Since Hank came along, we entertain at home a lot more because we’d rather buy groceries for the week than fund a sitter for an evening.

This is our cheese plate jar, it’s where we keep snacks for impromptu hosting. We used to eat all the yummy snacks ourselves, and then have sliced fudgesicles and dry pasta curls when people came over. Now, once something goes in the jar, it’s for guests only.

You can stock it with all kinds of shelf-friendly snacks, but our favorites include:

• Bars of Dagoba or Scharffenberger dark chocolate
• Raw almonds, pecans, filberts
• Roasted pistachios or pumpkin seeds
• Dried apricots, cranberries, or mangoes
• Crystalized ginger

If you happen to have some cheese in the fridge and a little drizzle of honey, you can make a killer cheese plate with that stash. If not, take three little dishes (we use sushi plates), and put out almonds, dried apricots, and chopped chocolate. You can put it together in five minutes with no cooking and no stress.

Look at you, so fancy.

I mentioned yesterday that I made this blank, DIY ABC book for my friend Alli’s shower.

Bryan and my friend Jaime really helped — I’d intended to use a store-bought journal, but couldn’t find anything that would work. If you’d like to make one too, here’s how we did it.

We took some white cardstock sheets, 8.5 x 11, and folded them in half to make all the pages. Then we stacked those sheets with the folded edges along what would become the spine of the book.

We used a red file folder as the book cover — it had multiple creases along the fold, so you could expand how many papers it would hold in the file. We folded to the widest creases, and the “bottom” of the file became the book’s spine. Once a ruler is involved, my temples start to throb from all the pressure, so my friend Jaime measured how big the cover needed to be, then marked it off with a ruler and trimmed to order.

Bryan printed up the letters, also on white cardstock. Jaime and I cut out little templates of squares that would fit over the letters, traced a square around each letter, cut them out, and glued them in the page corners. You could easily just write the letters in by hand if you liked too, but I wanted a more polished look.

The binding was the tricky part. We tried hot gluing the pages in, but they weren’t stable enough, so Bryan took an electric drill and drilled holes in the cover, which I then threaded with ribbon. I wish we’d had some little grommets to finish the holes, but it looked pretty good, notwithstanding.

At the shower, while Alli opened the gifts, everyone took turns drawing pictures and writing messages to the new mom and baby.

I like party activities that let you interact without having to make a pregnant woman cry by guessing at the exact girth of her enormous belly. This one is a champ.

My dear friend Alli is having a baby, so a few of us threw her an ABC baby shower. It was, of course, based on a theme I saw in Martha Stewart, whose empire has made it such that creative types need never again have an original idea.

If you have a shower to plan, here’s how it went:

I hung glittered letters over the dining room table. These are from the sign I got at the flea market a while back. If I were buying them especially for the party, I would have just gotten a bunch of As, Bs, and Cs.

We used blocks and vintage ABC books to decorate. These blocks are Hank’s and the book is a damaged version from a thrift store. I use it to “monogram” gifts and cards and such.

The door sign was a vintage baby sweater on a hanger. This would have been even cuter if I’d been able to track down a vintage baby hanger, but no luck, so I just bent a wire hanger in at the sides.

This is a detail of the sweater sign. Bryan hot glued the wooden blocks together with a piece of string glued between them. (Bryan hot glues things because it makes me hot and bothered. Note to entrepreneurial types: Hunks and Hot Glue site.) The string is looped over the neck of the hanger and hangs down through the sweater.

I used glass baby bottles as bud vases for the peonies. Cutesy genius, I tell you.

We had two relatively mellow games. This is one I saw and loved at another friend’s shower. It’s a handmade ABC book with blank pages. Guests drew in pictures for the letters to make an ABC book for the new baby. Putting it together was a little more complex than I expected (I’ll post a quick how-to soon), but you could easily buy a pretty book from a stationery store and draw the letters in by hand.

For the second game, we had everyone guess how many magnet letters were in the jar, and the winner got a little prize.

The embellishment on the prize package is from the old dictionary book pictured above, which I also used on the gift for the new baby:

I think it turned out pretty cute. And no one had to rub Vaseline on their nose, or sneak into the bathroom to dry heave after being made to sample a jar of pureed prunes. Bonus.

These are my pink superhero boots, which go with nothing. Nothing, I tell you! But do you see how they make me feel? They make me feel like copping a sexy attitude while posing alone in my living room. So imagine how good they’d be if I were dancing on a bar, my friends.

On a side note, this outfit was $32, if you don’t count the shoes. If you do count the shoes, it was $112. I am a shopping genius.

Anyway, what are you up to? Let’s go dance on a bar.

We’re officially in Mexico by now, where I don’t have Internet access, and I anticipate it will be like losing a limb. Every once in awhile I’ll get a phantom itch where Post Secret used to be.

I’ve prepped a few posts that will publish while we’re away. In the meantime, the weather’s great, wish you were here, and so forth.