A Baby Shower – Dr. Seuss Style

When my best friend, also named Rachel (but spelled the “wrong” way) told me she was pregnant, my Mom and quickly volunteered to throw her a shower. We knew right away that a traditional shower just would not do and decided to go with a Dr. Seuss themed shower instead. As you can see from here, where I showed off her invitations, my Mom and I were going to go way overboard. I don’t even want to think of the number of hours we spent Pinteresting and Googling Seuss themed parties to borrow ideas from. The day was a huge success, but I must admit we were so frantically busy I barely had time to take any pictures! Would do it again in a heartbeat though 🙂 Beware, this post is epically long. Feel free to just check out the pictures if you aren’t planning on having your own Seuss party.

We welcomed our guests to the party with some red and blue bead. It was nice to give everyone a bit of Seuss flair to wear. The guest of honor of course got to show of the boa and Seuss hat as part of her outfit. While all the details of the party were left a surprise, we gave her the heads up that she might want to wear something that would coordinate well with the theme colors!

On the bar, we had some fun Seuss pinwheels from a kit with our special drinks for the day. I can’t believe I didn’t get pictures! We served “Pink Yink Drink” from One Fish, Two Fish (“This one, I think, Is called a Yink… He likes to wink and drink pink ink.”) It was a mixture of vodka, pink lemonade and beer. Yeah, sounds weird but tastes good! There was also some “Moose Juice” from Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book which we interpreted as iced coffee with a bit of chocolate syrup mixed in.

        

The quality is pretty poor on these pictures, but they will have to do! For appetizers we served Goldfish in a fish bowl and “Hop on Pop” popcorn. It is seasoned with olive oil, salt and Penzy’s Greek Seasoning. To make them look fancy we wrapped boxes with some fun wrapping paper. We also served homemade Jalapeño “Pebbles” from If I Ran the Circus (“And you’ll now meet the Remarkable Foon, who eats sizzling hot pebbles that fall off the moon! ”), which I of course forgot to take a picture of in all the last-minute madness. My Mom and sister tried about 4 different frozen store-bought jalapeño poppers which were all inedible. We ended up making these instead served with this dipping sauce. If I was looking for a seriously good and fatty appetizer I would definitely make these again. Although I probably wouldn’t use the panko bread crumbs, mine didn’t brown up all nice in the oven and looked like raw flour instead. Regardless, these were a hit and disappeared rather quickly.

For lunch we served an entirely Seuss themed menu (pictures to follow). Thankfully there are so many creative people out there who posted food ideas on the internet for us to steal borrow!

Green deviled eggs with sliced ham rolled and held with toothpicks and green olives from Green Eggs and Ham. (“You do not like them, so you say, Try them, try them and you may.”) We will never try and make deviled eggs again. Not sure what was wrong with our eggs, or us, but we could not get them to peel. Yes, we even tried all the methods that were supposed to do the trick. After going through about 3 dozen we had enough usable ones and served green egg salad with all the duds. Of course a few days after the shower my sister discovered that Trader Joe’s sells already peeled hard-boiled eggs. Go figure. While the ham was nice for display, not too many people ate it.

Roast Beast Roll-ups with cream cheese and veggie strips from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (“And he, he himself…the Grinch…carvedthe roast beast.”) Can’t find the recipe we used, inside the roll is a mixture of cream and blue cheese with sliced red peppers and watercress.

Three Cheese Trees from Fox In Socks. (“Through three cheese trees three free fleas flew.”) Costco sells already cubed cheese that we put on toothpicks and then stuck into styrofoam cones wrapped in wrapping paper.

Noodle Poodle Salad from Fox In Socks. (“And the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles.”) We served a cold peanut noodle salad. Can’t say it was anything special, but people seemed to enjoy it.

Grin-itch Spinach Salad inspired by What Was I Scared Of (“Then one dark night in Grin-itch…I had to do an errand there and fetch some Grin-itch spinach.”) I totally have never heard of this book. In fact as we were researching ideas for the party I came across about a dozen that I missed out on as a kid.

Truffula Tree fruit kabobs from The Lorax (“And I first saw the trees! The bright-colored tufts of the Truffula trees!”) This was fruit on skewers stuck in styrofoam. We served extra fruit in a bowl which everyone ate first. Apparently our “trees” were just too pretty to eat!

And of course, the crumbs from The Grinch made it on the table as well. Now on to more important things, like dessert.

