The One With the Frozen Babies

Back in February, we held a Baby Shower for this cute girl:
If you've been to many showers you know that the guests always get roped in to playing a weird game...constructing a bridal gown from toilet paper, taking bets on the circumference of the poor pregnant woman's belly, or that horrific thing where you melt chocolate bars into diapers and ask the guests to identify the substance. See? Weird. And yet, somehow, it's totally appropriate in our society. We kept the games pretty low-key for Jessie's shower, but I was tasked with facilitating a game which, on a scale from one to weird, is an eleven. I'm not even sure what you call it, but I'm referring to it as "The One With the Frozen Babies." And I carefully documented the process so that fellow weirdos could easily recreate the fun at home.

First, you need some tiny plastic babies. Don't just have them laying around the house? We found some at Party Depot and also on the cake-decorating aisle at Michaels. You think this game is bad? Imagine getting a cupcake topped with one of these ...ummm...urchins. We ended up with two types - albino baby and jaundice baby.

The next step is to freeze the babies into ice cubes. Just one baby per cube - no twins.

At this point I was about to fill the ice cube tray with water, slide it into the freezer, and try desperately to forget I was now in the business of cyrogenics. However, a more experienced baby-freezer than I wandered into the kitchen and informed me that I was about to freeze the babies the wrong way. Newsflash: there are right and wrong ways to freeze babies. Why didn't they teach us that at Willamette?

Apparently, you should start by filling the trays only half-full of water. Then you freeze them and they come out looking like this. This "technique" prevents the babies from floating to the top of the ice cube. We'll talk more about floaters later. Now you top off the tray, and freeze again. When you remove the finished product from the freezer, you find this horrifying sight:

Is anyone else thinking "aftermath of the Titanic"? Cause that's what I was thinking. Shudder.

I will say that the protruding appendeges did make it easier to remove the babies from the tray. Now there's a silver lining. They are tong-ready!
Once we removed all the babies from their trays we realized that guests already had drinks in their hands and would need to be served their frozen babies. Want to guess whose job it was to circulate through the party plopping baby-sicles into people's drinks? Yeppers! Head Weirdo to the rescue. You have no idea how difficult it is to work this in to casual converstaion. "Hi! Lovely to see you! Thanks so much for coming. May I freshen your drink?" Sploosh.

Now the real fun begins. The game is a contest. Guests must watch the baby (now floating around their champagne) as it melts. The first guest whose "water breaks" (or "baby-sicle thaws") wins the game! Such fun! In the meantime, you stare down at a floater. Not weird at all.
The saddest part came after the fact. We had more babie-sicles than guests and had to leave all these guys in the sink to melt.
Gives a whole new meaning to sending the baby to time-out doesn't it? And a good time was had by all!