Our Shower

So, our shower was two weeks ago at this point. And I never got around to posting about it. This is in part because my father was the one taking pictures, which means I will probably never actually see the pictures (or, if I do, it will be at this child's wedding), and I wanted to post said pictures with the post. Not wanting to wait any longer, I'm just going to post with pictures taken after the fact at home, such as the one on the right, which is the contents of the toy box. We didn't get all those things at the shower (we got some at my work shower and some at a yard sale and the stuffed animals were already ours), but we did get quite a few.

Needless to say, the shower was lovely -- not at all a disaster, as I had feared. (The one thing that bothered others but just struck me as par for the course related to the food. My mother and stepmother were put in charge of bringing some of the food -- namely the sandwiches. The only sandwiches they brought were crabmeat. I don't eat seafood. They are well aware of this. So I couldn't eat any sandwiches. But this was very unsurprising to me. I thought my brother was going to blow a gasket, though. Oh, and they just bought the bread and crabmeat and mayo and arrived right before the party started and then complained that they had to spend time in the kitchen putting sandwiches together while guests were there.)

As I think I mentioned before, my brother is an event planner and florist (to those who commented on our wedding photos, he did the flowers -- he's quite talented), so it should have occurred to me that he would end up doing the bulk of the work for this affair.

He apparently asked P to find the Paddington at the Seaside book that I loved as a child and that he thought was at my dad's house but was in fact at ours. Unbeknownst to me, P brought it on vacation and gave it to him. The book became the theme of the shower. I really wish I had pictures. It was very sweet. When/if my dad ever gets them to me, I'll post them.

The shower was a decidedly unstructured affair, which worked well for me and especially for P (it was coed). No ridiculous games. We mingled, we ate, we opened presents, we went home. A ton of people came (about 50) -- it's amazing to know that our baby is so well-loved already. There were also a bunch of kids there, which I thought was great. Our friends' 19-month old daughter kept bringing P goldfish while we were opening presents :)

I'm not sure if this is everyone's experience, but every shower I've ever been to (and many weddings) has ended up with a gift-of-the-shower -- the thing that the bride/parent-to-be ends up getting a ton of, as if every attendee was on the same wavelength. For my wedding shower, it was placemat/napkin sets. All in sets of 4. Evidently we are only allowed to have two other people over at a time. For our wedding, it was salad tongs. Who needs 4 sets of salad tongs? We didn't register for any, since we didn't need any, but we got 4 sets anyway. A good friend received 5 pie plates at her shower. It just seems to happen. Well, for our baby shower, the gift-of-the-shower was blankets. I was amazed by how many we received. To give a sense, here is a photo of eleven of them:

And that's not all of them. I forgot one was in the basement for washing (and this doesn't include the ones we already had). Our child will never be cold.

Oh, and new belly shots too -- I posted one last week but forgot to mention it, and I figure I'll do them weekly now. I'm not sure if this one is just closer up or what but I look much, much bigger than last week.