The first babyshower!

We had our first baby shower on Saturday and it was an absolute blast! I say first because there are three (!) lined up in all. Seems showers are something that Americans love. They love to shop and they are so generous so it is the perfect combination. Jo and I were feeling seriously uncomfortable about it but our friends were pretty persuasive and won us over in the end. Then it turned out that I had to set up registries for these things. And not just one! I set one up at target but there was too much 'online only' stuff apparently so I was sent off to set up another at Babies'R'Us (ack how I hate names with R in them). That was another experience entirely and actually a lot of fun, where we ran round the store with a scanner blipping things.

These cupcakes are the goods! Don't let the blue scare you, they're lemonade flavoured.

So, first shower Saturday and the weather decided to get into the spirit as well, a little over-enthusiastically. It didn't shower it poured! The kind of drenching rain where even getting into the car has water in places where only the bath should go. Didn't matter a bit in the end. This shower was organised by some of the chicks from Church, and they did an incredible job.

This was part of the incredible spread. The plate with the tongs on top is full of 'nano' tamales, beef, pork or bean, and they were incredible. If you look hard you can also see the storm pelting against the window!

I didn't feel uncomfortable for a second (well, only during the present part) and there were about as many men there as women...no secret womens' voodoo just friends and food and one totally off the wall game! Have a look at the following pics and see if you can work out what's going on!




Yep, that's right. We're playing the "poopy diaper game". Eight mystery candy bars were melted into the bottom of 8 diapers (nappies - but I think I've already explained why I need to call them diapers here) and our job was to use sight and smell (no tasting!) to determine what the different sweets were.

Josie's score card. She doesn't eat enough candy from the looks of it...

This is our friend Liz, who is a chocolate connoisseur, working out 'what is that smell, I know it...'

The gummi bears weren't too tricky to identify. The Reece's peanut butter cups were just gross...

And yes, you're looking at the champion of the day. Well, actually Liz beat me with 7/8 but she was an organiser (as well as a chocolate fiend) so she stepped down to lucky number 2, which was me with 6/8. The two I missed were the two I'm holding and that's only because I've never tried either of them before in my life! Look at me, I'm all blurry with excitement!

The final phase of the party was opening the masses of generosity in the form of gorgeous present bags, dripping with ribbons and tissue paper. One thing Americans seem to know how to do well, aside from shopping, is wrapping!

We are incredibly blessed to have such lovely and generous friends here and let me tell you, Tuesday is a very lucky boy. I'll take a few snaps of some of the presents later but a couple of my favorites off the bat are the steam breathing red dragon humidifier, the lamaze magnetic stackable pond critters, and the (happy) monster squishable nightlight.