Showers. Wedding or baby, these gatherings of friends and family are bevies of grub, games, and gifts. For the guest(s) of honor, they are a moment to celebrate a milestone; for the hosts, such get-togethers can be well-organized and well-executed or chaotic and stressful. I think I have found a way to make any shower fun and easy to organize whether you have two hosts or twenty.

The solution lies in three steps: 1) determining what the guest(s) of honor want; 2) discussing specifics with all hosts involved; and 3) converting plans to tasks via a spreadsheet. These three steps are great because they are flexible; you can do all of this whenever works best for you and usually will have help in doing any of it.

The first step gives all who are involved a chance to talk about basics, like time, date, and location, and specifics, like themes, colors, and menus. Though some honorees might be reluctant to spell out what they want lest they look demanding, a get-together of some sort, be it dinner or quick conversations over email, can let you know what the honorees would like to see. For most of the showers that I have thrown, my fellow hostesses and I would try to get together with the guest(s) of honor and discuss what they want. Yes, I have had honorees who will say, “Oh, I trust your judgment!” or “I haven’t really thought about it”, but, with questions about colors and themes for the wedding or nursery, I can usually extract some idea of what they would like. For example, I recently helped plan a shower for a friend who was expecting a boy. She has always been laid back so I was not surprised when she said she was not sure what she wanted. I asked her a few questions about stuff like food, location, time of day, nursery theme, and more. By the end of the conversation, we had worked out that she wanted a late afternoon barbecue/shower with a jungle theme to match her nursery. Whenever people seem reluctant to voice their desires or are uncertain about details, I will point out that the shower is a celebration of this milestone and so everyone involved wants it to reflect those we are honoring. Generally, though, I have found that most have a picture of what they want the event to look like and are willing to share wants and ideas.

Once those ideas and desires are on the table, a second get-together, this time with just the hosts, can turn those into specific details. For example, one of my best friends was pregnant with her first child and was doing an ocean-themed nursery for her daughter. When it came to the details for her shower, we had a built-in set of colors and animals to work with; she had used two main colors and a handful of different animals throughout the nursery. All we had to do was decide how to use those colors (streamers, plates, napkins, favors, etc.) and the animals (plush and paper versions as décor and stamped and color versions on the invitations). We decided most of this at that first meeting. As time went on, we got more specific about execution, but that planning dinner allowed all of us to collaborate on every aspect of the shower. This way, each of us had a say and were able to decide how she wanted to contribute to the shower.

Lastly, those details can become a list of tasks necessary to make those ideas reality. The easiest way we found to keep up with tasks as well as shower specifics and hostess contact information to create a spreadsheet. You could do it in any word processor if you like, but we chose a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel because it had rows and columns built in and would do math for us. Excel has three ‘books’ in each file so we would use one book for tasks, one for the guest list, and the last for miscellaneous. One hostess would be in charge of the spreadsheet and everyone directed updates to her. The spreadsheet would feature a column with a list of tasks (organized by category!), a column for who signed up for that task, a column to signify if the task was done or not, and a column with money spent (if we needed to keep up with that). The spreadsheet was handy because we could keep track of what tasks were complete and what still remained. If a hostess ran into a problem and could not do something she had signed up for, then she could let the group know and someone could step in for her. When the day of the shower rolls around, the spreadsheet can then become your list of things to bring and to do.

The goal of these three steps to make the planning of a shower or any gathering easier for all involved. We all intend for such get-togethers to be fun for the honorees, their guests, and the hosts, but, without some organization and planning, they can become less-than-fun for everyone. Hopefully, the steps I discussed here will bring you as much success and enjoyment from your get-togethers as I have had with mine.

Thanks so much to Jennifer Kelly for today’s guest post.  Jennifer is a part-time college English instructor who enjoys a myriad of things like beating friends at Trivial Pursuit, absorbing pop culture, and being a domestic goddess. She is married to Jamie and has one munchkin, Jackson.

Post from: Thrifty Mommy