Coed Baby Shower

My brother-in-law and I have a special bond.  I’m not entirely sure how we developed it (maybe it’s because we’re both engineers) but we tend to think on the same wavelength.  We can sit next to each other and laugh at the same things, speak the same unspoken thoughts, and last Christmas, it manifested itself in us giving each other the EXACT same gift (a poster of his house at Harvard – so something completely random) for different reasons.  I also love his wife – she’s kind, warm, welcoming, and quietly hilarious.  When they announced they were pregnant, I immediately knew that I wanted to throw them a baby shower… but as I thought more about it, I really wanted my brother-in-law to be part of the celebrations because this was something he also has been desperately waiting for, so I decided a coed baby shower was definitely the way to go.

I ordered the invitations from Minted because I figured their envelope addressing service would save me time and make it really easy for our assistant to mail them while we were out of town in April.  They didn’t disappoint and mailing them was a breeze!   If you haven’t used Minted’s envelope addressing service yet you are seriously missing out.  Not only is mailing a snap, but the envelope options are endless.  I’ve got everyone’s addresses at the tips of my fingertips at all times!

After deciding on the invitations, I had all these great ideas for the shower… but pretty much everything had to go out the window when I got really sick after coming back from DC.  I kept thinking that I would knock the cold and be able to get back to it… which never happened.

Coed Baby Shower Decor

Because we were expecting over 30 people, I ordered tables and chairs from Ducky Bob’s.  The white resin folding chairs were safe to use on our hardwood floors and they arrived perfectly clean and packaged.  I ordered three round tables for dinner and a large square table for the onesie making station.  My only complaint about the tables (aside from the linen issue below) is that they didn’t all have the foot pads on the bottom of them, so we were really concerned about them scratching our floors.

Note to you: 72″ tables require 90″ tablecloths to even come close to fitting… and even those didn’t look as good as I wanted them to.  The 70″ Kate Spade Larabee Dot tablecloths* I had picked up at Marshall’s didn’t come anywhere close to fitting.    I also couldn’t find a solid tablecloth anywhere in Dallas… what I ended up with looked fine but it wasn’t really what I had in mind.  I should have just included them with the rental and called it a day.  I snagged the Kate Spade Harbor Drive table runners* in platinum off the clearance rack at Bed, Bath & Beyond.  For dishes, I used my china, crystal, silverware, and table linens that we received for our wedding.  It was really fun to break out the new (and pretty) stuff for such a fun celebration!

Because the shower was in the middle of graduation season, I had a hard time finding plain white roses for the table.  I ended up picking up these roses at Sam’s and actually got a lot of compliments.  People were surprised that 1) they were real and 2) they weren’t designer.  I bought them the day before, cut the stems, added flower food to the water, and arranged them myself.  By Saturday morning they were blossoming and filling out the vases.

I ordered a handful of the sweet maternity pictures that Creative Clicks Photography took of the parents-to-be a few weeks before the shower.  I bought plain white frames and set them around the tables.  The pictures were just too pretty not to include, and at the end of the shower, I sent them home with Omar and Marleni so they they could use the frames if they wanted to and so that they had some prints of their maternity pictures.

Coed Baby Shower Activity

My sister-in-law definitely told me that she was not into games at her shower, nor did she have any interest in having people try and guess how big she was with a ribbon.  (Totally agree.)   At Erin’s shower, we had a onesie station so I knew I wanted to do something like that.

Enter Kristin from A lil’ Moore.

Kristin.  Is.  The.  Sweetest.  Ever.  (And NO this is not a sponsored post… but you can follow her on instagram here!)

I found Kristin on Etsy less than a week before the shower, and within two days, she had her kit in my hands!  The kit included absolutely everything you need to decorate onesies at a baby shower – rubber stamps, ink pads, glitter, glue, fabric safe markers, iron-on transfers, “hangers” that will prevent bleed through, jute, clothespins to display everyone’s handiwork AND all the nicest, SOFTEST onesies you need.  It arrived in an easy-to-carry-easy-to-store box with the sweetest branding ever!  I was absolutely blown away by how much thought and detail was put into every single piece of her kit.

So.  Here’s the craziest thing about Kristin’s kit.  EVERYONE got into it.  We had some young kids there and they had fun decorating the onesies.  We had some older kids there.  They had fun decorating the onesies.  But most surprisingly?!  THE MEN GOT INTO IT.  Particularly Tony… who might be one of my favorite people ever.  I just wish I had snapped the picture of him ironing the transfers on to the onesies. He made SO many and it was basically the cutest thing ever.  My favorite was his future Harvard grad onesie (his son and my brother-in-law were students together at Harvard).

  Coed Baby Shower Menu

As I mentioned, I was sick, sick, sick… so Maggiano’s saved the day when we called in our order a mere few hours before the shower.  We ordered the following items and had more than enough food and bread:

• Maggiano’s Salad
• Famous Rigatoni D
• Mom’s Lasagna
• Four Cheese Ravioli

Central Market saved the day with the desserts – we picked up cupcakes and cookies.  Everyone RAVED about the cupcakes… I even got calls after the fact to find out where we got them.  I added the sprinkles myself and called it a day.

Lastly, my sweet sister-in-law loves her pina coladas, so I figured out a non-alcoholic alternative… and again, it turned out that people really enjoyed it.  I filled my punch dispenser with ice, poured in the ingredients below, and stirred it until everything was fully mixed and I was happy with the color.  Easiest party punch ever.

• 2 blue raspberry lemonade Kool-Aid packets
• 4 liters Sprite
• 16 ounces pina colada mix
• 1 large lemon, sliced

Overall, despite the hiccoughs of the day, the shower ended up being absolutely perfect and I loved being able to celebrate my in-laws.  It was also the first party we got to host in our new home… and it gave us the bug to do more hosting, so you can look forward to that.  😉