Back to Cali {part 5}

the Bridal Shower

This was an event Chriss & I had been looking forward to for many months. Preparations began before I moved and we had exchanged e-mails, phone calls & im's discussing this fun event. A little back story may explain our enthusiasm. My little sister had made the decision many years ago to save herself for marriage and stayed committed to that decision. So while we were excited to honor her as a bride we were also looking forward to making her blush, just a little - or maybe a whole lot.

Some ideas on shower planning? Get the guest list before you begin brainstorming ideas. We did it the opposite way and had to cut back quite a bit when we had a list of about 50 people. Of course, everyone doesn't always show up {except to the wedding - more on that later} but still. In the end we had one game with one prize, coffee & desserts {evening shower}, gifts to open and of course great fun & conversation. Everything went off without a hitch. Chriss, myself and Amy - another bridesmaid - whipped the whole thing together in under 2 hours and we all had a great time.

"How red did she get?" you ask. Well, I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. The first is her participation in the one game that we had. You've probably played or heard of things like 'guessing how many beans are in the jar'. Our version of this was 'guess how many condoms are in the vase', this served a double duty - making her blush & gifting them with some birth control should they choose to use it. As an extra bit of fun we put a pregnancy test in the middle of all the condoms. After asking guests to make their guesses, she had to count each of them out. And don't worry, we gave them quite the variety to try out. This was after the counting was done & the surprise inside was found.

Of course she enjoyed opening all of her gifts receiving a variety of jammies, lingerie, picture frames, household items & cards. We enjoyed reading back some things that she said while opening the gifts. This is how it works, someone discreetly writes down things that she says while opening presents, then it's read back under the heading: "Things the bride may say on her wedding night." Even though she figured out what I was doing and thought she was being careful I still got quite the laughs out of her. Stuff like, "where do I stick this?", "oh that smells...pretty", "what do you mean bigger?", "I'm scared of that one!". Ha! I can't remember them all & she's got the list so if you're not laughing I guess you just had to be there. We both turned quite red during the reading.

One last fun thing that we did was the 'excuses panty cake'. At Lydia's shower the centerpieces were diaper cakes; diapers rolled up, put in bunches with ribbon around as decoration. So we did panty cakes. Knowing that she wouldn't wear 'granny panties' {briefs} regardless if they were her size we got the largest size we saw. Each pair was rolled up around a tube of cardboard {which held the forks for the cake} and had ribbon around. After all the present fun was over Chriss read off each excuse to her, as in "if I'm wearing these you aren't getting any" excuses. It seems that neither of us have the excuses handy right now so I'll go from memory.

• I'm too tired from servicing the rest of your needs today.
• I have a headache.
• Oh no we are not done talking about that yet.
• I still have a headache.
• You are sleeping on the couch tonight!

There was one more but I've forgotten it. Everyone got a kick out of it.

So the shower was great fun! Here are some other photos that we took that night, including a great spread of the desserts - so yummy! And of course we didn't have everyone show up so we had plenty of treats & favors left over {will post about those on a later date}.