fun games for a baby shower

So we’ve all played the games with the candy bars in the diapers, the mystery baby food jars, alphabet letters and so on. I wanted an activity that was optional to guests, but that might also get people talking and mingling. I saw the idea for a custom-made ABC Book for baby (somewhere, on another blog, I just can’t remember) and went with it. I provided a mini chipboard photo album and card-stock cut to size, placed alphabet stickers on each page (some pages got 2 letters, since there weren’t quite 26 pages in the album) and offered a bucket full of markers, crayons, colored pencils, etc. Guests chose a letter, then drew a picture for that page, as in the example below. The finished book was embellished with ribbons that coordinated with the shower invites and decor.

Now I for one happen to enjoy word games, but not everyone is comfortable with those, so I wanted to include something along the lines of mad-libs, but less time consuming and, um, grammatical. Hence, the birth-story-candy-gram. Guests placed and re-arranged candy bars strategically within the story strips to fill in the blanks. For example: They had no idea the MOUNDS of diapers they would be changing. The candy bar of course, being a Mounds bar. When completed, our guest of honor took the sweet story home to her husband as an arsenal of snacks for long hours in the hospital. Silly, but something, at least.

Nothing fancy or complicated with these activities, and guests could participate at their leisure. The mommy and daddy-to-be seemed happy. And, I had fun putting them together.  If you are interested in the story I put together for the candy gram, let me know in the comments and I’ll post it.

Kimberly

...by day, making a home where the buffalo roam. By night, pretty much the same thing, punctuated by the occasional fantasies of sunny beaches, italian movies and sparkling lemonade.