A Harvest / Lil’ Pumpkin Baby Shower

I meant to do my showers in order, starting with Joan’s Aunt Shower since that came first (and I can’t wait to tell you about it!), but I didn’t have all the pictures I needed so while I’m trying to get a few more, I’ll start off with this one.  And by the way, thanks so much for all the love and support you guys have shown me, not just yesterday, but over the course of the last five months.  It means so much to me and your comments really touch my heart.

My sisters threw a Lil’ Pumpkin baby shower for me last month!  It was a lot of fun and I couldn’t be happier with how it all turned out!  All photos in this post are courtesy of Dolly Grace Photography and I mostly used her unedited photos here (she’s an old co-worker friend, and she graciously gave me all the photos she took, not just the best ones), but I’ll include some edited ones in here too so you can see how awesome your photos will be if you do a photo session with Ashley.  Thank you so much, Ashley, I’ll treasure these forever!

Of course I have to start off showing you the food table since, duh, this is a food blog.  :)  Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes, White Cloud Cupcakes, Brown Butter Pumpkin Spice Krispies Treats, Apple Cider & Cranberry Punch, Cream Cheese Mints (in fall colors), mixed nuts, Pumpkin Pretzels, a veggie tray with a small hollowed out pumpkin holding the dip (got the idea here), and two Pumpkin Cheese Balls (similar to this but I will be sharing the revised (and better, IMO) recipe next week, as well as the punch recipe.

This shows the veggie tray, but for some reason the top was on the pumpkin holding the dip.  Guess we hadn’t started plowing in yet.  Oh wait, I found one with it open after we’d definitely plowed in. :)

Sweets!

Photographers take such artistic photos!

There isn’t a close up of the mints, but they are in the divided leaf tray near the upper left corner, with nuts in the back and the mints in the front.  Very fall-ish. :)

Everyone loved the Pumpkin Pretzels!

Ashley snapped this photo looking toward the entrance to the building before all the guests arrived, and you can see each table has unique centerpieces.  The decorating was all Danielle’s work, supplied by things she had for sale in her shop.  She even ended up selling one of her glass pumpkins to one of the guests before we left! lol  Here’s the table you see people standing over in the back of the photo above:

On it was a “guess how many” game in the jar filled with a pumpkin seed snack mix, photo albums with pictures of Joshua’s nursery, our professional maternity photos, and my week-by-week pregnancy photos, and party favors.  Danielle made Pumpkin Cheesecake Lip Balms but I made the labels and put the wrong flavor on them.  Oops!

That’s Momma Donna (with Momma Phyllis, my MIL, in the corner) admiring her work on the nursery again. :)

Gift table…

And the diapers needed their own table! This is how we filled the crib with diapers in my last Thankful Thursday.  They were all gifts, and it was Lacey’s brilliant idea to do the diaper raffle.  I think it worked!

We started off with snacks.

There were some pretty cute guests in attendance…

Then had a lil’ pumpkin trivia (click here for the game and answers)…

You can see both my Momma’s in this one – Phyllis and Donna are sitting at the same table.  Unfortunately my own Mom couldn’t make it, but I’m blessed to have a lot of Moms so I still had two there. :)

Then it was time for gifts!

You could say I’m an “expressive” person. :)

Then something really awesome happened.  My aunt Margie…wait, let me introduce her properly:

She reminds me so much of Grandma Davis, who passed away ten years ago, and she actually brought me a gift from Grandma Davis. (!)  She included a note in her card:

Dear Veronica,

Grandma Davis gave me a steel box a few years before she died.  She said “When I’m gone, give these things to who they came from.”  I never opened the box till she passed.  I took it to the family gathering and some people took things, but most didn’t.  I’ve kept those things until the right time to give them and I feel this is the right time. Enjoy.

Love, Aunt Marjorie

I was already crying when I opened it up and found a coloring page I’d colored at her trailer and she’d kept since 1986, along with a lock of my baby hair (which she probably snipped without permission, lol).

I’ve talked about Grandma Davis in my Cinnamon Roll Pie Crust Cookies recipe post, and I miss her a lot even after a decade.  She was a wonderful, wise, God-fearing, and loving woman.  It was incredibly touching to realize she’d kept these things for so many years.  She had so many grand-children, great-grand children, and great-great grand children (she had eight kids, so now her descendants are pretty much minions), that it shows how much love she had in her heart to keep things from little ol’ me, and I bet she kept things from  most everyone in her life.  She lived alone and those things probably helped her feel like she always had her loved ones with her to a degree.

After the gifts, it was time to bid my homies adieu.

Caught Lacey in a photo, despite her best efforts to  hide from the camera!

And there were more tender moments…

Momma Donna talking to Joshua. :)

Laughs with Al, my FIL.

While this shower was so wonderful with such special moments, I was able to enjoy my next shower even more because I didn’t have to do a thing except open gifts.  And my family-in-law did such a creative and wonderful job with everything, I just can’t wait to share it with you.  Tune in tomorrow for shower #3.