Sunday, May 19, 2013

Hosting a Chinese Adoption Shower

Our precious friends are going to pick up their baby daughter in China next month.  I joined with 2 other sweet families from school and hosted a Chinese Adoption Shower.  What fun it was for me to host a baby shower, after all these years of being out of practice, and to host my first ever adoption shower.  We made it a couples dinner and invited about 20 couples.

I scoured the internet and Pinterest to find good ideas to make this party both special and personal.  One of my co-hostess has 3 daughters from China and she had so many great decorations.

 The dining room had a gold table cloth with center pieces and Chinese lanterns hung from the light fixture.
For party favors, we placed Asian snacks (found at the dollar section in Target) in a red basket with dragons.  Around each snack was a card with prayer requests on it held with a rubber band so each family could keep the card as a reminder to pray for the family.
 For the centerpieces, we put pictures of the baby of honor with a Chinese flag (held down with rice).
 The lanterns were my favorite.  We hung them from the kitchen fixture also.
 Down the kitchen bar was a straw mat table runner with chop sticks, sushi shaped candles, a few more centerpiece cans and this layered container from Singapore.
 I made a banner from ribbon and patterned card stock to match baby girl's bedding (that someone had purchased). 
 Each pendant had a Chinese character with a corresponding Bible verse to be prayed for their sweet daughter.  You can access this document here.
 We had a local Chinese restaurant cater the dinner.  On the table is a plaque to pray for China and a gold bowl with fortune cookies.
 Displaying a child's China tea set
 All the plastic ware was red.  The chopsticks were placed in an Asian teapot and the utensils were in a box with Chinese characters.
 As another party favor, my co-hostess made a delicious Chinese Chex mix and placed them in these Chinese to-go boxes with Bible verses on them about children and family.
At the front door, we placed a table with red table cloth, Bible, pens, index cards and red Chinese envelopes.  We asked each guest to write a Scripture on the index card, place it in the red envelope and hang it on the tree.

During the gift opening, I read Fun Facts about Chinese Culture (that I got from several different web sites, but you can get my google doc here).  After dinner and gifts, we had each person take a quiz (document here) about Chinese adoptions and the country.  This quiz led into a prayer time, using the prayers request that our friends had given us.

I took all of these photos BEFORE guests arrived and then was so busy making sure things were running smoothly that I totally forgot to take photos of the actual shower, which makes me sad.  It was such a special time to celebrate with our close friends. 

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