My awesome GLBT-and-friends choir threw me a coed baby shower, so much less with the heteronormativity.

Do you think if you'd called the event for your BFF a shower you'd have set false expectations and misled people (for the worse), or would have been redefining the term shower for the better?

I never actually used the word "shower" in the invitation. I did them myself, they were purple (BFF's favorite color), and said "come celebrate the impending birth of Baby F". When anyone said "shower", I said "it's brunch with presents". People hear what they want to hear.

Health~ma for your sister, smonster.

Showers for friends or close family are ok. I've been invited to many showers for people who didnt seemed inclined to ask me to dine, drink, or even hang out before hitting me up for a gift and a weekend afternoon, and those tended to make me feel a bit used. Five years since we spoke and you're expecting me to shell out for Waterford crystal? Or taste-test baby food? You'd damn well better come through with the bubbly, then (they didn't).

I despise showers and find them incredibly depressing, but I know that's mainly my own baggage. I agree the forced festivities suck. Vortex, your shower plan sounds perfect.

This must be why I don't have meatworld friends. I get invited to these things and I decline--hopefully before I make the "Not unless attending would shower me in kittens who will magically cure all my and Hubby's ills" face.

Vortex, I'm just thinking that if you did call it a shower, wouldn't that be a good thing? Diversity and all that. I mean, sure, someone's enjoying the toilet paper wedding dresses and stuff, but people are enjoying the sort of celebration you're throwing, and why not call it a shower? It's a pre-birth celebration--is it not a shower because it doesn't suck? What's the definition of shower?

I am kind of fond of baby showers because I met my husband at one. But it was this kind

...co ed, likkered up, and lots of laughs.

...co ed, likkered up, and lots of laughs.

See, to me, that's just a party. A shower is specifically focused on the woman who's about to undergo marriage/childbirth. She's surrounded by her friends and family, who are pledging their support of her in her coming difficult times by bringing her sacrifices of their time and money in the form of gifts, and by playing the sort of silly games they used to play in her childhood, which is now over.

My feeling toward showers might be soured by experience with a particularly greedy and self-centered friend.

I've been to a few baby showers, and with one exception (where we were supposed to taste baby food and guess what the ingredients were), the games we played were no more silly than the games that group of people usually played at parties. (We were math grad students. Our idea of fun may have been different than most.) We did one where names of famous mothers were taped to our backs, and we had to ask people questions to try to figure out who we were, and someone bought a big stack of onesies that we decorated with fabric paint. (There were maybe two normal baby clothing decorations among the bunch. The rest was math stuff.) But gatherings with this bunch of people typically involved board games and stuff like that, so these just seemed like normal parties with different games.

See, to me, that's just a party

Well it was party at which we gave the parents to be lots of baby stuff presents. That's what made it a shower. And it we also invited a ton of people who normally wouldn't travel several hundred miles for a plain ol' party. And that's why my husband was there from Chicago.