One of my best friends, Mrs. Lindsay McCarthy, is expecting a baby boy come April. I met Lindsay September of 2012 and we became instant friends. I've always been sad that we missed each others weddings (we both got married summer 2010) and didn't get to enjoy showers and stagettes and all that together, so when I found out she was pregnant I was immediately excited to get to throw her a baby shower. Lindsay is kind and generous and supportive as a friend - I am so lucky to be her friend and am so glad for the opportunity to shower her and soon-to-be baby boy McCarthy with love.
Along with the awesomeness that was throwing a party for Lindsay, I got to do it with my friend Ana! She loves Lindsay also. Ana is one of my other best friends, so party planning together was a joy. We've taken many trips down to the states together, including Black Friday so this meant we could do another USA trip together and have a wonderful day hanging out and prepping for this great party.
When Ana was getting married to Josh my other awesome awesome friend Irene and I planned her shower - we planned a tex-mex country dinner. We loved that party and it was, until this weekend, the best party I'd ever helped plan. And while that was still a darn good party, I have to say this week's baby shower knocked it out of the park.
Our girl Lindsay is from Cali and loves her some Mexican Food. So we ended up landing on yet another Tex-Mex inspired theme - but this time more Mexican than country. We took to Pinterest to see what it could suggest for us and found many ideas - the main pins that gave us our motivation were as follows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. We made our lists, we drafted our dreams and we set to work.
Ana is a graphic designer so she created the invites, banners and tags for the party - she did an amazing job and made it look effortless.
We used the window that Ana created for her own wedding, and added chalkboard art and some garland from Micheals to welcome people - we wanted the theme from outside in (especially with snow falling outside!). We added more garland and a festive wreath for the door.
We jazzed up my mail drop and chalkboard sign with doilies and chalkboard printing - Ana did an awesome job of mixing chalkboard and doilies in a way that made my heart happy.
We found lanterns at Ikea & the dollar store and fold out fans from Micheals and with the Chile Pepper Pinata that we picked up at WinCo had a festive theme going around the entire room. It jazzed it up so much!
My mantle already had my home made felt-ball-garland in multi colors on it, and all we had to do was change the wording on my home made chalkboard banner (using supplies from Pick Your Plum).
We found maracas at Target in the party aisle (favor section) and added them to a bowl of mexican candies. We used dried chile peppers from the Mexican Aisle at WinCo for decor in jars, and located some amazing lazy coloured doilies at Micheals for the table.
We made a sign complete with Lindsays cravings and had envelopes out for people to write their addresses on (for thank you cards)
We created pom poms using this Martha tutorial though we made ours with only 4 sheets of tissue each, going for a flower look, rather than pom pom. We loved them...and you can see that Lindsay agrees.
Also in this shot in the red is Ana's mom Benita who upped our Mexican credibility a ton - she made us the beef for our taco bar, created an amazing salsa and onion and cilantro dish AND fried up our tortillas. Benita for the win indeed.
We pulled out my drink container that I got from Arlene for my brithday and it worked perfectly to hold the Jarrito's - just below the counter there is a built in bottle opener for these.
Ana created tags for the mason jars and I added straws from Pick Your Plum.
The Taco Bar theme was a hit! I also made mexi-rice, cheese rotel dip and chicken. You can see on the back left there are great hot dog dishes from Pick Your Plum that are perfect for holding tacos on the go - helping make mess a non issue. We used empty Jarritas bottles and El Pato cans to hold flowers, used a Sombrero cut out from Ana's wedding photobooth to top our diaper cake, used burlap from Ana's shower for the table runner and strung up a table cloth that we'd found at Target.
We put veg & dip into cups (and had planned to add mustaches to the cups but ran out of time). This made veg and dip easy and clean.
The diaper cake was one of our favorite parts - we found a great tape at Target that allowed us to use tape rather than ribbon for the cake (helping hold the diapers together better) and at the last minute at Micheals found this great garland fringe in a ribbon pack.
We LOVE how it turned out.
We asked my wonderful friend Hanne...
to help us with the baking. Hanne always makes great desserts. We told her the theme and that we were using mustaches since it was a baby boy. I knew she'd make a tasty dessert but had no idea how very awesome until I saw it in person - I give you, Hanne's amazing creations...
Are you kidding me with that? Amazing. It blew my mind out of the water. And she even included a train for the father-to-be who loves trains.
We served coffee and tea as per usual.
On top of what you can see here we played the classic "pin" game where you try to steal someone's clothes pin (ours had mini mustaches on it) for saying key words, the Dad's name, "baby" and "Fetus." To collect a mustache if someone said a key word you had to say, "Quiero tu mustachio, por favor." So fun. The game got pretty cutthroat at times and Laura won with 8 collected! Laura also is the amazing genius behind the photos posted here today - she very kindly documented the party for Lindsay and for me - thanks friend!
We also played a hilarious game "my water broke" where you freeze mini babies into ice cubes and the guests have to extract the baby and shout "my water broke" to win. It is super hard to find mini babies - we looked like a couple of nuts in most stores...but we had an awesome and hilarious time both during the hunt (finally located at Micheals) and during the game itself of which Hanne was the winner! A quick shout out to thank Hanne for the amazing cupcakes and for her time and effort to help Ana and I - you are so appreciated.
The prizes for both were on theme - they were mustache related. The first prize was mustache magnets and the second was mustaches on straws. Good times indeed.
20 of us came out to celebrate with Lindsay. It was a lovely party and such a joy to get to bless a friend. Lindsay was so pleased with every part of the party and it was worth all the hard work to see her feel so loved. Love you girlfriend!
A shout out is needed at this point for my husband and Ana's husband - to Paul for your help in cleaning the entire house, scrubbing floors, cleaning bathrooms, doing dishes - I wouldn't throw parties without you....and to Josh, your help late Friday and all day Saturday was invaluable, we couldn't have done it without you.
2 comments:
Wow looks awesome, great party! And the photos are wonderful!
Aww. That is so sweet. It must have been the most happiest day of your life. I am also waiting for that to experience this. So to make that happen I am currently following this perfectly select baby gender.
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