Do you think that in the preexistence spirits that are about to be sent to Earth are thrown a “Parent Shower”?
Anyway, a few weeks back I got a very odd FaceBook message from someone I didn’t know named Debbie. I often immediately disregard random FB messages or friend requests. But, I figured there’d be no harm in at least seeing what medication they were trying to sell me just so I wouldn’t end up buying it later in a store by accident (that’ll show them). It turned out to be a friend of Anna’s from work. They wanted to throw her a surprise baby shower. I was the inside man.
So behind Anna’s back I have been secretly planning a baby shower with Anna’s co-workers. Well, to be fair, I wasn’t all that involved. I just fed the info about which weekends would work, the baby’s gender and other basics. The hard part of my share was getting a very skeptical person like Anna there without suspicion. Anna’s also very frugal. Talking her into going into a restaurant where she pays the bill is tricky. I may have had the harder part, actually.
It just so happened that I had a work visitor from Salt Lake visiting this weekend as well. I was planning on going Scuba Diving with him but the baby shower took priority. I sent him out with another co-worker. Then I told Anna that I forgot to give our guest the key to the company car. So we had to go to the office to drop off the car for him. While we were there, about lunch time, we’d just join them for lunch. Not the best cover, but I think it was believable enough to fly. We show up as they guests hide. And then, surprise!
Anna of course says nothing. She’s not very comfortable being the center of attention. Rather than make her say a speech, we hit the buffet.
Following the dinner came the games. We had people take strings and see if they could guess Anna’s current girth. Despite how large Anna looks now, she’s still pretty small over all. Almost everyone was way over.
We also played “hot potato” with a dirty diaper. Ick. And another icky game was to follow. There were four diapers on the table, each with a candy bar of some kind smooched into it, thus making every person in the room involuntarily thinks of feces. The object was to see who could guess which brand names they were. I suggested whoever wins get to keep the candy in the diapers.
Anna never did think of a speech. I offered a half one and then embarrassed her by saying she had something to say to everybody. She froze. It was fun.
We took our party favors and baby gifts home. The next morning, Anna went fully into nesting mode. Clothes and been pre-washed, sorted and folded into cute piles. Anna wants to dedicate a baby room immediately. The crib now has to be put up yesterday. It’s sort of like when you have a Christmas party a few days before Christmas. It looks like a good idea on the calendar, but all you end up doing is making yourself crave the actual occasion that much more. As of now, Anna has had her first baby shower. And every day since then, it’s been showering babies in her head...
