A blog friend of mine has started a facebook group called ‘party like a kid’ which has the goal of being an interactive community to share fun, on the fly, inexpensive, creative and eco-friendly baby shower and birthday party ideas. I’ve already posted a couple myself and hopefully that’s what she was going for, and if not, I’m okay with that. The one I’ve highlighted below is an eco-friendly baby shower gift:
Baby Shower gift
Here I’ve used a pre-made ribbon for around $1 and used the sticky part to attach it to the basket (2 for $1). As usual, with baby items, there will be some stuff that will be used up, but we did try and include plenty of reusable and recyclable items as well! We added in a couple of items our baby loved or we found useful. The anchor gift is a cloth diaper and pair of baby legs (in the front) and I added a stuffed animal, soap, musical toy, baby q tips, a bib, a couple of onesies, and a lingerie bag. Why a lingerie bag? It’s inexpensive, reusable, and what I use it for is to hold the baby’s socks/hats/mittens in the wash, they never get lost and they are easy to transition from washer to dryer and back to the drawer! You can change up the items to fit the expectant or adoptive mother’s registry, or go out on your own like we did and try and find a handful of useful items to ‘fill in’ the basket. The basket itself could be used to hold bath items together, as a toy catcher in the car, or to keep diaper items nearby on the changing table.
We’ve also done a small laundry basket with a little of everything that baby needs, for example, an item of clothing, a blanket, a large stuffed animal, bath and food items, and wrapped with a wide ribbon from the craft department. The laundry basket can be used for the baby’s laundry, to hold toys, or as a toy in itself! Our baby loves to imagine with our laundry baskets or just climb in and out of them. If the mother has a theme in mind for the nursery, you could easily incorporate this into the basket by adding an anchor gift that relates to the theme (frogs, sock monkeys, ladybugs, race cars) and then fill in with general baby items or things for the mother (lotion, a hospital care kit, and so on).
What do you do if you want to be eco-friendly, but you are the recipient of a lot of paper or gift bags? You can recycle the paper, or reuse or scrapbook it with photos from the baby shower. I saved all the bags from my baby shower and finally found a home for them a year later, a women and children’s crisis center gives out items for those in need in gift bags, and they were happy to take them off of my hands! Ones that aren’t baby themed you could reuse yourself for gifts to others.
Those are nice ideas. Sometimes I’ll make a new baby a CD as a gift and use old gift bags to make the CD cover. But we have a good local recycling program that will recycle things like gift bags so that’s what we do w/ ones that we don’t want to reuse.