Organising a Baby Shower

I’ve been doing a bit of blog admin recently, and realised I have numerous folders full of photos I’ve taken for blog posts, which I’ve never actually got round to writing. Whether it’s been that my health has got in the way or I had too much work on at Uni, they’ve just been left sitting there, which to me feels like a real shame (especially as I put so much time and energy into taking the photos in the first place!) So, as well as my goal to start uploading more new posts to my blog now that I’ve finished university, I also plan to dig some photos out of the archives and finally get my posts written to go alongside them. I’ll only share posts that are still relevant today (I don’t think there’s much point in me writing about a ‘new’ product launch that came out three years ago!) so hopefully you will still find my archive posts useful and interesting. And don’t worry – I also have plenty of new blog post ideas in mind, so I plan to do a nice mixture of old and new.

Today’s post that I want to share with you comes from photos I took about a year ago when my sister-in-law was still pregnant (can you believe ‘little’ Noah is now almost one!) Most of my friends and family know how much I enjoy planning and organising a good party, so when I was given the opportunity to arrange Lisa’s Baby Shower, I was over the moon! Pinterest soon became my best friend – I spent every spare minute I could find browsing pins for all sorts of Baby Shower related things (you can check out my Baby Shower board here) and things gradually started coming together. Obviously everyone’s tastes are different, so what we came up with may not be to everyone’s liking. But I thought I would share some of the things we did to make it a special day in case you’re just starting out with your planning and are feeling a little bit overwhelmed! 

Apart from sorting out the location (we booked a cosy room in a local church) the first thing I had to do was come up with some sort of theme for the party. We didn’t know baby’s gender at the time, so we wanted something neutral yet colourful and fun. Richard and Lisa had just had a beautiful mural of an elephant painted in the nursery, and so the idea of an elephant theme began. We complemented this with pastel rainbow shades to bring some colour to the event. Before we went any further, I wanted to check with Lisa if there was anything she either really wanted us to include or absolutely did not want to happen on the day. Luckily for me, she was fairly happy for us to go ahead with our own ideas, so it was able to be a nice surprise for her when she arrived on the day. The one thing Lisa did have a say over was the invite list – she sent over names and contact details so we could send out the invitations to the right people.

After a lot of planning and one or two minor breakdowns (!) things came together perfectly on the day. I was lucky to have a lot of help from my other sister-in-law, Emma, and my Mum, which made life so much easier. When it came to decorating the venue, there was only so much we could do to transform a slightly dated church hall into a room fit for a baby shower. But I think we did a pretty good job! The main part of the decoration was a range of different balloons. We found some rainbow pastel balloons, which we blew up and hung on the door so that our guests knew where the party was happening. We also found a couple of adorable foil balloons – one with an elephant in a bath and a giant baby, which we took to a local balloon shop to be filled with helium. Lastly, we found some latex rainbow balloons, which matched the elephant on the foil balloon. These were also filled with helium and placed up the length of the hallway entrance to the room. 

Above the door, we hung some beautiful personalised bunting, which we discovered on Amazon at a really reasonable price. Emma and I had also made Lisa a nappy cake (our first attempt at making one – we were really pleased with the result!), which we sat on a table just by the door. When Lisa came into the building, you could tell what a lovely surprise it all was and she seemed really pleased with all the little touches.

We had decided to base the party around an afternoon tea (because everyone loves tea, scones and cakes right?!) so we set out tables and chairs, and then covered the tables with pretty cloths to try and make it feel less like a church hall! We managed to gather together some beautiful tea sets between us, which looked perfect sat on the tables next to the lovely IKEA lanterns. Around the room we also hung lots of vintage-style bunting and fairy lights to try and make it feel as much like a cosy tearoom as possible. 

As well as the tea and cake, we also wanted to include a variety of activities to keep everyone entertained. This is where Pinterest came in very handy – I got so much inspiration browsing through pins from other people’s baby showers! The first game we played was ‘Pin the Dummy on the baby’, which seemed to bring out rather a lot of cheating behaviour! In the end, we concluded that players shouldn’t have the opportunity to feel the board too much before sticking the dummy on, as we ended up with a lot of dummies very close to the baby’s mouth! 

There were also some quieter activities that people could do as and when they fancied it. One of these was called ‘Baby’s First Alphabet Book.’ It was basically a pile of white card, with each piece having “A is for..,” “B is for…” and so on written at the top. The idea being, that each person at the baby shower would draw and colour in a picture (or two!) that matched the letter of the alphabet on the card. Once they were all completed, the pile could be joined together to make an alphabet book for the new baby (and a lovely keepsake for the Mum-to-Be). For another game, we had a couple of baby bottles filled with sweets (counted out by my Mum!) Everyone then had to place their guesses for how many sweets were in each bottle and write them on the chart against their name. The person whose guess was the closest would win the bottle (and the sweets!) to take home.

