owl baby shower for boy

owls are SO flipping cute to me and i like how they're a symbol of wisdom. i knew i wanted to have a theme for my baby shower (for a boy) & i didn't want it to be the usual rubber duckies or noah's ark (i'm not knocking either one of those themes, i just wanted something different), so i surfed the web. the majority of the ideas for the decoration came from this website. here are the pictures & ideas for games:

i made these cupcakes out of white cake mix (is that what it's called? lol) from walmart and i used the cream cheese icing for the white and added blue food coloring to get the blue cupcakes (i only used a couple of drops) and of course used the chocolate icing for the brown cupcakes. i used a zip lock bag and snipped a VERY small piece from the corner to pipe out the designs onto the top of the cup cakes. (just place the icing into the zip lock bag, squeeze it all to the corner where you've made the hole, and start decorating!)

these owls were my favorite! all i did was follow the instructions on this site to make the felt owls and placed them as the center piece on the dessert table. i bought the felt at walmart and some of it was felt i had lying around from previous crafts. the styrofoam balls i also purchased at walmart. you can get all this also at a craft store, but walmart was cheaper for me. the nest was a little basket i found in the garage, but you can also get a lot of little twigs and super glue them together. i used an actual egg for the nest by poking a small hole at the bottom with the tip of a knife and shaking the inside of the egg out & then rinsing it. i super glued all of this to a tree branch from my back yard.

these are various shots of the dessert table. the place card for the dessert table read, 'chocolate, sugar, and sweets whooo my!' in one of the apothecary jars i placed chocolate malt balls & yogurt covered raisins. in the other i used hershey kisses and this new cookies and cream hershey kisses that looks like a tablet. i also made coconut macaroons (SO easy to make and SO delish, here's the recipe) and a pineapple dessert that is also delish but i'm not sure what i did with the recipe (shame on me!). i had some blue plastic safety pins i just scattered across the table and the place cards i made from left over paper from the owls (which you'll see in a bit) and left over blue tissue paper from the martha stewart inspired paper pom-poms, instructions here.

this was probably the 'most expensive' piece because of the owl hole puncher i bought at michael's (it's martha stewart, $19 i think). i got the little blue diamond jewels in the scrap booking section at walmart and used them as eyes on the owls. i took brown yarn, also from walmart, and i taped it to the wall and bought the clothes pins from family tree, super glued the owls to the pins, and pinned up the ultrasound pictures the tech had given me on my 5 month visit. 

 this was the blue drink. all i did was add one of those liters of ginger ale, two 64 oz white grape juice, and blue hawaiin punch. there wasn't a recipe i followed, i just added all these to taste. for example, if you don't want too much bubbly, use less of the ginger ale.

now for the game table. i made a place card that said, "life's a hoot." trying to find games that weren't the same games everyone knows by memory because they are always played at baby showers was really hard to me. these are the games:
1. Guess WHOOOO!: on the invitation, i told the guests to bring a picture of herself as a baby, so the basket you see is where the pictures went when the guests came in, but they were not to tell anyone that was them as a baby. the guests later had to guess who was who.
2. What's on the tray: the basket the guests had to put their pictures in was sitting next to several baby items (about 20 of them), so naturally, they looked at these items when placing their pictures in the basket but a lot of them probably didn't pay much attention to it. well, for the first game after everyone was sitting down, we put away all the items and had the guests write out as many items they could remember.
3. Rice/Safety pins: for this i had two bowls of rice and in the rice i put 20 small safety pins (make sure they're closed, you don't want them to poke your guests *snicker*). you get two guests and blind fold them and they have a minute to see who can dig out the most safety pins (trust me this game is hard bcz those little safety pins feel like rice).
4. Birthing Baby: for this game i bought a bunch of plastic easter eggs and small plastic babies that fit into the eggs that i found at hobby lobby. i placed a baby in the egg and filled it up with water, placed them in a bowl and let them freeze before the guests came in. when they came in, they were each given an egg and who ever 'birthed' the baby first (had the baby completely ice free) was the winner.
i must admit that i did do some of the typical shower games where you unscramble words. i used scrambled baby animal names (for example, oalf - foal). i also did another game where we had a bunch of plush babies (you can use potatoes) and divided up the guests in two teams and had buckets on one end. each team member had to place a potato between their legs and without dropping them quickly go across the room and drop them in their team bucket. my favorite game was one that i made from scrap paper and poster board was pin the sperm. i found this online but the poster cost $15 (not including shipping/handling), so i made it myself. you don't need to use scrap paper, i did because i didn't have all the markers (thanks to my three year old - lol). i made the little sperm out of black scrap paper, same with the ovule and just used scotch tape to stick them to the poster. i printed out a bunch of pictures of my husband's face and placed one on each sperm and a picture of my face to the ovule (or is it ovum??). this game is played just like 'pin the donkey.'

this is what it looked like after everyone was done trying to pin the sperm to the egg.

hope this gave someone ideas for their baby shower!