A Sweet Baby Shower

With only a few more days to go until our little one arrives, I thought it was time to share pictures from my baby shower which was held a few weeks ago. I was honored with the pure joy of family and friends gathered to celebrate our little baby on the way. I am seriously the luckiest girl and have such great family and friends who traveled from Northern California just to attend and my sister who flew from Florida so that she wouldn’t miss the day – seriously blessed! All of the decorations in the world can’t compared to the love that filled the room as the shower wouldn’t be the same without these people there.

The invitations were one of the my favorite elements of the shower. I wanted them to be simple and classy with just a touch of baby. Because we are not finding out the gender of the baby, this made it difficult to incorporate gender neutral colors. While we could have gone with something more neutral such as green or yellow, I ultimately love pink and wanted to incorporate that color into the shower, so we settled on baby blue and blush pink.

As I mentioned before, my family is a 7 hour drive away but they were still just as invovled as if they lived right around the corner.  We made the invitations ourselves, while my Mom printed the envelopes and glued the envelope liners.  I love the classic look of envelope seals and thought this would be the perfect touch of baby. At our wedding 3 years ago, we created a candy buffet which I loved so much, so I wanted to create a station where guests could pick dessert items as they wished. For the baby blocks, my Mom and I found unpainted wooden ABC blocks at Hobby Lobby. I had Ryan scrape off one of the “C”‘s and glued a “Y” on instead. We used white hyngragea’s in decorated glass vases.

The wonderful ladies at Sweet & Saucy made the adorable carrot cake which I loved so much I didn’t want to cut into it.

Above the gift table, I displayed my weekly pictures which I have been taking since week 8. Because my family does not live close by and cannot see the baby’s progress I began taking these so they could see the growth throughout my pregnancy. I decided it might be a fun way for guests to also track the progress.

As I mentioned before, I love decorating with pink, so my Mom had to continuously remind me to use blue as well. She found these plates at Kirkland and because she is the best mom ever, she picked up 25 plates for us to use. I made salted carmel macrons for each guest to enjoy and placed them in the mini dessert cups.   

I am not a huge fan of traditional baby shower games, but the celebrity game never gets old. I took 15 celebrity baby bumps and using Photoshop put my head over their face. Guests had to guess who the celebrity bump was!

I loved the idea of a onesie decorating station which I had seen on many other blogs, but when it came down to it my Mom had a good point which was, “Shan, you are going to have so many cute baby clothes, I can’t really see you putting your kid in one of these homemade onesies.” Which, well, is true. She brainstormed different ideas and came up with a onesie cookie decorating station. “Perfect”, I said!

I made a double batch of sugar cookies using this recipe (which made about 40 onesie cookies total) the weekend before and froze them. I was nervous that they weren’t going to be fresh, as I had never froze the cookies before, but thankfully, I couldn’t even tell a difference and they tasted as if they were just baked. I made 6 different colors of royal icing which was more than enough and filled them in 12oz bottles.

Each guest decorated a sugar cookie which was placed on the voting paper for everyone to cast their vote for the favorite cookie.

My sister ended up with the winning cookie!!!!!!! Seriously, some of the cookies turned out awesome. Once the cookies were dried, we packaged them up for each guest to take home. 

I was so blessed to have so much love at the baby shower and to have so many family and friends in the same room all together to celebrate our little one with us.  So many people came together to help pull off such an amazing event. It seriously could not have been done without the help of everyone involved.

xoxo

HAIR CARE

Costa Rica | Vol. 4 | The Wedding Finale!

Andy and Katie’s wedding at ‘Casa de Capitan’ was an incredible event and the finale of our trip. We had looked forward to the wedding day the whole week and we were happy to see that the event would be set in absolutely perfect weather. As the sun began to set we gathered on the beach and watched Katie, the gorgeous bride, come the down the aisle.

Sarah, Katrin, Vivian, Alexandra and Shan

Charlie and Me

SPACE

SPACE

Anthony & Alex, Sarah and Brian

SPACE

SPACE

The newly engaged.

SPACE

SPACE

For the reception dinner, Shan and I were assigned to the “pantera” table.

