line. And while I realize it’s not typical to plan your own baby shower I have amazing friends who love me and put up with my weird obsessions for Martha Stewart party goodness and they basically let me plan the whole thing. And then when pinterest boards were full (oh what my wedding would have been like if they had pinterest 4 years ago) and we had done sketches of how the food would be laid out and lists were made and tasks designated we all got together and made it happen. And it was epic.

Here are the details: co-ed indoor/outdoor shower with a woodland creature theme (to match her nursery decor), poker for the men, a fire pit, s’mores bar, wine, beer, and lemonade, and a hot dog bar. I also brought the smash book I’d been recording every week of the pregnancy in, so people could see what the last 8 months had been like.

While everything was just about perfect and there was a party printable for everything imaginable, the thing that made our baby shower so great was the people. I left feeling so overwhelmingly loved. Here were close to 70 people, all there blessing us with their presence and with presents because they love us and because they love a child they’ve never met just because it’s ours. I remember sitting on the couch that night, staring across the room at the loads of gifts that covered our very large fireplace and crying as I slowly caressed my very 35 week pregnant belly, knowing that this child would never lack for anything, especially love.

One of the things I cherish most from our wedding is our guest book. We had a photo booth (Bill proposed in a photo booth) and folks basically scrap booked a page with their photo booth images and left darling notes for us. Since we weren’t going to have a photo booth for the shower (trust me, I looked into it), I created a Photo Guestbook of our maternity photos and everyone who attended signed it. We actually took it to our OBGYN office and had everyone there sign it. Even all the nurses when Issa was born signed it. Her foot prints sit next to a photo of my pregnant belly. It’s one of those things that God forbid if we’re ever facing a natural disaster I will grab and save from destruction, because in it, that love I mentioned above is expressed in words from our family, friends and the folks who made Issa’s arrival into the world possible.

The other thing I will grab is the quilt above. My mom is bursting with creativity, people have always said I get my creativity from her. And now that I’m a mom and I see her as a grandmother I understand that it wasn’t something that was genetically passed down but something she fostered and nurtured and allowed to happen and grow every time she let me flood the yard and make mud pies. I hope I can do that for Issa.

So 4 months after Bill and I got married my grandmother passed away. My mom’s mother. And it sucked, a lot. Because she was kind of our spiritual rock. And I loved her. And she made delicious strawberry jam. And I remember as mom and I cleaned out her very small one room apartment she filled a box with Gram’s clothes, a few pairs of PJs, a few fleece jackets I’m sure my Gram had had for ages, and a jean dress I’m pretty sure I remember her wearing since I was teeny. I didn’t ask why, it didn’t seem curious to me. It actually seemed kind of normal. And honestly I’d sort of forgotten all about it until the baby shower.

You see the quilt above is made from my Grandmother’s favorite clothes. And my mom made it. As I pulled it out, the last gift we opened that night, and mom began to read through the scrapbook that she’d made to explain the whole thing to Issa I started balling. I wasn’t alone either. There were sobs among everyone watching us open gifts. It’s one of those things I will cherish forever. And the funny thing is, when Issa was two weeks old and she wasn’t sleeping at all at night, and consiquently neither were we, wrapping her in this quilt, dubbed The Grandma Hug, was the only thing that would comfort her long enough for her to fall asleep. And now, she sleeps with it every night.

That was our baby shower. It was epic. I can’t thank my friends and family enough for helping make it happen with all their hard work and with just being there to make memories with us and to celebrate this little peanut of a girl who has stolen our hearts.