Baby Showers Are Not Just For Moms

What do you think of when you hear the words "baby shower?" You probably visualize an image of women sitting around in a circle oohing about cute little outfits and other items. However, this does not have to be the reality of your baby shower. Imagine if you decided to plan your baby shower yourself. This is what I did. This was a strategy that paid off greatly. See the costs of getting all the things you need for your new baby can run into the thousands. To add insult to financial injury, most of the stuff you will be buying will no longer be needed when your child starts walking. If you plan to have another child you can store the stuff for later, but that's a discussion for another article.

When it came time to have a baby shower I decided to take matters into my own hands. I knew that if I allowed my family or my wife's family to plan it, it would have been a small event with a few people sitting around a table. The gifts would probably be small and consist of cute things we really didn't need. I have a background in political events and other business events. I also remembered how my wedding essentially allowed us to move into our first house with almost no need to buy appliances and other household items. This gave me an idea. I figured that if I made this baby shower an event rather than a small party, we could profit handsomely from all the gifts.

I went to the local hotel and started planning. Although I used a hotel with catering and the like, you can come up with some cost effective ideas yourself. If you are a volunteer fire fighter, you could see if your department will allow you to hold the event at the station with family members providing food. Instead of having a chips and cake event, I had a dinner with prime rib and chicken. Then I asked my wife to give me a list of everybody she knew. I am not that big a social butterfly so I didn't know too many people. However, I did invite everyone at the donut shop I worked for at the time. With this kind of set up you should not feel weird inviting men to the event. Have the men you know bring their wives. The more people you invite the better. The event was a big success. We ended up with 80 plus people. This resulted in us having everything we needed to welcome our daughter home. I would estimate that we received over five thousand dollars in items. Although we did get some hand me down stuff, most of the stuff we got was top of the line stuff. Any doubles we got were returned to buy the little things we had left to get.

If your wife still insists on holding a classical baby shower you could still have a separate event and even call it something different. You could hold it as an event celebrating her. Although people you know might try to enforce social norms or rules, the truth is that there are no rules. If you want to hold a "mother shower" or other event go ahead. The key is that it isn't every day that you have the opportunity to have all your friends and family buy all the things you need to welcome your child into the world. And believe me; if you pull it off you will earn brownie points with your wife and mother-in-law.