Birds & Bees Gender Neutral Baby Shower

Their nest is growing! What will it bee??

My friends Michael and Heather announced their pregnancy to family by giving them little bird nests saying, “Our nest is growing!” When mutual friends, Jaime and Tiffany, approached me about helping with their gender neutral baby shower I was thrilled.

Jaime threw out the idea of incorporating the bird theme, but also using bees because we didn’t know what their baby would “bee” until it was born. Who says that gender neutral is no fun? This sure was a fun theme to explore!

We really didn’t set out to use specific colors, but it ended up that a lot of our decorations were a soft, deep yellow with a little bit of aqua and deep pink thrown in there.

The backdrop of the dessert table was a honeycomb made from large craft sticks and branches with a real bird’s nest.

I made little signs for the food and desserts with styrofoam eggs that came from an Easter wreath that I dismantled a long time ago.

Speaking of food, the biggest challenge for us was preparing food that both Michael and Heather would enjoy. Michael is vegan and Heather is vegetarian. Vegetarian cooking is fairly easy, but vegan cooking is a pretty new thing for me, especially in baking. It was a challenge I was pretty excited about.

Our Mediterranean-style menu included: Greek chicken kebabs, veggie kebabs, a hummus plate with olives and pepperoncini, Greek pasta salad, a green salad and fruit salad. For desserts we had a homemade vegan vanilla layer cake with vegan buttercream frosting, bakery-made vanilla cupcakes, vanilla and chocolate oreos and fresh strawberries with vegan coconut cream.

The vegan vanilla cake was probably the highlight. It was really tasty!

For activities, we had several fun things for guests to do. Upon arrival, each guest chose a pink or blue clothes pin to wear to show their guess of the baby’s gender.

Guests also got the chance to fill out a sweet “Wishes for Baby” card.

Finally, guests were able to “Take a Guess” as to the gender, the birth date and weight of  the baby. Each guest put $2 into the pot. Half of the pot went to Heather and Michael to start a college fund for baby and the other half went to the person who guessed correctly.

One of my favorite details of the party was these adorable, tiny jars of honey that we sent home with each guest. What a cute and fun way to say, “Thanks for bee-ing here!”