Planning a baby shower while expecting a baby

I don't know how we ended up doing it, but it certainly wasn't planned. My friend Crystal and her husband found out they were expecting a baby in October and found out around February, and then kept advising me now I needed a baby :) Of course, we had planned to have one in a couple of years, but never did I imagine my own body would be taking her words of knowledge.

So, we are expecting on Christmas, a little girl, Madeline Grace Caldwell, and Crystal is expecting a little boy in October, Gavin Pierce Alexander! As if that was not ironic enough, I volunteered to do her baby shower and find myself getting way to excited about it. We decided to follow the monkey theme set out in her nursery with the brown and green colors, so I looked up some crafty ideas from the web and found myself working on a diaper cake and making my own cupcake stand.

I am rather pleased with the results:

Diaper Cake for Crystal's Monkey Shower

Monkey Cupcake Stand

If anyone ever wants to get really good instructions on how to make their own cupcake stand, I recommend going to this site, it has wonderful step-by-step details:

http://www.cakejournal.com/archives/my-cupcake-in-where2go-a-danish-magazine

Because the web doesn't really show a lot of popularity with monkey-themed baby showers in general, I picked and chose different concepts from different sites.

I will be putting monkey cupcakes on the stand and chocolate covered bananas as favors :


I bought some brown table cloths at Party City (great place with unique colors) and light green plates and utensils.

I will also be hanging up a really cute clothesline with baby items such as baby booties, onesies, and bibs pinned to them and have the guests bring in their own baby pictures to pin on the line so that we can do a guessing game of who belongs to the baby picture.

I found some really neat table toppers at Oriental trading with monkeys on tropical trees, which I will be using this concept throughout the room of hanging stuffed monkeys, palm trees (fake) and some bananas hanging from racks on the table.

If anyone would like to use color, (I am still debating on this) they have the runtz banana candy you can order in bulk to put in jars.

I will be setting up a table for the guests to be putting their own advice tips in a really large baby bottle I found at Hobby Lobby which the mother can open when opening presents and reading for later.

Some games we will be playing (since she doesn't want too cheesy of games) is guess the baby food flavor (unlabled jars that everyone can smell and look at to guess) as well as guess the mother's belly size by comparing whoevers piece of string being the closest to the length of the mother's belly.

My friend also came with a really great idea for everyone at the party to decorate a onesie and the mother gets to keep it as a gift for later.

Anyway, I am still in the process of putting this together since the shower is in September.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions, let me know!