Puzzles are a wonderful way to keep the guests at your baby shower occupied while they are waiting for the other people to arrive. It's great to have several kinds of these on hand, as some of the guests may not like one kind of puzzle or the other, or another of the guests is late so more activities need to be done in the meantime. The simplest kinds of puzzles are the crossword, word search, and word scrambles.
The baby crossword puzzle can be handed out to guests as they arrive. The background can be printed to reflect the theme of the baby shower and the questions could reflect that as well. Some other bits of trivia could be sprinkled in, like bits about the parents-to-be, the names of the guests expected, or general baby trivia. There are several crossword puzzle makers on the internet that can be downloaded to make these personal crossword puzzles.
For word search puzzles, you need to create a word search game (these can be downloaded, too) that contain words concerning baby showers, maternity, and parenthood mixed up with letters that don't belong. Remember to place the word box with the list of hidden words at the bottom of the page. It's also nice to print out an answer page against which the guests can check their answers.
If the parents-to-be have already decided on the name of their child, another puzzle would be to print out the name of the child at the top of a sheet of paper and have the guests come up with as many words as they can just using the name. The guest with the most words wins, of course.
A more complicated version of the puzzles is the double puzzle. There are two steps to this: first of all, words must be unscrambled. Each letter is assigned a number, and the correctly numbered letters are transferred to their corresponding boxes in order to read a hidden message. There can be two winners for this game: the one who finishes first and the first one to guess the message correctly.
Puzzles don't just have to be solitary games, however. They can make terrific team activities at the baby shower, too. One simple game is to give each team a bag of puzzle pieces of any baby-themed puzzle. (The Anne Geddes ones are really beautiful for this.) The first team to put together the puzzle wins a prize.
The Word in a Bag is another team game that involves puzzles. Write down some baby-related words on thin white card and cut up the words into the individual letters. For example, with “baby shower,” you should have ten cards, each with a letter on them. Put the cards into a bag – one word per bag – and hand them out to the teams. The first team that can figure out the word(s) wins.
Another team game using word puzzles is Mother, Mother, Who am I? You need to prepare a list of questions about 'famous mothers.' All the questions have answers that start with 'mother.'
Some questions could be:
Who is the mother of the land? (Mother Earth)
What mother went to the cupboard to fetch her poor dog a bone? (Mother
Hubbard)
Who is the mother of nursery rhymes? (Mother Goose)
Who is the mother of weather? (Mother Nature)