Nicole's Baby Shower

   This past Saturday I (with the help of my good friends Amy and Rachel) threw a baby shower for my friend Nicole. Nicole is also expecting her first baby and is only about 12 weeks behind me, making her due in October. We couldn't throw her a shower in October, however, because at the end of July she and her husband, Dan, are moving to Chicago for medical school at Northwestern. So it was necessary to have the shower before they leave, and before I give birth, since I was primarily in charge of throwing the shower. So we decided on June 30th, hoping that it would give me enough time to plan, but be far enough away from Henry's due date that the probability of him coming before then would be really low. It worked, since Henry still hasn't come, but being 9 months pregnant and throwing a shower was exhausting! Totally worth it for my friend, but I was wiped out afterward!
   I wanted the shower to be really beautiful, with a cute theme, pretty food, and awesome party favors. I went through my pinterest boards looking for the best ideas and found several that I wanted to do, but over the course of the 3 weeks that I spent planning and preparing, I gradually had to whittle it down to about 4-5 big-ish ideas. I think that if I wasn't 9 months pregnant, I would've been able to do a lot more, but one of the things that I've been working on lately is knowing my limits and not pushing beyond them. This has been especially hard during pregnancy because my limits are so much more restrictive than they've ever been, but I've been getting better and better at respecting those limits as the months have gone by.
   Anyhow, here's what I did:

 Since the theme was "A Little Man Is On His Way" I used "Little Man" things in the food and decor like Mustaches and Bow Ties. Here's what some of those things looked like:

Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate mustache suckers.

Bow Tie Cookies

Bow Tie Pasta Salad and "Handlebar Mustache" croissants with chicken salad.

    Amy made the pasta salad, chicken salad, and bow tie cookies-pretty much saving me from going completely insane. Without Amy's help, I would've been waaay too tired to actually host the baby shower that I painstakingly planned, so I'm EXTREMELY grateful for all of Amy's help!
  
I made the mustache suckers with a mold I found on Amazon, sucker sticks I also got from Amazon, and chocolate from a local company called "Gygi" who delivered the chocolate to my door for free.

This is my ghetto double-boiler that I used to melt the chocolate.

This is the mold with the sucker sticks in their spots.

These are the suckers in the fridge-they weren't hardening on the counter because it's too dang hot in our apartment.

   The thing that took up the most of my time was definitely the garland. The unfortunate thing is that the color I used for the letters is so light that it doesn't show up in the picture at all, and the picture generally makes the garland look super weird. But first, some pictures of the process:

First I had to fold the paper accordian-style, which was super time-consuming.

Then I had to staple the ends together.

And to make them stay together, I had to hot glue the middle.

Then I used this awesome cricut that I borrowed from my across-the-street neighbor to cut out all the letters.

And here's the finished product. It looks way better in person, I promise.

   And here are some pictures of the guests:

Nicole, the woman of honor, getting her food. And you can see the frozen strawberry lemonades (that I forgot to mention until now) in the background! Those were delicious!

Aubrie and her adorable little man Connor.

Everyone seems ready for this picture except Rachel, even though I warned them. From L-R: Rachel, Amy, Lindsay, Nicole, and Jolene.

   We also played a few games like matching the parent animal with its offspring, a baby word scramble, and a "Guess How Many Are In The Jar" game with gushers (which Nicole loves right now). I had a fourth game that involved putting a huge bowl on your belly while trying to pick toys up off the ground-I called it "Pregnant Pick-Up" but we didn't end up having time for it.
  
    And that's pretty much it! Overall it was a success, and afterward I was completely exhausted, but it was totally worth it for my friend Nicole!