About To Hatch!

The best Christmas gift hubby and I got last year was a phone call the day after Christmas from my daughter and son in law with news they were coming home for an unplanned visit in January. Last minute though it was, we decided to throw a baby shower for them, giving us just 2 weeks to put everything together. Crazy, huh. Not even enough time to send out invitations, but since a lot of the family would be coming over for our New Years Day family reunion, invites were entirely by word of mouth.

Theme of the shower was "About To Hatch". First glance at the party table and one would think this was for an Easter party. This was not my first choice for a baby shower theme. But sometimes you just gotta go with the flow... You see, when we made the announcement of the baby shower at our New Years Day party, my mom and aunties had "Year of the Rooster" in their heads, thinking it would be "cute" to have a rooster themed shower. Not even!  IMO, "Year of the Rooster" is not an appropriate theme for a baby shower, and especially not for a baby girl! I would have much preferred to do a "Princess" themed shower, but as a compromise, I came up with the "About To Hatch" theme...uh, well afterall, roosters all started out as baby chicks, right?

With not much time to plan and prepare, I had to keep everything simple. The cut file I used for the banner was the same one I had originally created 5 years ago when I made my daughter's "Just Married" wedding banner. I used Teletype font and MTC to create the alphas and hatching chick cut file comes from My Scrap Chick.

I had just enough time make simple favor bags for the guests and a diaper cake for the parents to be.

I was surprised at how quickly this diaper came together. Found a great tutorial for this by Mischele over at Bean Sprout Notes blog. Using a springform pan to hold the diapers in place to shape the layers and an empty paper towel roll to keep the layers stacked made this so easy!

Finished it off by covering the layers with receiving blankets, and adding bows and tulle roses. Sweet teddy dressed in the chick costume was a

Baby bottles filled with Hershey kisses and M & M's candies doubled as a cute table decor as well as a "Guess How Many" shower game.

And I just couldn't resist buying these adorable "chirping chicks" and egg shaped egg timers! 

Made 28 of these favor bags using a hatching chick paper piecing from My Scrap Chick's "Easter Chicks" collection.

Filled them with homemade chocolate chip cookies and added our thank you message on the inside.

Big hugs and special thanks to our dear sweet friend Heather who baked and decorated several of the cutest chickie and baby themed cookies ever! I used a few to decorate my daughter's favorite Lemon Crunch Cake, and the rest we individually sealed in cello bags to be used as game prizes. Darn! I really thought I had taken photos of the rest of the cookies...but I guess I didn't...I'm so mad at myself!

Thank you from our hearts also to our very special aunt who worked very hard making these lovely chicken and rooster themed kitchen towels for each of our guests. 

Whew! Now that it's over, I am still amazed that we were able to pull all of this off on such short notice...but it was fun and I'm so glad we did!