If you’re pregnant, have been pregnant or know just about anyone who has been pregnant in the last couple of years, chances are you’ve heard of or attended a gender reveal. People continue to amaze me by coming up with such creative, sometimes out-of-this-world and sometimes actually just flipping crazy (I’m looking at you fires and plane crashes) to reveal the sex of their baby beans.
OBVIOUSLY, we wanted in on the “basicness,” so we jumped on that gender reveal party planning train. Except, ours was a little different than most in that we knew the gender at about 10 weeks- before most people even knew I was pregnant.
Momfession: I’m a control freak and there was no loving WAY I wasn’t going to know EVERYTHING I could about my growing child. We decided we wanted to have genetic testing done, to make sure we were as prepared for anything thrown our way as we could be. With the testing, they can find out the gender of your baby. This mama said, um “Hell, yes.”
In all honesty, the toughest part was keeping it a secret from everyone. See, we decided to wait until I was well into my pregnancy to host the party. You might be thinking “oh no big deal if the two parents know then it can’t be THAT hard.” Um. WRONG. I talk to my sister every. Damn. Day. As soon as we knew Addison was an Addison, it was incredibly hard not to refer to her as such in everyday conversations.
It always felt so weird and unnatural to refer to her as an “it” even before we were aware of her gender. She was never an “it” to us. She was a little growing gummy bear human and she deserved more than “it.”
Each of my sisters came up with little nicknames for their little bumps before they switched to referring to them as what their eventual names would be. It seemed only natural to follow suit and come up with our own special name for our own special bean.
If you know my husband and I, you know we are a little prickly around the edges. We are salty and sarcastic and perhaps a little rough around the edges. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s probably just me and I’m slowly taking him down with me… Poor guy. Anyway.
Taking all of this into consideration, we just knew that Addison would likely end up with a little bit of that prickle in her too. And so that’s what she became. Our little prickle. (And, if you’re wondering, she still is. We hit the nail on the damn head with that one.)
Deciding what to do for the gender reveal itself also proved to be a little difficult for us. There is this idea that you need to come up with the “next big thing” and do something totally unique that’s never been seen before. We thought about it too much. And every idea we came up with just seemed straight up ridiculous.
We decided to use the “prickle” nickname as inspiration for our décor and then for the rest of it, we did what felt like “us” and it was perfect for our tribe.
So, without further ado, here are some pictures from our revealing day:
Because one of my passions is baking, I decided to make some cactus-esque cake pops for our guests. To give them more of an authentic feel, I stuck them in terracotta pots filled with black rocks. (They were DELISH, by the way. Could have been the baby talkin’ but I think I ate a whole pot by myself.)
My husband has always been a big dirt bike ridin’ guy, so we prompted our guests to vote what gender they thought our baby would be. Except we decided to put dirt bikes (pink) for a girl or dirt bikes (blue) for a boy. Because it is 2020 y’all and if our girl wants to ride a damn dirt bike, she is going to ride a damn dirt bike (while this mama clenches her fists until they turn white because holy nerves, batman. I’ve seen enough wipe outs to know it’s a rough ridin’ sport.).
For the actual reveal, we asked each of our guests if they wanted to be a part and warned them that it could get messy, cause that’s the nice thing to do. We had everyone go outside and handed them each a black balloon filled with (pink) dust and biodegradable pink confetti. They each had their own skewer to use to pop the balloons. Michael and I counted down for everyone for the “grand reveal” and then we got to stand, take pictures and videos and soak it all in. It was perfect.
(Spot my dog in the above picture? He was being a typical Golden Retriever, all friendly and in your business.... And then the balloons went "pop" and he said NOPE! And took off running with no regard for anyone else's safety.)
Also, fun not so fun fact: we had the balloons filled up prior to our guests arriving and stored in a box in our office, which is toward the front of our house. One of our guests put their diaper bags on top of the box and the weight of it popped a balloon so there was pink dust EVERYWHERE, over every balloon. We didn’t realize it until right before the reveal, as we were getting ready to pass everything out. Michael and I locked our guests outside (sorry, y’all) grabbed some towels, soaked them and cleaned every single balloon of any trace of pink before the reveal could commence.
We also felt it was important to include the people closest to us in the reveal that couldn’t be there for it physically, so we mailed each of them one of these precious scratch off cards for them to do the day of. Love them? Get them here.
So, we want to know… Are you planning on having a gender reveal? What are you planning to do for your reveal?