Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Baby Shower Etiquette

Its only 10am and I've already peed 5 times today. Oops, just came back. Make that 6. Yeah, I'm impressed too. Less than a week away from our gender reveal, which means less than a week away from when I will start to really plan my shower. First, I know, for proper etiquette I'm not supposed to plan my own, but considering I didn't have a bridal shower (since I didn't plan my own), I know I just have to take it in my own hands to be sure it happens. For my wedding it wasn't a big deal, I'm not much of a princess type anyway, but for baby, this is like new puppy party x100. I'm better at spoiling others than myself anyway. Plus we can use all the help we can get, being so far away from family, and having no friends in Austin with babies (with the exception of one couple, who's baby is still well a baby). I did ask our Baby's godmother Chenoh to help me plan the shower, which she agreed to! We're going to meet up sometime soon to figure out where, address invites, and think of fun things to do and all that baby crazy stuff. Mostly I'm wondering where to have it. Considering it will be summer in Austin, which most likely will mean triple digits. I'm thinking swimming, maybe Barton Springs?

I'm also technically not supposed to have it at my house, but we'll see about that too- depending on who RSVPs we might need to provide some AC. Its a bummer that we still haven't been able to fix our pool (every thing we've saved has gone to new floors, new fridge, vet bills, paying off our car (yay!), and trying to lower our monthly credit card bills as much as possible before I stop bringing in half our income. Jason has been having stress dreams, and losing sleep over our finances, but I know we'll figure it out. We have so much more than we had growing up, and there is so much to be thankful for. Its just hard when we don't have a solid community (or family nearby) to rely back on, all the pressure is resting on the two of us, or rather will be resting on him to financially take care of our mortgage, our 4 animals, his wife, his baby. Healthcare, food, utilities, everything. Since we found out, all my income has gone directly to debts, and we've been even more tight with no eating out, not spending, to see what it will be like to live on his income. Its been not as bad as we expected, and with lowering all our monthly bills (the car payment was the biggest one), its definitely going to be alright, but still our goals of paying off all our cards by the time the baby arrives is putting a lot of pressure on us, rather on him. I know there are a lot more things that we want to do to our place, we need to install carpets on our dangerous, plywood stairs, upstairs hallway, and two upstairs bedrooms (one will be the nursery). We also just had to pay for installing a fence on one of our property lines, which is really nice, but was really expensive. I'm hopeful that when baby comes, we can afford to at least get our garden going so we won't have to spend money on (most of) our veggies.

Its kind of embarrassing to have people over with all the work that's left to do on our place, but I know I'm probably more critical than other people. I keep reminding myself how much we've done, how much I've done, and how much better it already is than when we bought the place (carpet in all the bathrooms and kitchen anyone?), but I'm a perfectionist so nothing is ever good enough (of course). I can't wait to have more time at home to take better care of our backyard (pool or no pool). Everything is so overgrown. We want to replace the fence on the back of our property line, but ugh, everything is so expensive. Hopefully by next summer we'll be in a place to get the pool back up and running. Oh my god, such heaven, having a pool in Texas. Then again that's what we said this time last year, and summer's already here. At least we had it the first summer we moved in, which was one of the worst, longest summers in decades. Anyway. Back to the shower.

Also, who am I supposed to invite? Considering we've registered (we didn't register for our wedding), and considering we have to start from scratch on our own, I want to invite as many friends and family as possible! It's embarrassing to ask for help, or for me, to admit that I can't provide everything for myself (dammit pride), but truthfully I need to suck up my pride and get used to the idea that its expected to register and ask for gifts when you have a baby (or get married). Even rich people do that! When we got married, I asked for "presence" and not "presents." And said if people wanted to get us anything we love art, and would love some live music at our reception. If neither of those were your style, and if you wanted to get us something practical, we said we could always use gift cards. But thinking of bringing a new baby home, I want to be able to provide for this lil kiddo to the best of our abilities even if that means asking for help. I know its probably horrible etiquette to even talk about any of this, but why be ashamed of wanting to be a great mama, and give my baby everything he or she needs? Plus I doubt that many people will come to our shower, considering the vast majority of our family and friends live at least a three-days drive away from Austin. The more people I invite, hopefully the more people (half a dozen?) will show up, right?

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