The unsurprise
I was always ambivalent about whether or not this was a surprise shower. If asked, I’d tell people not to let her know but she’s pretty perceptive (unlike me) so I figured she’d figure it out anyway. It’s also probably not a good idea to hold a surprise shower for a mother-to-be who is over seven months along. She apparently found out as she drove up to her parents’ house because she kept driving by cars she recognized on her way to find a parking spot!

The decorations
The grandma-to-be (whose home was the locale of the party) owns a flower shop and has a helium tank in her store so she was responsible for blowing up all the balloons we had bought earlier. She hadn’t been as excited about the Curious George balloons as I was but since the baby room has Curious George monkeys painted on the wall (by the dad to be, aww!) I knew the balloons would be cute and I fought for them. The mom-to-be loved them. I got a lot of help from the Sudbury houseguests (more on them later) with hanging the streamers so I got to be more director than orchestrator, which suited my lazy self to a tee. The colour scheme was blue with other primary colours because the baby room is going to be very colourful.

The games
Despite my worrying, I definitely had enough games planned and we got through all but one game. We had a nursery rhyme fill-in (next time I’ll make it harder, for sure: five people scored 100% on it), and the game where anyone caught saying one of the banned words had to relinquish the elastic band they were given at the beginning of the event to the person who caught them. We also played “guess how big the mom-to-be is (conclusion: she’s smaller than most people thought). I also set up a station with colourful paper and markers for people to write a message with a goal of creating some sort of memento book thingy.

The Subury contingent

I really felt like this entire weekend was about friends and friendly people and just sitting and enjoying one another’s company, and this was started by the group of women (3 generations: an 80 year old woman, her two daughters, and the daughter of one aforementioned women, see them up there?). They had never met any of us (other than the mother-to-be’s family) before but they were so warm, engaging and pleasant that I really enjoyed getting to know them. When the grandmother finally headed to bed just before midnight, she came to give me a hug and invited me to visit Sudbury anytime. After most of the guests left a few of us stayed and talked for a couple of hours before we left. It was nice to feel so comfortable discussing such a range of topics with strangers.

The Love
Cheesy, but there was so much love at this shower. I asked everyone to introduce themselves and say how they knew the mother-to-be and it was nice to hear this mini story of how much this person means to so many different people: coworkers, former classmates, friends, family, people who’ve known her for two years or almost 28 years. It was nice too to see in-laws (the grandmas-to-be especially!) who actually like each other. And lastly, it’s so nice to be friends with someone whose family really likes you. I’m always touched by how everyone in the mother-to-be’s family treats me like I’m part of the family and they always make a big deal of introducing me to their close friends in such a familiar way. I’m very socially awkward while they’re the absolute opposite (disgustingly comfortable in in the midst of strangers or large crowds) and I always imagine people thinking it must be opposites that made us friends.

When we finished opening the gifts, the mother of the mother-to-be said we had forgotten a gift and I felt bad because I was the one responsible for passing the gifts to the mom-to-be so I was in mid-apology when I was presented with this:

as a thank you for the work I did to organize the shower! I didn’t expect it at all and was very touched that with all the running around the woman had done (the shower started at 5pm, she worked at her store until 4:30pm!) she found time to make up something so gorgeous for me. It smells divine.

And my mom, in her typical spontaneous way patted her thigh and beckoned to the mom-to-be. They’re buds so of course she went over to her:

It was a lovely shower.

Filed under: Celebrations, Friends by jummy