Two of my friends here have celebration-worthy events coming up next month, one day apart. One is getting married and the other is having a baby. We celebrated these two joyous events on two consecutive weekends, and my liver can't handle any more big life changes! Here's a handy little guide on how to throw a successful baby shower.
Decorate the venue with poufy, pink (or blue, or whatever) crap:
Then add a buffet table full of grub:
My personal contribution to this buffet was a tray of crustless sandwiches:
I made these specifically because I recently watched the episode of Sex & the City where Miranda refused to allow crustless sandwiches at her baby shower. She's not into cutsey crap (or storks), and she demanded fried chicken. I even made signs indicating which fillings sat where, which people took to mean I am Martha Stewart!
Then add a festive punch bowl containing non-alcoholic punch (remember, there's at least one person in the room abstaining from alcohol):
But don't you dare forget to add in a few bottles of champis to add to the punch! Most people (ahem, moi) wouldn't survive the shower without it.
The final component of a successful baby shower is a few cutsey games to break up the drinking. I don't claim to have invented this game, but I'm still proud of it:
I named several famous families and everybody had to list out the children in those families. This was harder than anticipated, because we had a very diverse group of people. I had to pick celebrities/TV shows/movies that were known to all nationalities, so I had to spend a fair bit of time on it. If you're ever tasked with coming up with a baby shower game, hit me up and I can send you the game that I lovingly handcrafted.
Surprisingly for an American female over the age of 30, I'd never been to a baby shower before. Lord knows it won't be my last. I had a blast! And a hell of a hangover the next day.
For the bachelorette party we headed out of town to the Gold Coast, which is an area of Queensland about an hour south of Brisbane. All we wanted to do was soak up the rays all weekend long, so we rented an awesome apartment right on the beach that had amazing views.
The difference between a bachelorette party in your 20's and one in your 30's is that in your 30's you're happy to stay in. Like, the only time we went out of our apartment was to go to the beach or stock up on supplies. No restaurants, no bars or clubs. It was perfect!
Yeah, I'm old (and curmudgeonly).
We ate.
We drank.
We played flip cup!
I had never played it before! I don't know what the hell I was doing in college.
The Gold Coast takes a lot of heat for being "bogan" (white trash) but Coolangatta, where we stayed, was a much more chill - and less backpacker - part of the Gold Coast. And of course it's beautiful!
Neither of these events could have been so fantastic without the presence of one very important character:
This champagne is the bomb dot com and legit affordable. It's the bubbly swill of choice of the bride-to-be and it's French, so you know it's classy (and available all over the world). I love this champis!
I had a great time celebrating various life events with my lady friends. I'm very fortunate to have such a good group of girlfriends, when we first got here we didn't know a soul. It's been a very female-centric few weekends. Girl power!
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