A Camping Baby Shower for a New Little Nephew

Right about a month ago this cute little guy - Mathias Grant was born to my sister Keren and her husband Benjamin. This is their second little boy - you have probably seen mention of their 2 year old Ephraim on my blog at other times. They live quite  close to us and attend church with us so we love getting to  see them all on a very regular basis.

   Mathias is about 8th in the line-up or boys that have been born in our congregation in the last 2 years (with no girls in between) . So when we were trying to figure out a fun theme for Mathias' shower my friend Emily thought a camping theme might be fun with a focus on boy things. I thought that sounded perfect for Mathias especially because his parents very much enjoy camping and I am sure he will be doing it before long and it just sounded like a fun theme that wouldn't be hard to do.

It is so lovely to have a church family when planning things like this. So many people pitched in to help it wasn't that hard for anyone. We all had fun working together to put it on too.

   Decorating was largely my department. This winter we made a bunch of wreaths to sell and at that time a friend from church had said that I could cut boughs from a really crowded section of trees on their property. The trees there we like 6 inches apart from each other and their branches were all twisted together. It did the trees a favor to thin them out a little. Anyway, we did quite use all that we had gotten at that time and they had just been hanging out in our yard. They still looked lovely and green so I thought they would add a nice touch to our camping theme party.

   

We also brought along one of our little tents and a few camping chairs. My nephew Buirlen had fun checking them out.

For the tables I found some red checked ones that were at the church building and brought one from home and put those on the tables. Then I added some wood slices, lanterns, pine cones, acorns, greenery and little animals to make a centerpiece.

Emily, Mary and Irindee all worked to figure out games for the party and we had a bunch of fun ones. All but one had a major outdoor theme and the other one had to do with character traits that we should be seeking to instill in our boys.

Mary made the super cute game in this photo. They cut wood slices and then she wood burned different animal tracks on them (oh, she also made cute little baby tracks on one as well). We had to write down what we thought the track belonged to.

Other games were reaching into brown paper bags (without looking) and feeling the nature item that is inside and then writing down what it was. We had to match up pictures of trees to the picture of their leaf and seed.

Emily and Irindee also had everybody make a bow and arrow set from big popscycle sticks, dental floss and Q-tips. Then they competed on shooting them. There was also a marshmallow toss.

We had prizes for game winners that followed the camping/outdoors theme. Emily made this cute embroidered piece for a prize, I had brought a wood slice garland that I had made along with an acorn necklace that Mara made and a notebook with a birch bark cover. There was trail mix and gummy bears, baseballs, a camping cookbook and more.

For food we had camping or camping related foods.
Our menu was:

• Chili with shredded cheese and corn chips (Chili is a very traditional food that pretty much everybody brings to a fall camping trip that many from our church go to.)
• Trail mix
• Ants on logs (celery with peanut butter and raisins)
• Tortilla Roll-ups (to look like sleeping bags)
• S'mores Cupcakes
• S'mores bars
• Lemonade

These are the adorable cupcakes that my sister-in-law, Molly Bea made.

I had fun bringing my blue camping dishes to use for serving dishes. I also brought a log for the table and a cute little tent that Megan had for her barbies.

My sister Keren, the beautiful new Mom, with Mathias. They are sitting in front of the gift table which I had fun putting sticks and a lantern over.

Ephraim (the big brother) and Buirlen (cousin) had fun helping to open up the gifts.

I was able to make this little sweater for a gift. I thought it looked like a good one for camping.

Mathias tries out a tent for the first time. :-)

 I think everybody had a lot of fun at the shower. It was fun to get to help with it. The theme I thought was a wonderful one because it was easy to do and very economical for decorations just go to your camping supplies or the woods. :-)