Katherine and Marjie had decorated downstairs and put together a tasty spread of food and invited friends of ours from AIS and VeT, to share in the occasion. Of my friends from VeT, not one had attended a baby shower before, nor had we all been together as a group since the office closed in mid-March, so it was really special to have them there, as well as a group of our friends from AIS. We all spent the first hour or so enjoying each others company and plates of western and Vietnamese treats.
After we'd had our fill of food and conversation, we kicked off the party, as all good parties are started, with a drinking game. Marjie and Katherine had purchased sippy cups and the game consisted of a race between participants to see who could empty their water-filled sippy cup first. After the first round, the winners, one of which was my friend Huong's two-year-old daughter, Suzie, completed a final round to determine the winner.
After our drinking game, it came time for the presents. I've never been a fan of the baby shower present ritual because of its emphasis on materialism, but a few weeks earlier at the urging of some more practical friends, I had put together a baby registry on Amazon.com, where we picked out some basic, and not so basic, items that could be easily purchased and sent to my parents home in Florida, to save us the burden of carrying things home and the cost of some baby items that would be nice to have. When it came time for our shower, we received a few gifts from Viet Nam, including a great pair of flashy "Vietnamese" stretch pants for Hazel and a really neat internationally themed first counting book. The rest of our friends had printed out pictures of gifts bought from the registry and sent to Florida, including a baby carrier that had come highly recommended, a baby play mat, and a few other practical items that we were pleased to receive.
After the gift opening, Katherine unveiled her masterpiece of the evening. Just as my friends from VeT were making their leave to attend other to other commitments, she came down the stairs with a table, on which were what looked very realistically like dirty baby diapers, filled with the melted remains of five different chocolate candy bars. While the table itself didn’t do wonders for my stomach or my impending visions of motherhood, it was amusing to try to guess which diaper contained which candy bar based on the consistency alone. After much deliberation, Nina, came out victorious, now having won both the sippy cup race and the diaper mystery challenge. For the final game, Katherine and Marjie had us all guess the baby’s birth date – the first and most optimistic guess of May 5, being mine and the last, Caroline’s guess of May 17th.
Once it began to get dark, we all started to take our leave, thanking Marjie and Katherine for the party and saying our goodbyes. It was so nice to spend an afternoon with the friends that we’ve made in Viet Nam during our time here and feeling a real sense of being a part of a community of generous, caring friends from all over the world. It was a wonderful reminder that just such connections can make almost anywhere feel like home.
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