Storybook “Meet the Baby” Shower

Since the two months before Luke was born were taken up with Christmas and Logan’s superhero party, my friend Sarah waited until after Luke was born to have a baby shower.  We aptly named it a ‘meet the baby’ shower instead and set a light dinner for friends with a storybook theme.

What a fun theme this was to plan!  There were tons of ideas on the internet and I had plenty of my own to share, being a children’s book lover.  At first I scoured my shelves and picked all of our favorite books and scanned them into my computer.  Then I planned a menu around food named books that I knew.  I looked for the books I didn’t already own at the library and scanned them as well.  (It wasn’t until I had scanned at least 20 books into the computer that I realized that I could just look on Google Images for the book covers I wanted!  Silly me.  So if you do  this theme for a party of your own, save yourself the trouble and just use Google Images.)

I printed all of the book cover images on to cardstock, matted it with a second piece of card stock and Sarah put together block and clothespin place markers for our buffet style meal.

Our menu for our Storybook themed dinner consisted of:

Main Courses:

• The Little Red Hen – Bread and butter
• Eat Your Alphabet A to Z – Vegetable platter
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar – Fruit bowls
• Pete’s a Pizza – Pizza bites
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs – Meatballs
• Stinky Cheese Man – Cheese and cracker platter
• Green Eggs and Ham – Spinach Quiche
• Three Little Pigs – Pigs in a blanket

Snacks:

• Pumpkin Baby – Mini pumpkin muffins
• One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish – Rainbow goldfish
• Rain Makes Applesauce – Applesauce

To Drink:

• Blueberries for Sal – Blueberry punch

Dessert:

• Jellybeans for Breakfast – Jellybeans (tis the season, after all.)
• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie – Cookie favors to take home
• Cakepops (not on theme, but a friend of mine made them and they were incredible!  So good!)

The décor was simple:

My favorite children’s books along with some blocks and some storybook characters we had on hand.  Sarah had Pooh Bear, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Curious George. 

I had the entire cast of Where the Wild Things Are:

I made a banner that said “Once Upon A Time” printed on simple cardstock that we hung from Sarah’s great room arch.

Favors were also on theme with two cookies in each bag and a sticker that read “and they lived happily ever after” on the front.

We played a game of word scramble that I made up with “Natural Mama” words such as doula, waterbirth, breastfeeding, sling, and cloth diaper.

The rest of the time we hung out and got to know Luke a little bit.  Although he spent much of the party like this:

We had a lovely time!  Thank you Sarah for everything!!