Baby Shower Planning, Start to Finish
Skip the 40-tab research spiral. This is the whole baby shower — every game, every number, every printable — laid out in the order you actually need them.
By Baljeet Aulakh · Last updated July 22, 2026
The Whole Plan, in Order
A good baby shower is really just five decisions handled early: who comes, what they eat, what they play, how the room looks, and what they take home. Do those in the right order and the day runs itself. We built a free tool for each one — a food calculator that tells you exactly how many tea sandwiches to make, a budget planner that keeps you off the $1,000 end of the scale, a 14-game lineup the mom-to-be will actually enjoy, and a printable checklist that starts six weeks out. Everything here is free and needs no account.
The 6 Baby Shower Planning Tools
What the Printable Kit Actually Looks Like
4 designed sheets, drawn around your own details — the names, the date, the guest count, the window around your due date. These are real pages from the kit, watermarked here.
Welcome Sign — Botanical Arch
One page, the guest of honor’s name reversed out of a deep botanical arch, with greenery spilling over the shoulders and a garland across the foot. The sheet that goes on the door — and the one that gets photographed.
Advice Cards — Watercolour
Four 3.5×4.75″ cards per sheet, each with a different prompt, ruled writing space, and the name, date and city printed on it.
Gift Bingo — Art Deco (every card different)
Two cards per sheet, and no two cards share a grid — each board is its own shuffle of 16 items from a pool of 24.
Predictions Cards — Minimalist
Four cards per sheet. Guests tick a birth-date window computed from your real due date, guess weight, length, hair and who the baby will look like — using your own names.
Every sheet, in 8 colourways
Pick a scheme and the whole kit repaints together — one matched set, not eight downloads that arrived on the same day. You choose before you buy, and you can change it afterwards.
Coral Nursery
Free: the Baby Predictions & Advice card
Add the mom-to-be's name and we'll email you a printable card guests fill in at the shower — birth-date guesses on one side, advice for the parents on the other. A keepsake they'll actually reread.
What Does a Baby Shower Cost and Need, by Guest Count?
Party Genius plans a shower against four numbers: the guest count, the all-in cost at home, the food to put out, and the drinks to pour. Everything below is what a typical 2–3 hour shower needs at each size, before you change a single thing.
Costs are the home-hosted figures from our budget calculator. Food is 8–10 small items per guest and drinks are 2 per guest per hour across 2.5 hours — the same rates the calculators on this site run on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Separates a Smooth Shower From a Stressful One
The showers that fall apart almost always fail for the same reason: the host treated a dozen small choices as one giant looming project, then tried to solve all of it in the final week. The ones that feel effortless were sequenced. Guest list before menu, because headcount decides how much food and how big a space you need. Theme and decor palette before shopping, because a single palette is what makes a room read as designed instead of thrown together. Baby shower invitations go out 4 weeks ahead, because that is the window where guests still have open calendars and the registry still has options on it.
The second trap is over-buying. Shower food is grazing food, and the instinct to cook a full sit-down lunch for thirty people leads to three trays of untouched pasta and a host who spent the morning in the kitchen instead of with the mom-to-be. Plan the spread as bites rather than meals, prep what keeps overnight, and set the drinks out self-serve — two drinks per guest per hour is the same pour rate any party runs on, and the ice that station needs is the thing hosts forget until the morning of. The third trap is decor sprawl — a little of everything from five different theme kits. Pick one focal point, repeat one palette, and stop.
Do those three things — sequence the decisions, plan for grazing, and edit the decor — and the day genuinely runs itself. If you only take one thing from this page, take the sequence: the 6-week baby shower planning checklist is that order written down, and everything below is one free tool for one of those decisions.
Who Hosts, Who Pays, and Who Gets Invited
The three questions that stall a first-time host are not logistical, they are social — and all three have clearer answers than people expect. None of them are covered by the tools above, so here they are plainly, before you spend anything: settle these, then start the 6-week planning checklist.