Wedding Shower!!!

Y’all… I had the BEST weekend.  My twin brother is marrying one of my favorite people in the whole world next weekend, and this last weekend I had the privilege of hosting a couples shower for them! I am so excited for them to be married and I LOVED getting to participate in throwing them a shower!  We knew their guest list was pretty extensive for this shower since it was for quite a few of the people at our church that have helped shape Arthur into the pastor that he is now. Since we knew that, our senior pastor and his wife offered to open up their house for us to throw the shower in! It was a perfect location and the weather was beautiful (being the humble person I am… I’m totally taking credit for the GORGEOUS weather).

The flowers for the wedding are a combination of pinks and purples, so we embraced that as the theme for the shower… check out our spread:

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We served BBQ Meatballs, Chips & Guacamole, stuffed peppers, a cream cheese dip, caprese skewers, veggie cups, and fruit skewers on the food table.  For decor we used burlap squares, tissue balls and tulips.

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But the real food winner for the day was the dessert table:

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The cheesecakes are a family favorite, my dad and I tag teamed them this time, but they are really my dad’s specialty and Arthur’s absolute favorite.  But my favorite were those cookies… my co-host Emily made those and they are for real the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever had.  I may or may not have eaten one for breakfast on Sunday.  And by that I mean… I had two.

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Speaking of my co-host, her daughter and I unexpectedly coordinated outfits, so I had an unexpected (second) twin for the day! How cute is she?!!?

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Sharon (whose home we were in) is a whiz at flowers… and she had BEAUTIFUL tulips to decorate the tables and despite being early in the season she made her backyard shine with fabulous flowers

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For our entertainment I had the happy couple and both sets of their parents play The Newlywed Game.  It ended up being a quick, hilarious game.  I just asked 5 questions, this picture is from the last question: Who does/will do more chores?

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Their answer? The other one. That should be fun to figure out who is right!  It was such a fun game to play!! I love Becky’s family so much, and they have loved Arthur and welcomed him into their family with open arms.  I couldn’t have asked for a better set of in-laws for him!! PS… they won the Newlywed Game, aren’t they cute celebrating?!

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The circle garland on the mantle was a quick craft I made for the shower and I was A-MAZED at how easy it was… I will definitely be making more of these… and just for you, I’ll post a tutorial on that later this week!  Update–tutorial posted! 

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And we just sprinkled a few white frames around the house for more decor:

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And for favors I had a friend of mine bake up and decorate some fabulous sugar cookies and set them next to a framed copy of the invitation:

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In case you want a closer look at the invite (altered for privacy of course) I whipped up in photoshop and had printed at mpix.com (love that site), here it is:

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I’ll have a post on that coming this week too with font names, etc.

Overall it was a FANTASTIC shower for two fantastic people.  I think this picture sums up how wonderful and full their lives are:

shower5 I am so blessed to have them in my life and can’t wait to celebrate everything with them this weekend!!

Jungle Animal Baby Shower

Since we are on the topic of baby showers this week, (see yesterday’s cool baby shower activity) and I’m waiting on a cool Edison bulb to arrive before I can show you the new light in my upstairs bonus room, so I decided to show you the pictures from the baby shower we threw for my best friend a few years ago.  Her precious baby boy Cooper is not much of a baby anymore, but I think the shower we threw was awfully cute.  She and her husband were decorating their nursery using some jungle animals for a theme, so we decided to run with that for the theme of the shower.  I can’t take credit for most of the cute things at the shower, Amy’s sister Beth is a craft genius and artistic to boot… so she painted and created a lot of the decor as well as making the cookies from scratch.  But take a look at all the decor:

To welcome everyone to the party, Beth painted a canvas with a cute stork.

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The guest book was a copy of Goodnight Moon that everyone left a note for Baby Cooper.

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Beth made the table runner, and we had a varying selection of food… including animal crackers and cookie dough dip, cupcakes with cute little animal decor, fruit and caprese skewers.

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The one thing I can take credit for at the shower was the ‘diaper cake’.  I’ve seen some super elaborate diaper cakes, but I wanted to make one that didn’t require individually re-rolling the diapers and wasting them (I’ve heard a lot of the diaper cake diapers are unusable afterwards).

To make this guy I covered three different sizes of cardboard cake plates (similar to these) with fabric.  For the bottom layer I used diapers just how they come out of the bag.  For the second layer I used 12 of the DIY Burp Cloths rolled up.  Then for the top layer I used some of the full size baby products they had registered for to top it all off.  I finished them all off with some cute ribbon.  I think it turned out pretty well for my first diaper cake!

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The rest of the decor included another canvas that eventually went into baby Cooper’s room and had the same decor as the invite did.  This was another of Beth’s masterpieces! It also included a cute fabric bunting hanging over the fireplace.

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I mentioned in my post yesterday how much I despise cheesy shower games (like the candy in the diaper thing… yuck) so the only game we played was a memory game of how many baby items you could remember off of a tray.  I put the tray out for a minute, and then took it into the other room.  Guests had to try to remember everything they could.  At the end of the day, Amy got to keep all the items on the tray.  I tried to pick a bunch of little things off of her registry or random items that would make the game more interesting.  Here I am trying to explain the game… and my other friend’s beautiful daughter was finding new things to play with!

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At the end of the day we didn’t want guests to go home empty handed, so Beth made some Elephant cookies to take home as a favor.  She used my favorite recipes from Annie’s Eats for the cookies:  the cookies are this recipe for Sugar cookies from Annie’s Eats with her recipe (and tutorial) forRoyal Icing.  Check back in tomorrow to see the bonus room light installation!

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Check back in tomorrow to see the bonus room light installation!