I always think photos are a brilliant way to create lasting memories, but I know it can sometimes feel a bit awkward when you’re in a larger group and you don’t necessarily know everyone. So we decided to have a photo booth corner with some cute new baby related props to encourage everyone to take some funny photos. These pictures could then be shared with Lisa, meaning she can then print them out and make a keepsake album or add them to her pregnancy/baby book. 

I don’t think you can have a baby shower without asking everyone to dig out a baby photo or two! We decided that, for another game, we would ask people to guess which baby photo matched to each guest. So, before the party, I contacted everyone and asked them to send me over an old photo of themselves. I then arranged these on pieces of card and make some little forms that each guest could fill in. It was so much fun looking through all the photos (some more embarrassing than others!) and trying to guess who was who. It definitely helped to break the ice a bit too. 

Another guessing game was to ask everyone to make their predictions about the new baby – I always think it’s fun to see what sorts of things people go for, and I know it’s quite interesting for the Mum and Dad-to-be to look through once baby has arrived to see if anyone was correct! Again, I just put together some paper forms so guests could record their predictions for date and time of birth, weight, length, hair colour, eye colour, gender and name suggestions. Some of these were easier to guess than others – for example, none of us really knew how long a typical baby was!

I was really conscious of making sure that Lisa had some keepsakes from her special day, and I found these beautiful cloud-shaped advice cards, which I thought would be nice for her to look through after the party. On Pinterest I also came across a lovely ‘Wishes for Baby’ printable and again, thought this would be a nice keepsake for the Mum-to-be. 

Our final two games definitely brought with them the most laughs! Firstly, we did a blindfolded nappy changing game. We split into two teams and the winners were the fastest team to all change a nappy blindfolded. We had some rather interesting nappies, which I'm pretty sure wouldn't have lasted long on a real baby!

For the other game we covered a selection of baby food jars with numbers, and then everyone had to guess what flavour/meal each one was by smelling and tasting each jar in turn. Eating baby food isn’t something any of us had ever really done before, so it was interesting to say the least! All I can say is, some tasted a lot nicer than others did! 

We did a bring and share with the food to take the pressure off us providing everything. We ended up with a yummy selection of sweet and savoury foods, and there was plenty to go around. My sister-in-law, Emma, made some delicious cupcakes and we found these cloud toppers to match the cloud-shaped advice cards. They looked brilliant cascading down the cake stand, popping out against the rainbow sprinkles. We also found some grey and yellow elephant confetti to decorate the table with.

One of my favourite parts of the baby shower décor was the amazing cake my friend Mel, from The Cake Revolution made. She’s made a few cakes for me over the last few years, so I knew I could count on her to do something perfect for such a special occasion. I sent her over a few photos of cakes I’d found online that I quite liked, all including elephants in one way or another, and she worked her magic making this beautiful Mother and Baby elephant cake. It tasted delicious too!

I couldn’t believe how quickly the party went, and it was soon time for everyone to start heading home. Before everybody left, I asked them to leave Lisa (and Richard!) a message in this beautiful guest book so that they had something special to look back on in years to come. We also had a little basket of favours for people to take home. After lots of browsing through favour ideas on Pinterest, I decided to buy a box of fruit teas in individual envelopes and tie a ‘Baby is Brewing’ tag onto each one. They looked great and received a lot of compliments from guests as they took one home with them. 

Despite the organisation being a little stressful at times, I was so pleased with how it all turned out and was happy to see Lisa and her friends enjoying it all. Hopefully it left her with lots of happy memories before the new arrival. And I hope this post might have offered you some ideas and inspiration if you’re planning your own baby shower sometime soon.

What do you think of all the decorations and games that we came up with for Lisa’s baby shower? Are you planning a baby shower soon?

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My experiences of University with a chronic illness

When I was little, my Dad would often talk to my siblings and I about his time at university. These stories would often include tales of how he and his friends would go for a curry on a Friday evening and put the world to rights. One day, I told my Dad that I didn’t want to go to university. He asked me why, and I told him it was because I didn’t like curry. He laughed and explained that you didn’t have to eat curry if you went to university! As a small child, I had just assumed that it was part of what you had to do there! So from then on, I decided that I wanted to study for a degree (and I soon changed my mind on liking curry too!)

As I got older, my desire to move away to university continued and I eventually decided that I wanted to study medicine. But at the age of 15, my health started to decline pretty rapidly, and I ended up having to drop out of school and have a home tutor. I left Secondary School with seven GCSE’s and, after a year out, I went back to Sixth Form to study for a CACHE Child Development qualification. I soon came to the sad realisation that I simply wasn’t well enough to study to become a doctor, so instead decided to work towards becoming a Play Therapist. I was still determined to do what all my friends were doing and go away to university, even if I was a year behind them due to having to take a year out to be in hospital. So while I was at Sixth Form, I started looking at possible options for courses and universities, knowing that I needed some sort of child development qualification. 

