May Palacpac, Storyteller

I haven’t blogged in weeks. I’ve had my hands full with home schooling and a marketing campaign I tried for work, so most of my time was spent teaching my kids or monitoring the campaign results,  and on other things that I consider priority — like my friend Phoebe’s baby shower.

It was quite a challenge for me because Phoebe had hosted countless of baby showers before. I’ve organised a few in the past but this was the first time for me to host one and  I was hosting a baby shower for a baby shower expert!!! (Insert suspenseful music here)

I volunteered our house for the event so I thought that it was only practical for me to volunteer to do the decorations, too, after all, most of our friends will be coming from the north and from the south (we’re in the middle) and it would be too much of a pressure to require them to show up earlier to help me.  We all agreed that food would be on potluck and I would take care of setting up my house for the occasion.

Pinterest Ideas

I consulted Pinterest for ideas on setting up. For days, I browsed through pictures and pinned the ones I thought were cute on my boards.

There were a lot of ideas that I wasn’t able to execute because I ran out of time. I had to let go of the other details to prioritise the more important tasks, like washing off the plastic chairs and cleaning up the area where the tables would be.

I loved doing it all, to be honest, and I wish I had more time to do the cutting and pasting. I didn’t have that many supplies here so we had to walk over the bookstore and the supermarket to buy stuff the evening before. Now I know that with all I have to work on, I’ll need to start at least a week ahead.

Gallery

I’ve learned a lot during the process. First of which is realizing that decorating doesn’t come naturally to me despite the availability of references.

Phoebe says for a beginner, I did a good job. For someone who’s not naturally “dainty”, I guess did fine (I think..)

Here are some of the pictures from the party:

More or less, this is how the sweets table looked like. My apologies for the quality of the pictures, I wasn’t able to hold long enough to take good ones.

Anyway, I got some of the ideas for the sweets buffet table  from a Ban Kee event I attended weeks ago.

I’ve seen how Phoebe painstakingly cut out letters for banners with the names of the babies of the moms she hosted parties for and I wanted to do the same for her. Here’s what I came up with:

Phoebe have also made many diaper cakes for her pregnant friends. I can’t make a diaper cake so I made the next best thing: a diaper bundle. The one in Pinterest has a figure of a stork and a card attached to it. I just wanted to put a birdie but again, I wasn’t able to because of time constraint.

I don’t have an oven yet so I decided to prepare chocolate refrigerator bars and no bake cookie dough bars. I haven’t baked in years and I missed it more when I was doing all these. I hope I get my oven this year. It  would be fun to bake for the kids.

We decided to forego of the usual program and just catch up with each other’s lives over dinner.

I did see this little trivia on Pinterest that I thought would make an interesting highlight for our sweets table so I made one. I didn’t use M & Ms though, I used the local brand, Nips, and I didn’t have a baby bottle to put them in so I just used a small jar for it.

I counted 210 pieces of nips but the kids kept eating them, so no one was able to guess how many there were left and I didn’t bother  to count anymore, haha.

It took a lot of revisions to get this birdie detail done, for some reason, it kept looking like a fish!  It took me five tries before I got it right. I planned on putting a birdie on other stuff but like I said, I ran out of time.

I tied the utensils up the evening before so they were ready by Saturday.

If you remember, I blogged about how Tostitos made me fat. Well, I kept a bunch of  those Tostitos salsa jars in the kitchen. Using mason jars as glasses is a trend nowadays, so why not use my Tostitos jars for the drinks? So I sterilized them, tied ribbons around them, added big straws. Phoebe loved them!

Successful event!

Despite all the things I was not able to do, I think the event was a success mostly because the people in the party were our friends for almost 15 years. For Phoebe, they were her friends since childhood, they all grew up in the same street.

Fifteen years ago or so, Phoebe and I became friends and eventually, the rest adopted me into their group.

It was fun catching up over food and celebrating Phoebe’s birthday and her pregnancy together.

Phoebe says that if I host more parties, I’ll get better at it. Perhaps. Let’s see what comes up. For now, though, what matters to me, really, is that she had a great time and our friends felt welcome in our home.

I’m definitely open to hosting more parties here, it’s the reason why we decided to rent this house in the first place – to be able to invite people over and share our life as a family with others. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to complete all plans the next time around.