Forecast: Wedding Showers

All of those days with no bloggage from moi, and now I simply can't stop. There is just SO much to share with you about the magical 2 weeks we spent in Newfoundland!!

On our second day "back home", my beautiful Aunt June threw a shower for me in which any Auntie or friend within a 100 kilometer radius was invited to her lovely home for an old school Newfoundland shower. I wasn't forced to wear a paper plate with bows on my head. Nay. I was able to maintain all of my dignity! We DID play games. There were prizes aplenty!! And we laughed our faces off. And we visited. And we noshed. It was truly, truly delightful.

It all started with a bag of presents. THIS bag of presents to be specific:

Actually, it started with my amazing Aunt June, pictured here. If you need something done in your life, you just have a word with Aunt June and it will happen. She is a fabulous organizer and host and I'm so lucky that I got to spend more time with her on this trip because she is a lovely, lovely soul and I'm fortunate to be related to her. My father was the eldest of 11 children, 6 of whom are girls, so I have a bevy of amazing Aunties - all of whom are fantastic women. Many of them were at Aunt June's for the shower!

So we all picked a number from an envelope, and then, when our number was called, we were invited to root through the bag, and to select a present. Sniffing, shaking and musing aloud were encouraged. Once your gift was open, you had an opportunity to steal someone else's gift.

For example, here Mary is listing the contents of the pedicure kit and deciding whether or not she'll keep it or steal someone else's acquisition!!

And then it was on to more games! The group divided into "the Bingo lot" and "the Bridge lot". I was in the former.

Again, there was another huge bag of prizes to be had!! It was a help-yourself kind of dealio. If you called "Bingo", you got to root through the bag and choose a prize.

As you can see, people took it VERY seriously!

These are my beautiful cousins - Grace and Nancy Lee.

But no one took it as seriously as that Bridge crowd. While we shrieked and hollered in the kitchen, they were the very model of maturity.

Even though we tried to break up the concentration....

We also had a game of 120's (a grand old Newfoundland card game that I heart). Here my wonderful Aunt Georgiana is giving Mary-Lynn an earful about the unorthodox way in which she's dealing....!!

I'm not sure what's happening here, but I do recall thinking that they should start a singing group!

And then it was time for the tea. Who doesn't LOVE a sammich with the crusts cut off? (not to mention those Partridgeberry tarts made by my Aunt June. I'm happy to report that she gave me the recipe for my shower/stag cookbook!! I'll be blogging about them later after I make them in Vancouver. We can't get Partridgeberries in BC, but I think I'll be able to substitute something just as delightfully tart.)

I also got the recipe for Aunt June's FAMOUS carrot cake. My family doesn't mess around when it comes to food!

Meanwhile, back at my brother's place in Torbay, Mister Man and Paully got dressed up and headed out to dinner. I don't think they could have had NEARLY as much fun as we did. As my friend Mary said to me later, "that was the most fun I've ever had at a shower." I couldn't disagree. It underlined yet again, what a blessed life I lead.....