Best Baby Shower of All Time

Me and Jennie, hostess extraordinaire

Last month, Jennie hosted the most beautiful, personal, thoughtful and delicious baby shower of all time in my honor. She, Thor and others put in a tremendous amount of work to make my penguin-themed, high tea shower incredibly special and fun and I couldn't be more grateful.

Everything from the handmade penguin and snowflake decorations, to the baby trivia game, to the fabulous gluten free high tea goodies was elegant and perfect. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that Jennie spends her 9 - 5 hours crunching numbers when her talent for putting on the perfect party is this exceptional. She occupies a unique category of person that I made up to describe her: saint genius. A saint genius is someone who is both incredibly kind, patient and generous (saint) and also brilliant at the same time (genius). If you need help decorating your holiday table, assessing your finances, hemming your trousers, deciding where to go on holiday, hanging pictures, relationship advice or basically anything, Jennie is your lady.

The highlight of this already amazing shower was connecting to my friends in San Francisco and mom in LA who were all celebrating in their own way live via webcam. We encountered some of the normal problems that come with video chat: for a while we couldn't hear them and I always feel the need to shout, but for the most part it worked brilliantly. I was incredibly touched that Steph, Jess, Lee and Laura had gathered in San Francisco and had set up a party complete with decorations, food and gifts and had coordinated with Jennie on  organizing the video chat.

The food - can you believe most of this is GF?!

When Jennie first sent around an email invitation to the shower, I insisted that she include those ladies even though I knew they couldn't make it. They all used to live in Sydney and I consider them part of my core group of Sydney friends even though they've since moved back to the states. Still, seeing them on the webcam via the TV was a wonderful surprise.

Handmade penguin bunting, a treasure for the nursery made by Jennie and Thor

Trivia!

Another highlight was the multimedia trivia game that Thor created just for the party. He generated nine rounds (one for every month of pregnancy) of baby-related picture, video and music trivia questions. The content was fun and right up my alley; in one round, Thor used photos of celebs with their children and then photoshopped out the mom so you had to name the celeb mama. In another round, we had to identify movies about babies based on parts of the movie poster. Answering the most number of questions correctly by a good margin, Lisa was the clear winner, but I felt like a winner, too, because the trivia was so much fun.

Of course another highlight was catching up with lady friends who I know and love from book club, TA and Google. It was so sweet of all of them to celebrate with me and bring such gorgeous, generous gifts. I've since had way too much fun looking at, organizing, washing and then reorganizing and putting away these beautiful baby things. I'm confident that our little person has everything now that s/he could want in regard to toys, books and clothes. I know, though, that what our baby wants most is love and I've got a lot of that ready, too.

Girls just wanna have fun