An All-Guys Baby Shower with a Difference: An NFL Fiesta!

Get together all the football fans when the girls are having a baby shower and let them throw their own football fiesta with a Southwestern flavor!

Send the guys their own invitations. You can send it as a ticket to a football match, with one end serving as a ticket stub for a lottery to be drawn at the end of the baby shower. Each guest just needs to write his name in the stub and drop it into a container when he arrives. The price for getting to watch the game? A pack of diapers. Word it as clearly as you can so the guests know what to expect. You can say something like, “You better take a siesta before this NFL fiesta!”

You can make the décor as wacky as you like, since this is a Southwestern football baby shower. This requires creative thinking, like a cactus wearing a football helmet or a Super Bowl banner sporting sombreros and maracas. Decorate the room with chili pepper lights, cactus cutouts, and lines of dangling football cutouts hanging from the ceiling.

Use balloons in the NFL team colors to decorate a few spots in the room and accent them with mylar balloons in a fiesta theme: there are cactus, sombrero, margarita, maracas, and chili pepper balloons available online. Have a few foam footballs around since it's safe enough to bet your guests will be throwing them around during their all-guys baby shower.

Don't put anything on the tables as sports parties tend to get rather rowdy! All each table needs is a sombrero at each place setting, with a bandanna tied in a loose knot to serve as a napkin. Have an acrylic vase in the middle with a selection of noisemakers, maracas, clackers, football horns, and whistles to help everybody cheer and celebrate.

But do decorate the buffet bar. Instead of using a tablecloth, put down artificial or astroturf to protect the food. Serve your meal from football-themed serving plates like football halves, sombreros with bowls set in them, or a football helmet.

The perfect menu for this NFL baby shower is a taco bar! Just put out soft and hard tacos, grilled fish, steak, and chicken slices, ground beef, refried beans, lettuce, onions, and tomatoes, taco sauce, Mexican rice, sour cream, and grated cheese. Have salsas, guacamole, cheese dip, and taco chips out, too. And for drinks, have icy Coronas available, and lots of shotglasses of tequila. Serve lemonade, limeade and a Mexican coffee bar two hours before the party ends, unless you have a taxi service available or you want to have overnight guests.

It's normal for the females to join in the all-boys baby shower once the game is over. That's the time that the lottery should kick in, with the females drawing the names out one by one. There should be small prizes for this, like a bottle of pain reliever for the morning after, packets of spicy hot chocolate mix, football-themed decals or pins, football trading cards, or tubes of Bengay.

A memorable football fiesta baby shower would be a bottle of Tabasco with a thank-you note attached. Ole!