I didn’t really set myself any limits with regards to which universities I was going to look at. My Dad and I travelled across the country attending various open days – from Northumbria and Leeds to Plymouth and Bristol – we really did cover them all! Despite absolutely loving some of the institutions up North, in the end I decided to make Portsmouth University my first choice for studying Childhood and Youth Studies. I wanted to be near enough to home that if I needed my parents or wasn’t well, I wasn’t completely out of reach. 

September came and my family and I headed down to Portsmouth to settle me in to my new accommodation. The first couple of months were great! I met lots of new friends, was doing well in my studies, became a Course Rep, was enjoying the nightlife and joined some societies. But as time went on, I found I was enjoying the course less and less, hated where I was living and my health was getting progressively worse. Coming home for Christmas, and then having to go back to Portsmouth again, made me realise how unhappy and unwell I had become. So, in the February after I started my degree, I decided to call it a day and left Portsmouth for the last time. 

I felt like a complete failure to be honest. I hadn’t even managed a year of my degree and was so gutted that I hadn’t coped living away from home on my own. All my friends were doing so well on their courses and were having a whale of a time, and I just felt like I’d disappointed everyone around me. I was also terrified about my future and what on earth I should do next. I still wanted to work in a medical setting, probably with children and young people, but couldn’t see how I would ever get there if I couldn’t even get a degree. After taking some time out to try and get my health a bit more stable, I started looking into alternative ways to get qualifications. And that was when my parents suggested I look into The Open University. Up until then, I didn’t know an awful lot about it, but after doing some research I found that I could study for a Psychology degree, part-time, from the comfort of my own home. It seemed to be the perfect option, as it also allowed me some time to get hands-on experience working with children: an essential addition to my CV. 

After applying for a few local jobs in nurseries and pre-schools, I was given a part-time job at my old Secondary School, working as a Learning Support Assistant. I was pretty terrified about working with teenagers if I’m completely honest, but it didn’t take me long to start enjoying it. Despite it being hard work, I had a great five years there and it really complemented the studying I was doing. Studying with The Open University was a completely new experience, although having to work from home during my GCSE’s did give me some preparation for it. I had to be incredibly self-disciplined and set aside at least two days a week purely for doing my work. I tried to attend tutorials when I could, as it could get pretty lonely doing everything on my own and it was nice to make some course friends along the way.

Things were going relatively well until 2012, when my health decided to throw another curve ball. I declined pretty rapidly although I was desperately trying to cling on to my studies so I could complete my degree. But it got to a point where I physically just couldn’t keep up or attend the summer school that was needed as part of the qualification. So I made the difficult decision to put my studies on hold, yet again, while I focused on my health. I felt pretty awful, as I just felt like I was failing for a second time, but my parents kept reminding me that I could pick up my course again once my health was more stable (which is the good thing about The OU – within reason you can take as long as you need to finish the modules). 

My health problems were a lot more complex than we originally realised, and I ended up having to spend a lot of time in hospital and trying to ‘recover.’ After two or so years of just focusing on my health, I finally felt ready to think about getting a degree again. By this point, I had had a lot of time to think about my options, and had decided that the Psychology course with the OU just wasn’t for me any more. I was still so desperate to be a doctor, and was finding it hard to accept that I couldn’t do it. I spoke to a few people who asked me what it was about being a doctor that appealed to me, and that I should look at those qualities and see what other professions might meet them. For me, I liked the idea of working in the medical field – I find the science behind it interesting, but I also really like the idea of working with people. So I began to look at other careers in the medical field, and became interested in Occupational Therapy. I did some work experience with a local OT and really loved it, so decided that would be my new focus.

To become an OT, I would obviously need a degree, but to get on that degree course I would need A Levels in Biology, Chemistry and/or Psychology. I had none of these, so decided to spend a year at a local college doing an Access to Higher Education Diploma with Human Biology, Chemistry, Psychology and Sociology. It was a lot harder than I’d anticipated but I also really enjoyed studying again. Whilst I was there, I started to go to open days at local universities, but the more open days I went to, the more I started to realise that my health just wasn’t up to taking on such an intensive course. I’d struggled enough doing my Access course and my health had really suffered – I just couldn’t keep putting my body through that. Somehow, with the help of my parents, friends and tutors, I managed to get through that year and come out with good qualifications in all subjects. But I had also had to make the heart breaking decision to withdraw my application to study Occupational Therapy. I felt at a complete loss – my dreams of working in the medical field had been completely shattered. Some people might say that I gave up too quickly and that I should have pushed through my health problems and given OT or medicine a try. But I knew in my heart of hearts that I would only end up damaging my physical and mental health further by doing that. I knew that I needed to start again.

