Posted by Oona Flaherty on July 20, 2010

A Virtual Shower for a Real Baby

It’s hard being away from friends and family. It’s especially hard when you’re pregnant. No one can simply pop on over to see how you’re doing and bring you a pint of ice cream; your mom can’t take you to shop for maternity or baby clothes; your girlfriends can’t oooh and ahhh at how beautiful and big your belly is getting while giving it a rub; and no one can easily come by for the afternoon to shower you with their love and gifts.

Luckily, in this day and age, we have the Internet. Which is the next best thing to actually being with people! Right??? Okay, it certainly doesn’t replace having your loved ones in the same room as you, but it provides a window through which you can share the journey of pregnancy with them. And that is exactly what David and I did.  We had a virtual baby shower (listen to PregTASTIC, Episode 177 for tips on Baby Shower Etiquette)!

You might be thinking… What in the world is a virtual baby shower? As much as I’d love to take the credit, I am not the first person to do one. You can google it and find some information about different ways to hold one, as well as a website that does it for you for a nominal fee. Wanting to personalize it as much as possible, however, I decided to do it my own way.

First, I created a website (easily done with iWeb). It’s a place for our friends and family to keep up-to-date with the progress of the pregnancy through journal entries, photos and videos. We also created web pages for the baby shower – an informational page, a fun & games page, and a gift registry page. Invitations were sent out to our loved ones inviting them to visit the website and asking them to save the date and time to “attend” our baby shower live on the web. That’s right…LIVE!  The response was amazing (mixed in with a little confusion which was easily cleared up)!

Our friends and family from all over the country, and even from London and Argentina visited the site and got to see how we were doing and participate in the fun. They filled out the fun & games page which included:

• Send a Message: write a note to the baby
• Guess the Details: birth date, time, weight, length etc…
• Guess the Name: the baby’s first, middle and last name
• Share a Recipe: either for mom and dad, or the baby

It was such a delight to read what everyone wrote, and so special to have such personalized entries from everyone. We got lovely messages, hilarious guesses and delicious recipes. The messages are being put into a baby book for the baby; we will declare winners for the guessing games after the baby is born; and the recipes are all going into our personal recipe book. And the gifts started to roll in!  And pile up – since we didn’t want to open them until our virtual shower. It was getting more and more exciting as the day of the shower approached.

The day of the shower arrived and at the set time, we and our loved one’s logged on to ustream.tv – we had a url and password just for our shower that we provided for our guests. Guests were able to chat with us online as we streamed ourselves live from our living room. At first, I have to admit, it was a little weird – a bit voyeuristic, and it felt like we were talking to ourselves. But people starting signing in – we had family from New York, Maryland, Texas and even Buenos Aires! Everyone started chatting with us, reacting to my belly with a lot “Oooos and aaaaahs”; people told me how beautiful I looked (which is always nice to hear); and they were also chatting with one another. So after we settled into it, it was actually a lot of fun!

We read out loud some of the messages and guesses that people made. Someone guessed that the circumference of my belly would be 62” at the time of the birth – which is actually how tall I am – so that got a lot of virtual laughs. My cousin guessed that the baby would be 15 inches long – which I thought was a dig on how short I am – laughs. And my dad guessed that our son would be named “Nick The Quick Private Eye” (exposing his own personal dream of having a detective grandson with the name Nick) – tons of virtual laughs.

Then the present opening commenced! We opened all of our wonderful gifts and presented them to the computer video. It was a joy to be surprised by all of the gifts and to read the sweet notes sent by everyone. I’m still kind a kid when it comes to opening presents, so I had a lot of fun ripping open the wrapping paper and pulling out each gift (I let David open a few). I think it was especially nice for our family and friend’s to see our delight at opening the gifts that they sent, and for us to be able to thank them right away. We got some beautiful stuff.

The whole thing took about an hour and a half. And after the initial awkwardness of being out there in the virtual universe, it was a real success. I’m so glad we did it. I think the people who participated appreciated being included in the moment – from wherever they happened to live. And I finally got the oohs and ahhhs that I’d been craving so much and, more importantly, felt the virtual arms of our loved one’s from all over the world supporting us and loving us in this amazing time in our lives. There’s nothing better.

1 Comment »

1. I love this idea! We have friends & family all over the country too, and I know, when the time comes, they would love to be able to participate in something like this. How fun; good job :)

   Comment by Alisa — August 22, 2010 @ 9:49 am

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