Yertle the Turtle Chocolate Caramels (“I’m Yertle the Turtle!  Oh, marvelous me!  For I am the ruler of all that I see!”) For this we took small pretzels, melted a Rolo on top, flattened it with a spoon and pressed in sliced pecan pieces. I don’t want to be vulgar, but I HIGHLY recommend slicing or crushing your pecan pieces. We had a rather unfortunate incident with our test turtle. I can’t post the picture of here, but let’s just say it resembled female anatomy parts. I am still laughing about this incident, so I am really glad we made this blunder. And it would have been oddly appropriate for a baby shower.

Sneetch Treats inspired by The Sneetches. This dessert really could have been anything, but we decided that peanut butter pie shooters would fit the bill. These were A-MAZ-ING. Very easy to make and since they were in individual cups, easy to serve. Definitely no low-cal, but seriously worth it.

A Seuss themed party would not be complete without Thing 1 and Thing 2 cupcakes! We took a major shortcut here and used boxed cake mix and canned cream cheese frosting. No one seemed to notice, especially since half were red velvet and half funfetti! There is never a good reason not to serve funfetti at a party. Printed out the cupcake labels from here and attached with a glue gun. Word to the wise: if you are going to make these and it is hot and humid out DO NOT attach the cotton candy (which we got in plastic tubs from Wegman’s) until right before you serve the cupcakes. It will quickly melt into a pile of blue gooey sugar in the 90% Washington D.C. humidity (you can see the beginning stages of this in the above picture). It will still taste good though. The awesome banner hanging over the cupcakes was purchased from here and printed out at Kinko’s. I seriously ran out of steam by this point and decided the cost of the digital banner was an amazingly good deal.

We decided to forgo the cheesy organized shower games and go for a simple guess the number of gummy fish in the fish bowl and write your “Wishes for Baby”. This was a good choice for the number of guests we had.

And last, but not least, favors! I spent more time than I care to admit putting bamboo skewers through Swedish Fish and Gummy Sharks. I was able to get a better deal on candy by the pound at my local candy store than I could bulk online. The shipping pretty much kills you unless you need 15 lbs of candy. I got the idea for the favors from here and the tags from here. If you ever try this yourself, I found that putting a little bit of olive oil on the skewer helped the gummy slide on without sticking to the skewer too much. I designed my own tag using clip art I purchased from here which I used for the food signs as well.

Hope you enjoyed a rather detailed look at our shower. It was far more planning that my own wedding, but somehow my Mom, sister and I are still speaking and managed to have a great time ourselves!! Truly the sign of a good party!

{Crafting} Dr. Seuss Baby Shower Invitations

Let me start this post out by saying, no, I’m not pregnant. My best friend Rachel is. And by the way, my name is Rachael which is SO different from Rachel. And no, we are not sisters. And yes, someone actually asked us that once. Seriously??

Anyway, Rachel has pretty much been a member of the family since we met back in 1994. We bonded over Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Sim City and glasses of milk filled with mini Snackwell’s cookies which were eaten with a spoon. Don’t knock it till you try it. Rachel has her first mini-me due July 3rd and my Mom and I jumped on the opportunity to throw her a shower. As per usual, we took something simple and are spending countless hours on the Internet finding ways to make it as complicated as possible. Damn you Pinterest, you truly are a time warp. It didn’t take us long to settle on a Dr. Seuss theme and of course I had to channel my inner Martha Stewart and create my own invitations.

First, I borrowed many ideas of Seuss themed invites I found on the Internet and combined them using GIMP. This is a totally  free, open source Photoshop-like program. I used Photoshop for years until I switched to a Mac and was too cheap to get new software.  GIMP is almost as good as the real thing, and did I mention it is free??  Many thanks for whoever was creative enough to come up with the wording of the poem. No one in my immediate family was blessed with original creativity. The fonts are Sketch Block Bold and Lauren Script. These were then printed two up on nice heavy card stock. Paper slicers truly are one of the world’s great inventions and allowed me to achieve straight lines when cutting these babies down.

Next, I used a paper punch from the Martha Stewart craft collection to add some decorative holes on the top and bottom edge of the card. Sorry for the ugly blur on the photo but I didn’t want the entire world knowing our addresses!

I attached these to slightly large pre-cut blue cards which came with matching envelopes. Not wanting to mess around with liquid glue I gave Elmer’s Glue Dots a whirl and they truly are a miracle dot. You attach them just like white out and press them down and voila! Instant, non-messy, non-wrinkly glue!

Don’t worry, I didn’t stop there. I decided I had to cut tissue paper to line the inside flap of the envelope. Again, I attached this with the miracle dots.

Here is what the finished product looks like. I have to admit, I am pretty damn impressed with myself. Can’t say we really saved any money over buying invites off the Internet. These averaged about $1 each including all supplies and envelopes. I already had the paper slicer, but the hole punch was new. Everything was purchased from Michaels.

Have no fear. There are many  more Seuss themed posts to come!