When you come to the realisation that everything you’ve spent your life working for is wrong, it can feel incredibly difficult to find the strength to carry on. As far as I was concerned, the only thing I had been put on this planet for was to be a doctor. The fact I couldn’t do that, to me, meant there was no point in carrying on. I hit a real low for quite a while – not knowing what I was going to do with my life and wondering if I should just give up now. I desperately still loved the idea of being able to go to university and really didn’t want all my hard work to be in vain. But what on earth was I going to do? I hated the idea of having to settle for second best. I thought about training as a medical secretary, about working in a pharmacy or even looking into Play Therapy again. But none of these were things I actually wanted to do, and I knew if I went down one of these paths I would just feel like I was constantly pining after something I couldn’t have. 

One day, my Dad asked me if I had ever considered doing a degree in Journalism. I must have given him a bit of a strange look, and asked him “What on earth do I know about journalism?!” His reply surprised me a bit when he said: “Loads! You’ve been doing it already for a couple of years!” I didn’t understand what he meant until he brought up this blog, which I had been updating regularly for around two years. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that it was journalism – I thought I was just rambling on my little corner of the Internet (which, to be fair, I am! But it’s still journalism!) This conversation set the cogs in my brain turning, and I began to do some research into local universities that offered degrees in journalism. The more I read, the more things started to feel like they were falling into place. With my two experiences of university so far, I felt like I had learnt quite a lot about what works best for me. I knew I wanted to go to an actual university, because I wanted the social interaction. But I also knew that I needed to live at home for the sake of my health. Two institutions came up as I searched – the college I was already studying at, and the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. I soon found that the course at the college wasn’t actually what I was looking for, but I went to speak to the Course Leader at UCA and came away feeling like I had finally found the right path.

Dress from Chi Chi London

However, in typical Jenny style, a week or so before I was due to start at Farnham, I had a massive wobble. I told my parents that I couldn’t study journalism – I was desperate to do something medical – and that I wanted to pull out of the course. I’m so thankful that they talked me out of it and told me to at least give it a go. I remember my first day at UCA – everyone else was a lot younger than me (yay for being a mature student!) and I was convinced I wouldn’t fit in and that I would hate the course. I really hadn’t gone into it with an open mind and was just waiting for everything to fail yet again. 

But gradually, over a few weeks, things began to change. I realised I was actually enjoying the course – finding things I thought I would hate fun and actually enjoying being able to write and produce my own content in a variety of styles. I was also getting to know the other people in my group, and finding they were accepting me for who I was – my age and disability didn’t seem to matter. Our first Christmas break came, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I was actually excited to get back to university in the New Year! Don’t get me wrong – over the last three years I’ve definitely had times when I’ve wanted to quit, when my health has got so bad I’ve struggled to carry on and have wondered if I’ve made the right decision. But not once have I felt like I’ve settled for second best, and that’s what I was most worried about. Instead, I just feel like I’ve found an equally good but different path to go down. Sure, I still have that wish of wanting to be a doctor, but it doesn’t make me feel so sad any more. I feel like I have something I love just as much to take its place – something I can work around my health problems but not something I feel I’ve had to compromise on. 

So why do I think that, after ten long years, I’ve finally been able to complete a university course and come out with a degree? I think it’s probably a whole mixture of reasons really. Firstly, I found a degree topic that I have actually enjoyed and that has kept my interest for three years. I also worked out that living at home worked best for me, and I chose the right university for my needs. Classes were small, so I got to know my course mates and lecturers really well (and they got to know me and understand my needs). And most importantly, I was able to ask for help when I needed it. I don’t want to go into all the support I received from the university too much, as I might do a separate post about Disabled Students Allowance. But I had a great support worker and a fantastic mentor, who have definitely made all the difference to my time at university. 

Sitting in The Royal Festival Hall a few weeks ago in my graduation gown and hat, waiting to collect my certificate confirming I had received a First Class BA (Hons) in Journalism, felt incredibly surreal. I had honestly reached the point where I thought I would never get that degree I wanted so badly. But I guess with this post I want to show that, with the right help and the right circumstances, it is possible. And that it doesn’t matter if it takes you three years or thirty years to achieve what you’ve been dreaming of – it’s still a massive achievement. I also hope it shows that you don’t have to have your whole life mapped out in front of you by the time you finish school. And you don’t have to do what all your friends are doing – instead, find your own path and take your own time. I know this is only really the start of my journey, and now I need to work out what I’m actually going to do with my degree. But finally graduating has given me a confidence boost that I can achieve what I set my mind to – it will just be in my own time.

Have you been to university with a chronic illness, or do you have another goal that you’re trying to reach? Are there any other university related posts that you would be interested in reading?

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