My three kids were the first grandchildren on both sides of our family, so for five years, they were pretty much the stars of the show. They had lots of doting aunts and uncles and grandparents. But no cousins. Until now.
Five years after our first child was born, we have experienced a baby explosion of sorts: seven new babies have joined our extended family in the last four years.
Seven!
That’s a lot of babies.
We are thankful, grateful, and blessed.
It also means that my kids, as the older cousins, have been able to help out with the planning, organizing, and hosting of baby showers. As Maddy, Owen, and Cora have become older and experienced new cousins arriving, having their hands on board to help throw baby shower parties has been a lot of fun.
However, Maddy and Cora have admittedly been more a part of the events, and Owen has enjoyed some serious ‘guy time’ with Dad and Pap during baby showers. I get it.
All in all, my kids have wholeheartedly loved to help with the super fun parts of baby showers: decorations, treats, and games.
Here’s the skinny. . .
Baby Shower Decorations, Treats, & Games– 3 Ways to Get Your Kids to Help:
1. Kids can help with decorations. We have planned two baby boy showers and one baby girl shower, and each time, we’ve stayed with a monochromatic color scheme. Greens and blues for the boys, pinks and oranges for the girl.
Choosing a color scheme right from the start has helped us narrow down decorations and accessories.
Any time you’re looking for ways kids can help with baby shower decorations, consider giving them easy, repetitive jobs.
Easy is good and repetitive is even better.
Kids can:
- Add flowers to vases
- Puff up tissue paper pom-poms
- Tie ribbons onto balloons
- Sprinkle confetti on tables
- Create welcome banners or flag buntings
- Help arrange gifts on table and bring gifts to mom-to-be
2. Kids love to help with baby shower treats. Though each of our showers has been slightly different—some were catered and some were not—we did throw one where we made the majority of the food.
Maddy and Cora love to help with the mixing of ingredients for dips like spinach or artichoke crab dip. They love dipping strawberries in chocolate or drizzling chocolate on pretzels. They love adding candy to bowls (and sneaking a few along the way!).
And shower attendees will love to sip on a Blueberry Mint Spritzer Mocktail, so don’t forget to add this to the spread as well. It’s an absolute fave!
Kids are expert sprinkle-sprinklers, and they’re great at adding toppers to cupcakes. One thing we have often done for showers is ordered plain cupcakes from the local bakery and then decorated them ourselves with personalized toppers and sprinkles to match our color scheme.
Arranged on a simple cupcake treat tower
, they looked professional and fancy.
3. Kids love to prepare and run baby shower games. Only one of my sisters has approved baby shower games, so we kept it pretty simple for her.
We played ‘Baby Food Challenge’, where our baby shower guests had to look closely at ten different baby food jars and guess the food inside. We simply used a white mailing sticker to cover the label on the jar and numbered the jars 1-10.
Maddy and Cora were super psyched to help with this game. They picked out the jars of baby foods, and we tried to choose a range of colors, textures, and sizes. At the shower, they had a blast handing out our Baby Food Challenge sheets to guests and walking around with the tray of baby food jars for each person to see.
You can download Baby Food Challenge here for your own shower: baby food game _ teachmama.com
The winner of Baby Food Challenge was the person who guessed the most baby foods correctly. Easy, quick, and lots of fun!
Other great ideas for baby shower games are:
Or here’s one last one: Bring out BABY!
baby WORD shower game _ teachmama.com
Though our baby shower planning days may be over, we are certainly looking forward to hearing other ways that families have included kids in the baby shower planning and partying!
What worked for you? How did you get your kids involved in this special event? Do let us know in the comments!
fyi: HUGE and happy thanks to my incredible, amazing, and crazy-crafty mom and sisters–Jenny, Mary, and Katie–each who helped do just about everything for all of the showers above and who threw me the world’s best shower ever–way back when. In most cases, my mom and sisters researched, planned, and organized the showers from start to finish; Maddy, Cora, and I just filled in as necessary and did what they told us. Thank you, girls! xoxoxo
I am blogging on behalf of Walmart.com and received compensation for my time, but the views expressed here are solely mine, not Walmart’s. Shop online and save money to live better at http://www.walmart.com.
prepare a family emergency plan: be EVEREADY (and grab a few free books from Scholastic!)
Leave a Reply