Welcoming Baby, From a Distance

A couple years ago I was part of a shower planning aunt duo that coordinated a semi-virtual baby shower.  Not because of a germ, but because of a move.

One of our adventurous nephews had packed up and moved from Illinois to Alaska about five years ago.  What came next for this gregarious guy was a lovely wife, and then two years ago, the first of their two adorable little girls.  

So we made plans to gather at one house and basically have a regular baby shower, except that the guest of honor was physically 3000 miles away and logistically about ten feet away on the TV screen.  Were we a step ahead of the times, or what?

My partner aunt is herself a creative thinker.  She hosts parties with attention to detail and with creative embellishments that are put together, not just sourced.  She’s fun to work with.

Now, what to do about gifts? We wouldn’t have been able to mail the gifts without ruining the surprise and we didn’t want to open them for her and take the fun out of it either.  Plus, I can’t imagine what it would cost to ship a stroller or crib to Juneau from Illinois.

We decided to all give gift cards.  Practical, but missing the all-important oohs and ahhs over the cute little baby things.  We needed a way to get some of that cute factor.

Here’s what we came up with.  We told each person to bring a picture or two - maybe them as a baby with their mom, or from when they were first moms, something like that. and some kind of cute sayings or wise words about motherhood that they wanted to share.  We hostesses brought together an assortment of scrapbook papers, stickers, and other suitable ephemera and bought a blank book that had removable pages.  During the shower, we spilled it all out and each lady assembled a two page spread that included the pictures and the sayings plus a little stuck-on pocket for the gift card. 

The quality of this picture is pretty bad, but it gives the idea of what the pages looked like.

In the course of planning, we got to thinking about the fact that this would be the first baby in our family that we’d have to find extra-ordinary ways to be close to and to be a part of each other’s lives because there wouldn’t be much real-life getting together.

In both of our families, as in yours I hope, children’s books hold special memories. They get read so many times that they become friends and the bond between reader and hearer is special. 

So we asked each lady in the family, and a couple of the guys too, to choose a children’s book we particularly liked ourselves, or liked sharing with our kids, to give as a gift. 

But first, and here’s the really fun part, we recorded ourselves reading them.  And it was easy.  We just read them into a voice recorder app on our phones and my brother, the grandpa-to-be, composed a little intro and put all the readings together. 

We even printed out bookplates everyone could sign.  We addressed them to the family so that they’d be for this baby and others that might follow.  Good thing, because the second little miss was quick on the scene.

Now that branch of our family tree has a little book with a dose of family history that will still be around when the baby clothes and car seat are outgrown. 

They’ll seldom hear those recorded voices in real life, but they’ll know us. 

We shared what we held dear ourselves. And we made sure that the kids in this family would have a connection with their far off relatives who thought of them, cared about them and prayed for them before they were even born.