After the ceremony, the group enjoyed drinks and appetizers on the beach.  There could not have been a better setting.

Fitz played a few a songs.

The ceremony amongst the palms, the circular arrangement brought everybody close the action.

The groom, very happy obviously.

Mr. and (very soon to be) Mrs,

And they’re married!

First steps of many in a life together!

Brian, Sarah, Katrin and Sten

Shan, Kim, and Suzi

The Father-Daughter dance was all time, a full, intense swing dance to Free Bird.  An instant classic.

The Punta Coco clan, those who live together, party together and eat ‘Gallo Pinto’ together:

This is scene looking towards the beach from the house and swimming pool, Marty, myself and Kevin.

Flor de Cana a local rum,

Dinner was first class, also first class were the “Shot-skis,” here the Curtis’s give a lesson in teamwork.

Andy’s brother Erik, delivered a great speech.

Some ‘Shot-ski’ races.

The happy newlyweds.

At midnight, Katie surprised Andy (and all of us) with a firework show! We were blown away!

I really like the shot on the right here, it’s the Grand Finale on 20 second exposure hand held.  What you’re seeing on the bottom is the tent illuminated by the fireworks and framed by palm trees on both sides, quite an experience!

Congratulations to the new Mr. and Mrs. Curtis!!!

lemon and lime of a good time.

Since my little brother, Nick, was a little boy, he has been nothing but all boy. Growing up, Nick dreamed of  growing up and becoming an Army Bomb Detonator. I don’t even know how he knew what this was, but somehow he knew that is what he wanted to be. After a few years it changed to becoming a Fire Storm jumper – yes, he wanted to be the guy to jump out of an airplane and into a raging forest fire. I am not sure if it was the influence of my parents or him coming to his own senses, but somewhere along the way he settled with becoming a firefighter. There is nothing that gets him more excited than to talk about the fire calls he goes on or teach us the lingo (“Code 3” or  “frequent flyers”).  All of the sleepless nights don’t bother him because he gets to do what he loves. Nick has never been one to love school or frankly even understand why he needed to go to college. But, my parents never stopped encouraging him.  So, on Saturday, my baby brother actually did it and graduated from California State University of Sacramento (Sac State) with a degree in Fire Service Management.

So, what does this mean? PARTY!

We decided that a  lemon and lime theme would go nicley with the party venue and as a bonus green and yellow are Sac State’s colors. Since we plan most all family events from different locations, I love to get everyone on the same page with an inspiration board.

I saw the tissue pomanders a few months ago in Martha Stewart and have been looking for a reason to make them! Like most things Martha does, they look beautiful in the magazine, but in real life they turn out looking a bit to DIY-ish to actually use. So, intially I was a bit skeptical of this project. I followed the instructions from her website and 12 minutes later I had my first pom-pom completed! While mine didn’t look 100% as good as Ms. Martha’s I was happy enough with the outcome!!

After making 20 or so of these things I learned:

1. Do not tie the wire too tight because it makes it impossible to actually seperate the tissue paper.

2. Make sure your wire is centered before you start to pull the tissue apart or else you end of with an oval pom-pom.

3. Cutting through all those layers is rough, so just take a few at a time.

As for drinks, we wanted to offer guests something other than beer and wine, but it also had to be easy for them to take and drink. The solution was to use canning jars and fill them with homeade,  “Hard Lemonade”. For this, I mixed 1 can of frozen lemonade concentrate, 2 cans of water, 1  can of vodka, and 1/8 cup of fresh lemon juice. We poured the mix into the canning jars and added fresh lemon wedges.

For budget friendly centerpieces, my mom bought 6 bags of lemons which we used to fill various sized vases and glass containers. These were left over from my wedding so we didn’t have any added cost there.

And to put the finishing touch on the lemon and lime theme party, my Mom made a 3-tier cake with each layer a different flavor. The bottom was the secret family favorite carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, the middle tier was lime with whipped cream frosting, and the top was lemon.  As it turns out, the middle layer was a bit too soft to hold the weight of the top tier, so we ended up with only a 2-tier cake (at least for decoration purposes)! The cake was a major hit and tasted fabulous too!

We have plenty more pictures of our time up there, but these were just the first few to get out for now!