For the Love of Mamas: Shower Time! Celebrating Baby Ella :)

I was honored to have the opportunity to throw my dear friend and coworker, Jen, a baby shower. She isn't originally from the area, and her family was throwing her a shower back home, so I wanted to host one here, that way her Hershey friends could celebrate with her too. We chose a date (putting her right around 31 weeks) and we started planning. Unfortunately, bad timing and a bit of bad luck put Jen in the hospital, on bed rest, two days before the shower :(. We considered moving the shower to the her room at the hospital, but the food, decorations and number of people would have been difficult to squeeze in, so we decided to reschedule the shower for after the baby was born, and took a few of the decorations into the hospital and decorated her room. The rest of the decorations that we had already put up, stayed up in my house for the rest of the month (pretty sure Jared loved this)!

After 2-3 weeks on bed rest, Jen had a beautiful, healthy baby girl named Ella Rose on January 24th!!! But because she was early (due March 6) and tiny, she's spending some time in the NICU growing. Jen's awesome photographer (Family Tales Photography) visited Ella in the hospital to take some photos, and here are some Jen took too! Isn't she adorable?!

Meanwhile, we rescheduled the shower and finally had the chance to celebrate Jen and perfect little Ella (though she was not in attendance as she still rockin' it in the NICU). Not everyone was able to make it, but we made the best of it! We did have to come up with some new games, as the planned ones didn't really work since the baby was already born, but it turned out great anyway! We played a pacifier spitting game (for distance) that was pretty funny, and my friend Lara has the pictures on her phone, so I'll have to add them later. She won too!

We had a lot of good food and good laughs! Here are a few photos of the decorations we made (and bought). We hand cut the paper garland and strung it ourselves!

This was the invitation we sent out that inspired the pink sparkle theme. I'm really, really not a fan of the super-cutesy themes, so this worked. Really girly but still kind of simple. We did throw a few elephants in there since Jen is using that as the theme of Ella's nursery.

I just loved the sparkly paper garland, and can't wait to use it again. Julie hand painted this wooden 'e' with pink glitter paint, which honestly was a lot harder than it looks!

All the guests wrote their name on a little balloon,

which turned into this (thanks Julie..and Pinterest for the idea)!

We also made rice krispie treat elephants for favors. My favorite favors are the kind you can eat! Came across an elephant shaped cookie cutter at Michaels, and dipped the ears in pink white chocolate. We added eyes with white icing, and probably shouldn't have, as it wouldn't harden, smeared everywhere, and not to mention it made them a little creepy. Oh well, next time :).