There is endless shopping for baby clothes, canvassing for cribs and strollers, finding the best diaper brands, and researching for baby-friendly home cleaning brands. Also, one of the most popular activities among expectant parents is to hold gender reveal and baby shower activities. 

Some opt to do a one-time shower and reveal while others skip the gender reveal party and just opt for a baby shower. We opted for the latter and I must say it was worth it because it was a chance to bond over food and fun-filled activities with friends and family.

While we did enjoy organizing our baby shower by ourselves, it was not without challenges and some anxiety because we had to do it while we had full-time jobs. As such, we decided to come up with these simple tips and checklists to make organizing your own baby shower a little hassle-free.

Here are five important guidelines to help you organize your baby shower:

As with any event or life decision, it is always good to start with a budget. It is usually food that takes the biggest chunk of the budget so know how much your finances will allow you to allot per head. You may also want to set aside some funds for some decorations, game props, and giveaways. These are of course the least important items and should be your last priority.

If you already have a venue in mind, you may check their menus and packaged offerings so that you will have an idea of the cost. Check around three venues so that you would have a benchmark and references for comparison.

Furthermore, you might already want to set the date for your party. A weekend is obviously advisable as most of your invitees would be off from work by then.

This will probably come hand-in-hand with budgeting. You will be able to determine the bulk of your budget once you have finalized your headcount. A baby shower is an intimate celebration so you might want to prioritize your closest friends and relatives. A good headcount for such a small event would be around 50 people.

By the time you have set your budget and number of invitees, you would have a clearer picture of how you want your baby shower to happen. You might have a theme in mind or the decors that you want to put. These will dictate the event venue that you will book.

Alternatively, you might want to talk to several venues or restaurants if they can bring your ideas to fruition. Most restaurants are used to organizing events like baby showers and kiddie parties so they are mostly capable of executing your requirements.

Once you have booked your venue, set a meeting with them for an ocular as well as to discuss your requirements, what you plan to bring in, the menu, how the food will be served, and when the food will be served.

Don’t be afraid to ask for extra like table toppers, extra chairs, your preferred décor color, or some chips that your guests can munch on while waiting for the event to start.

Make the event exciting for your guests by creating colorful invitations for them. Since most people are on their smartphones, why not create electronic invites. We used a template Canva, a design application, to create our save-the-date teaser and formal invitation. We sent these via email and also posted them in the event invitation that we created via Facebook.

Giveaways are nice-to-have but not a necessity for your baby shower. But if you really want to distribute giveaways to your guests, create do-it-yourself items for a more personal touch. For us, we ordered cute but cheap boxes with a shirt and tie design from an online shop and filled these with assorted colorful candies bought from a grocery shop.

There you have it, some simple things to keep in mind to make organizing your baby shower truly enjoyable and headache-free. Keep in mind that your baby shower need not be lavish in order for it to be memorable. You can always come up with a good event based on the budget that you have.

But most importantly, enjoy this wonderful occasion.

More parenting stories: