And My Future Granddaughter's Name is.... (drum roll)

This is from our name reveal game at Jessica's baby shower.

Only a few people came, but we had a  lot of fun. But for Jessica's sake, I wish her friends, coworkers and church acquaintances would have come. But we are in a busy time of year.

We hosted the party at our house. Her friend Delisa wanted to do it, but she has a very small house.

I picked three games, and Delisa picked one.

For game one we melted five kinds of candy bars and smeared one kind in each of five diapers. People had to identify the candy bar by smell. Fun game, but it looks gross! (It's supposed to I think)

 Game two was baby twister. The non pregnant people had balloon babies. You couldn't lose your baby during the game.

We let everyone try this one. The guys had been in the back watching Batman.

Delisa passed out ribbon and everyone had to cut it to be the right size to go around Jessica's baby bump. One lady had it almost exact. I didn't get  pictures of it. She's in the picture below.

They are not being weird, this is the name reveal game. We put the beads with the letters of the baby's name in a ziplock bag along with navy beans. With eyes closed, they had to find the letter beads and arrange them in order with eyes still closed. No one got them in the right order. But once they saw the letters, it was easy to guess the name. What other word has those letters?

River

She received lots of nice presents.

There's an afghan from my mom not shown in the pictures.

I had everyone write a message or good wish to Jessica or River on the tablecloth. I left a blank in mine for River's name because we hadn't revealed it yet.

We had little sausages both rolled up and in a crock pot with BBQ sauce, meatballs, a cracker tray, a fruit tray, cake and cupcakes. Delisa had brought pinwheels but they were forgotten in the freezer!

Walmart didn't have the cake ready, then they just threw it together. The one in the order book is really cute. This one not so much. Guess we'll go to Publix next time!This is what it looked like in the book:

All in all, the shower was fun, but I wish more  people had come. Her mother in law and step mother in law are having one for her too. They have the advantage of having lots of relative in town and also living much closer to the others. So it should be well attended. The disadvantage is for us that it is the same day as breakfast with Santa and the big Christmas parade.

I now have four blogs. Part of it is because I divided them out--one for girls (my readers--although none of them read the blog!), a parenting blog, my family blog, and a new blog for teens. So I added two blogs. The reason for the teen one is that a publisher has asked to see the full manuscript of my teen novel. They are very interested in having authors who have a presence online--like Karen Kingsbury with her 350,000+ followers on her author page. I do not think they are going to be impressed with my 43 followers. Please click to follow each blog (I can't find a follow button for the new blogs!) and my author page on facebook (Katrina Cassel). Please comment on the posts if they are relevant to you. AND please recommend them to others. If you have a teen, teach teens etc, please send them to my blog. And let me know if there are certain things you'd think they'd like to read about. If you know a really amazing teen, I'd love to interview him or her for the blog. Here are the links:

Parenting Isn't for Wimps

 Just4Girls

Rock the Journey (teen blog)