My brother and sister-in-law are having their first baby, and the first baby in the family in 16 years, so we’re all pretty excited. My mom, two of her friends, and I decided to give her a fun baby shower. I think animal theme baby stuff is so great and decided on a jungle theme for the shower. Now they’re even doing the nursery in jungle theme. Lucky for all of us, it’s a really popular theme right now, so stuff is pretty easy to find.

I found a ton of ideas on Pinterest, of course. One of my mom’s friends took charge of the menu, and the other one did the flowers, and sourced some cute animal cookie party favors. Mom bought the cake and hosted.

It came out great, if I do say so myself.

We started with these fun invitations from Etsy Seller DesignsByDVB. She was great to work with and made several changes really quickly for me.

My mom gives a lot of parties so she had all the tables and chairs, linens, silverware, glasses and even the jungle print napkin rings! Since she already had the orange plates we decided to do a color scheme of oranges, yellow, and reds for the tables. This was a little more sophisticated than pastels, which I liked. I got the zebra runners and the fans (it was so hot!) as well as the little plastic animals at Windy City Novelties. Amazon.com also carries them. The animal print baby bottles came from Target, the flowers from Trader Joe’s. Mom’s friend did a wonderful job making grocery store flowers into cute arrangements! I got the animal faces for the buntings from Etsy seller WithEnvyPaper. The balloons were from the local party store.

SUCH a cute idea to put the flowers in baby bottles, and a plus that mom’s friend found animal print ones!

Mom’s friend prepping the food.

Such a delicious idea- curry chicken salad, fresh berries, and mini croissants.

I wanted to have a single cocktail for the cocktail hour, then wine and iced tea for dinner. I decided on a sparkling basil lemonade, that could have alcohol added to it for those who wanted it. I started with a glass filled with ice, 3 oz Simply Lemonade (I have never had luck making my own lemonade), a torn basil leaf, then topped off with sparkling water. For those who wanted it spiked, I added an ounce of gin and half an ounce of St. Germain. Really good and refreshing. Some people thought it was a little too sweet. If so, you can use less lemonade.

The original idea was to serve the drinks in baby bottles and mom and dad went all over town to find the right ones, but in the end, we couldn’t find crushed ice (it was a Sunday) and regular ice was too big to fit. With a little bit better planning, that would have been SO CUTE. Oh well, maybe next time…;)

My other brother (not the daddy) surprised everyone with this fab bartender costume, LOL!

Mom likes this white wine and I liked the label, LOL. The color scheme also went with the table decor.

The guest of honor sat at the end, with all the young cousins.

I decided on 3 games plus an extra if there was time. We gave out Starbucks gift cards as prizes. Whose Your Daddy- link the celebrity kid with the celebrity dad, extra points for getting and spelling the last name correctly.

Guess the baby- I had people bring baby pictures of themselves and the guest had to guess who was who. I copied them all in black and white and in the same size for uniformity.

One of The guest of honor’s oldest friend happens to also be very smart and hilarious, so we had him MC the party and write and host a trivia game. I think the young people liked it better than the older ones, but all around it was pretty fun.

Concentrate, ladies! Daddy-To-Be helping out.

Mom got this adorable cake from The Village French Bakery in Glendale, CA.

We got chocolate on the bottom, coconut in the middle and strawberry on the top. The coconut was by far the best layer, followed by the strawberry. The animal decorations came from Michael’s.

Got these adorable shortbread animal cookies for party favors at Valley Bakery in Oak Park, CA

Congratulations Sarah and Dave!