Here’s your challenge, if you choose to accept it.

You have just arrived in Michigan to introduce your new baby to her family…

Baby Mila with her Grammy
..and to celebrate your sister-in-law’s new baby with a baby shower:

Cousin Danielle, Sister-in-law Tiffany, sister-in-law Ashley and me
You haven’t been very involved in the planning of the shower, although you did pretend-decorate a penguin-themed nursery for the teeny baby. When you arrive in Michigan, your mother-in-law shows you the pots she’s decorated for the centerpieces…

…and tells you she hasn’t decided what else to do for the centerpieces, and would you like to come up with something?

Your challenge: Create a centerpiece decoration using these pots. You have 24 hours. Go.

What would you do?

I’ll tell you what I did! First I got all giddy-excited about the chance to decorate something. Then I got to work!

I wanted to make the little pots feel more “important” on the big round tables, so we hit the Dollar Tree to come up with some way to raise them off the tables. We found these candlesticks and these little glass bowls:

And found that the lid on the bowls fit perfectly in the candlestands. I glued them together using Glass Bond:

And ended up with a DIY $2 stand for the little vases my mother-in-law had made:

We hit up Kroger (my favorite place for fresh flowers) and picked up a bunch of blooms in all shades of orange. I thought the orange would really pop against the blues.

We found lots of wild orange lilies growing in my in-laws’ yard, so Weston and I picked a bunch…

And I gathered all my mother-in-law’s spare vases and glassware and started playing. First I filled the little white pots with orange roses. I like to cut the flowers just slightly taller than the pots so you focus on those gorgeous blooms, and not on the stems.

Once they were full of roses, I added some greenery too.

Then I just got carried away and couldn’t stop playing with flowers and vases. I found a set of matching vases in her basement which I filled with little clementine oranges.

And added lilies and carnations.

Look at all that fun orange freshness just hanging out on the counter while I played!

Here’s my favorite one! It’s a trick! It looks like a standing bouquet of carnations…

But it’s really this extra vase I found…

Filled with water and carnations…

I used the rubber band that came off the bouquets:

Wrapped it around the vase, and cut carnation stems the height of the vase, then stuck them under the rubber band:

Then I covered the rubber band with a stray piece of ribbon I dug up in my mother-in-law’s basement. Ta-da! Cool, right? It’s magic.

Then suddenly it was like 1 a.m. and I had run out of flowers and it was way past my bedtime so I finally stopped.

But look how pretty everything turned out! I love how the orange roses popped against the navy tablecloths at the shower.

My mother-in-law and sis-in-law had also set up this fancy candy table. So cute, right?

The shower was a great success and the mama-to-be got lots of goodies for the little one.

Plus we had so much fun on our trip. Weston got to fly the airplane. Only for a minute though. Apparently they frown on that kinda thing.

When we got to the airport and he saw his Grammy on the other side of security, Weston took off running toward her, they embraced, and it was this very emotional, slow-motion hollywood-style moment.

Weston and his baby sister played in the kiddy pool at their grandparents’ house.

And Weston got to go fishing in their pond…
Mila got some good cuddle time with her new unborn cousin…

And we all braved the otherworldly heat to spend some time on Lake Huron.

But we’re back now!

What would you have done with a white-pot centerpiece challenge? Do you have as much fun playing with flowers and vases as I do? Would you let your toddler fly a commercial jet?