I’m going to be a grandma! My daughter is expecting a baby boy in late March. We are all thrilled and excited!
Of course, the new mom-to-be needs a baby shower. She selected a storybook theme with the focus on the book Where the Wild Things Are. Her best friend, S, and I were determined to make this a perfect shower for her, since she tends to spend an inordinate amount of time making showers or parties perfect for other people.
Where the Wild Things Are is a great story where Max goes to his room and imagines that it turns into a jungle, then he sails away to a far away land where the wild things live. You can’t have a party about Wild Things without the jungle, so we turned the dining room into a jungle. This is where many of the activities would take place.
You also can’t have a party about children’s books without a nod to Dr. Seuss. The gift table in the living room paid homage to Dr. Seuss books.
The food and drinks were based on various books, with a sign and maybe even the book nearby.
That was our plan, anyway. We made it happen!
Here’s the jungle room. I took this picture after we finished the “jungle,” but before we had the back wall done and all the activities arranged. Bailey, the foster dog, is admiring our hard work!
We made the trees out of the existing columns in the dining room. The columns are first loosely wrapped in masking paper, available at your local home improvement store. It’s used for masking large areas (floor, ceiling, windows). It’s extremely thin, and a whole roll of 12″ wide paper is $3. We used less than half of it.
The vines are made by twisting the paper. Using long strips of paper, it’s twisted, then wrapped around the “trees,” and then attached to the walls and the dining room chandelier.
Next came attaching leaves. About 100 leaves were cut out of 12×12″ cardstock in shades of green and 12×18″ green construction paper. Either they were hand cut with scissors into plain leaves (pointed ovals), or cut on a Cricut (fancier philodendron, banana leaves, and palms). The palms didn’t hold up so well, so they were attached to the light fixture, and the others placed artfully on the vines, trees, and wherever else we could attach them.
Finally we added green crepe paper streamers. We also clustered some balloons with streamers and leaves, attached them to plastic balloon sticks, and slid the sticks between the slats of the blinds to hold them up.
We covered a portion of the wall with green streamers made by cutting crepe paper sheets into 6″ sections, then cutting paper fringe into each side. We twisted them and anchored them at the bottom.
The wood on the buffet was scavenged by S. She chased her boyfriend and his family out into the woods at their home and had him cut up pretty branches for decor. Above the buffet is a banner made from scans of the Wild Things in the book, then cleaned up in a graphics program and sent to my sister-in-law, who cut them and sewed them into the banner for me. She also cut out some black silhouettes of the characters and made them into a centerpiece, and cut out a number of leaves. I wish I had a photo that I took of it; alas, I didn’t take one nor have I asked for permission to post the one S took.
The centerpiece in the jungle room is a diaper cake of Max’s boat. Sis-in-law made the bibs that became the sails. Max was scanned from the book, enlarged, printed on cardstock, then cut out with scissors.
We had several games. Shown is guess how many Hershey Kisses are in the Mason jar (and, of course, kisses are love, so Guess How Much I Love You is the perfect book). For about a third of the kisses, I made stickers using Cricut’s print and cut feature. I made a JPG file with .75″ white circles with images from many of the books. I had the Cricut design software print the JPG onto sticker paper, then cut the stickers and stuck a sticker on many of the candies. It looked really cute!
Each of the activities had a “storybook” that explained it, that had a picture of the book, then brief instructions on what to do. The activities:
- Guess how many kisses
- Diaper Thoughts, featuring the PG version of Go the F*k to Sleep
- Guess the baby’s arrival date
- Guess the baby food, playing off the Wild Things theme
- Take ribbon in the size of Mom’s belly, to the book, So Big
- Sign a copy of Where the Wild Things Are as the guest book
- Enter the diaper raffle (diapers for the little Wild Thing)
We also played baby shower bingo while the gifts were opened.
The prizes for winning were made with a kitchen towel and pot holder wrapped around a wooden kitchen utensil, except the Kisses, where the winner won the jar of Kisses.
The gift table was so much fun! Multi-color balloons and streamers adorned a banner made from Dr. Seuss book covers printed onto cardstock, cut out, then attached to yarn. The yellow plastic tablecloth had “One Fish, Two Fish, Gifts for the New Fish” in a riff on the Seuss book. My sister-in-law sent a Cat in the Hat style hat, and showed me some really cute ribbon trees, so clearly I had to make one.
She sent me instructions for the tree, and I made the ribbons a bit poofier. I found the Dr. Seuss New Fish ribbon at JoAnn’s, so I knew I HAD to use that! The topper is an image I found and painstakingly imported into the Cricut. (Note: black outlines like that should be used with a pen or printed; getting those thin pieces off the mat and glued on is time consuming!)
We had an abundance of food! Our menu:
- Pigs in a blanket representing Three Little Pigs
- Meatballs – er – Bisquick Sausage Balls, representing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
- Fruit tray representing The Very Hungry Caterpillar
- Vegetable tray representing Peter Rabbit
Not pictured were these:
- Taco bar representing Dragons Love Tacos
- Make Way for Ducklings punch with little rubber ducks floating in them
- Book worms — er, gummi worms
- Cupcakes with picks depicting Wild Things silhouettes
Finally, we had favors. More Hershey Kisses with the stickers on them, placed into soap boxes made into “books” commemorating the shower.
We enjoyed putting this together! It was a lot of fun.
PLEASE NOTE: I don’t own the copyrights to any of the characters in this article. I used them for myself under my interpretation of the fair use clause of the U.S. copyright law. I post the pictures of the party here for inspiration. DO NOT ASK FOR THE SCANNED OR CUT FILES I USED TO MAKE THESE.