Last Names and Baby Shower Themes

Let’s take a moment to think about all the unfortunate last names that exist in the world. Sometimes they’re just boring (looking at you “Smith”), sometimes they’re impossible for anyone else to pronounce, and sometimes, they’re just plain dirty (“Hello, Mrs. Butte. It’s nice to meet you”). 

The focus of my last week or so has been the last name “Beaver.” Yep. Cute, furry, woodland creature or private lady part? Your call. 

How is this relevant? Well, a family friend (who started with a boring last name) married a man with a dirty last name, “Beaver,” and not too long ago they announced their first pregnancy. This means only one thing: baby shower!

Now, obviously, the theme of the shower has to be beavers. I’m not going to pretend like I didn’t debate which direction to take the shower though. Luckily, common decency won out and I decided to go with the cute, furry, woodland creature. I can only hope the dirty version was heavily played out at her bachelorette party many years ago. 

My mom, sister and I volunteered to throw the shower in our friend’s honor. The first order of business was to get the invitations made and in the mail as soon as possible. I found a couple cute woodland themed invitations online, but decided to make my own using our brand new Cricut Maker. The pattern is part of Cricut Access and requires the use of your free trial or a monthly subscription, but if you search hard enough, I’m about positive you can find it somewhere on the internet.

I ordered a pack of brown/neutral cardstock to make the beavers and let the Cricut do all the cutting. This part was relatively easy and my 3 year old was even able to help. Unfortunately, each beaver required quite a bit of assembly. It took me a whole bottle of glue (I had great success with this) and about 3 hours to complete my beaver army. 

Due to the limitations of the Cricut, my paper supply and unwillingness to spend more money, I created and printed the actual invitations using PowerPoint, my home printer and my trusty paper cutter. Since the invitations and beavers are brown/tan and yellow, I had the Cricut make bow ties using blue cardstock and added one to each beaver. I’m fairly certain everyone we invited to the shower knows the baby is a boy, but the bow tie was a subtle way to get the point across without having to recreate the entire invitation.

While in the end, I think the invitations look homemade and that wasn’t my goal, I still like the way they turned out. I also included a “Books for Baby” card and a “Diaper Raffle” card in each invitation. For these, I used the print and cut feature of the Cricut and that whole experience is really deserving of its own post.