My best friend is having her first baby! This is such an exciting time and since we are in our 30’s, we have been to our share of baby showers. I love celebrating the new little nuggets coming into this world, but sometimes baby showers can get repetitive. I mean how many times have you guys played baby world scramble? I would like to reference Mean Girls here and say…”the limit does not exist.”
My best friend’s all-time favorite show is Friends. I think most of us would say that we like Friends as well. If you don’t…you’re either crazy or you watched two minutes, didn’t find it funny and now have an opinion on the matter…which frankly doesn’t mean much. Friends is one of those cult classic shows that gets funnier and funnier the more you watch it. I still notice things that I didn’t before and think, “Wow! That was genius!”
My best friend, however, is on ANOTHER LEVEL when it comes to Friends. I have no doubt that she could get on stage right now and perform every single line of all ten seasons…she hates public speaking, so that won’t happen anytime soon…but she certainly could.
Every couple years or so, we sit down and play Friends trivia. I think a couple years is just enough time to forget about just how horribly we are about to lose. She will never get a question wrong and we quickly realize how silly we are to try and attempt to play against her.
One of her all-time favorite episodes is when Ross and Rachel are in Central Perk with Phoebe discussing baby names. Rachel is several months pregnant and they don’t agree on potential names at all. Phoebe suggests that if it a girl they name it after her and if it a boy they name it PhoebO…after her as well. The whole scene is perfectly done and gets us laughing every time.
When planning the baby shower, I knew that we needed to find a way to include this scene. My friend is not finding out the gender of the baby, so that actually worked out well for us!
We decided to make it a guessing game out what gender you thought the baby was: Phoebe (girl) or Phoebo (boy).
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Like with everything I need, I went to Amazon for inspiration. I had a vision of having a box decorated with Friends lines and the iconic yellow, picture frame peephole.
1) The Box
The first thing that I needed to get was the box/thing to hold the cards that guests would write their guesses on. I thought about the traditional card box with the slit in the top, but wanted it to be more dramatic. With the top closed, I felt like it wouldn’t catch your eye. And anyways, the point of those boxes is to make sure the money and checks that you are giving don’t get stolen. We won’t really have that problem for this game lol.
I will have everything linked in one spot at the bottom of this post, but for the box, I ultimately went with this wooden box. It was 12″ x 9.2″ x 3.3″. It is meant to be for a jewelry box, but it seemed perfect for this.
2) Paint
I think we can all agree that one of the most iconic decor pieces from Friends is Monica’s door. The purple door with the yellow, picture frame peephole is recognized by everyone, even those who didn’t watch the series.
For the paint, I wandered the aisles of JoAnn Fabrics. Even though I use Amazon for everything, I knew that I needed to see the color in person. Screens can change the way the colors look and if I had the wrong color purple, the whole thing would be ruined.
I landed on “Brilliant Purple” by Liquitex. I linked it here from Amazon in case you don’t want to run to the store. I really do think it was the perfect shade to match the infamous door.
I will be honest, when applying the paint, I didn’t buy the correct brushes. I bought the cheapest one on clearance at JoAnn’s. If they caused me any problems, I was going to go and splurge on the more expensive ones, but the cheap ones worked just fine! I linked the cheapest ones I could find on Amazon. Whatever you choose, make sure you don’t choose the itty bitty ones. That would obviously be very frustrated to work with.
3) Find and Apply Friend Decorations
This is the fun part. Decorations! I usually go over the top with all holidays, birthdays, and special occasions, so I needed to reel myself in a bit for decorating this box. It could start to look tacky really fast.
First I needed the iconic doorframe peephole decoration from Monica’s door. Obviously, I painted the box that purple for a reason! I am not ashamed to admit this…I actually have one around my peep hole at my apartment right now. I had even thought about trying to take it down and using it temporarily for the baby shower, but I couldn’t get it off the door! Hopefully, it will when I move someday. Until then we won’t think about it.
I found one on Amazon that wasn’t too expensive: $15.99. Click here or everything will be linked at the end of the post. I waited until a couple days before to put it in the desired spot on the box and I almost had a heart attack. It BARELY fit and that was only when I forced it between the pieces of wood. On the bright side, I did not need to hot glue or use double sided tape to make sure it stayed in place. It was not moving!
Originally, I had thought that I would be finished after the paint and the peephole frame, but I found the cutest, inexpensive Friends themed stickers and I just had to order them. They were adorable and I was able to put some on the box as indicators for people who didn’t watch the show. The sticker pack I got (linked here) had some great stickers in “Friends Handwriting” that I used…but they also had the most outrageous goofy ones as well. My friends (drink every time I say friends) and I were very amused going through the pack of stickers.
4) The Phoebe versus Phoebo Cards
Lastly, I needed to make the game aspect. Otherwise this was all for nothing lol. I downloaded the Friends font from Etsy and using Canva (I use the free version and it is my favorite thing ever), made some little index cards for people to fill out.
Below is what I came up with. I printed these on card stock, four per sheet. They came out around 4″ x 6″ each. For the game and prize aspect, we had the groom pull a card after everyone placed them in the box and that person won a prize. We obviously will not know who is right until after the baby is born, but I will be sending out a Starbucks giftcard when we know!
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Overall, I had a super fun time making this and it was a hit at the shower. In addition to the box and cards, I sprinkled some of the extra stickers on the table. I also had the “Phoebe/Phoebo” scene on loop on my iPad in case people didn’t understand what this was all about.
If you try making this, make sure to reach out to me and let me know!
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