Lively Happenings: Brewing a Baby Shower!

Last weekend, I was thrown a beautiful and fun baby shower from my friends, Natalie and Hope!

First, Hope and Natalie brainstormed to make the CUTEST invites for us! We wanted it to seem more like a casual lake day than a baby shower since it was a couples shower. Hope is an artist and used her mad skills to make these bad boys! I LOVE how they turned out! Natalie suggested the book instead of a card, and I loved it! Baby Bratton has some great books already! I cannot wait to read to her!

DECOR:

Hope and Natalie were going with the woodland theme, which is what will be Braelyn's nursery/our guest room. Hope gathered lots of lush evergreens and pinecones to put in large mason jars. Natalie got cute little woodland animals and they put them alongside this lush moss.

She was originally going to paint them gold, but then we all liked the natural colors of the animals.

Natalie also made the cute sign that was behind us as we opened all Braelyn's presents. Making the cutest backdrop for our shower photos!

FOOD:

To keep it casual, we had some amazing food Hope and Natalie prepped ahead of time all laid out for the guests on the patio table. The day of, we just had to mix the fruit, salad, warm up the mac n cheese, warm up the bread, and have Dane (Hope's hubby) grill the chicken she had seasoned up.

Massive Fruit bowl - approx 1 cantaloupe, 1 big bin of strawberries cut, 1 big bin of blueberries, and honeydew.
Bread loaves from the bakers simply warmed and served along side honey butter. The honey butter was made by Hope and she mixed up regular butter (like the stick kind) and creamed honey to taste
Chips to keep it easy
Homemade mac-n-cheese prepped ahead of time
Salad made of greens mixed, cherry tomatoes, caramelized onions, feta, and homemade dressing (my favorite dressing is a thick balsamic with a little olive oil and some seasonings - I sometimes even just use salt and pepper for that seasoning!)
Chicken on the bone, simply seasoned with a mix of spices and then grilled to perfection
Dessert was the BOMB! Hope and Natalie cut and sugared strawberries in advance as well as made little sweet biscuits. Hope then made homemade cream and day off she layered these together in cute 8oz mason jars!

DRINKS:
For our drinks, we had organic lemonade, un-sweet tea, and sweet tea which Natalie properly labeled "Sweet as Braelyn" in recognition of the little guest of honor! Oh and there was a bucket of beer, which I of course stayed away from even though I oh so badly crave beer during pregnancy...why is that!?

ACTIVITIES:
I wanted the shower to really feel more casual, like a lake day. So rather than playing a bunch of shower games, we had croquet to play in the yard. I meant to bring the redneck golf to play as well, but my pregnant memory failed me..wah wah! We also were going to bring cornhole, so that's another great suggestion for doing a casual shower like ours!

I mean come on...you really don't need much else when you have this:

If you want some suggestions on other more shower themed games, here's some of my favorites:

My Water Broke - freeze tiny babies in ice cubes, first one to thaw out has to scream "My Water Broke"
Chug the Bottle - we played this at the Baseball Themed shower I helped host for my friend Emily, and instead of baby bottles, I used juice boxes
The smelly diaper - so this one grosses me out, but is still sorta fun! It's when you melt candies down inside something that resembles a diaper, or I guess you could use real diapers, but that's a waste of $ in my opinion. So then the guests have to guess the candy by smell or even taste if they want!

The house where we had this shower is my father's. Sadly he and his girlfriend were out of town when we planned this shower. With our busy schedule and this being 6+ hours away from where Neal and I live, we had limited times we could do the shower. However, him and Kim were so sweet and had set up a banner and provided some cute little candy packages for the guests party favors!

That's a wrap up of the shower details. We really were so lucky to have some amazing friends host and wonderful family and friends to attend! Neal and I couldn't be more excited about our little girl, Braelyn Abigail Bratton!

Now here's some of my favorite pictures from the pressie opening and of our friends/family who came to support us!

Bath Toys!

This card from my brother and his wife was great! It had a ton of # as they like to tease me about my social media hastags ie: #LakeDay #BabyShower etc :) Thanks guys! Love you!