The Gender Reveal Party

This past weekend we had a great party where we revealed our baby's sex by cutting into a cake. Now, expectant parents haven't always been able to reveal the gender of their child-to-be by means of a cake. Early humans resorted to painting the results of the 20 week sonogram on the walls of a cave.

The idea for a gender reveal party came about when we decided that we (read: Brandi) wanted to find out early whether the baby going to be a boy or girl. I was somewhat indifferent, wanting to know but lamenting the loss of the moment where you storm out of the delivery room and announce, "It's a ____!" Enter the gender reveal party.

When we went in for our second trimester sonogram, we asked that the sonographer (not, as the name suggests, someone who draws sonograms but instead someone who reads them) let us know when she was going "down there" so we would not accidentally catch a sneak peak of the thing (or lack thereof) that we were going to reveal to our friends and family a week later. We had nothing to worry about. She detected the gender without our knowing about it, and the fact that we couldn't waltz in there and read a sonogram as well as she did definitely spoke well for the job security of sonographers. She wrote down the sex of the baby, put it in an envelope, and then put that inside another envelope. (Once we discovered we could not read sonograms we immediately developed a fear of being able to see through envelopes.)


We then took the envelopes to our friend Jenny Baer, who also baked our delicious pies and wedding cake almost three years ago. She then designed an amazing cake based on our invitations and used pink or blue icing on the inside of the cake so we would find out the sex when we cut into it.


We had the party at my aunt and uncle's house, and they did a great job decorating to the theme. There was a table with a spinner (you spin a spinner that lands on either a pink or blue section of the tablecloth, and then write your name where the spinner landed), a raffle for pink and blue gift baskets, and his and hers baby Texas A&M outfits.

(Sadly, these pictures were taken after half the party had departed. We wish we had thought to do a pink picture/blue picture earlier.)

Everyone was encouraged to wear a pink or blue shirt as a way of indicating a guess. Brandi wore blue and I wore pink, in accordance with our initial gut feelings about what the baby would be. As for the rest of the guests, there was probably a little more blue than pink (owing partially to the lack of pink shirts in many men's wardrobes, an affliction, I'm sorry to say, I also suffered until a few weeks ago).


The cake cutting was a moment we'll never forget. I cut out a good sized wedge, and while I was trying to get the knife underneath it, Brandi spied a little bit of blue icing. As I lifted the piece of cake, we all saw what Brandi had--there were three layers of blue icing amongst the inside of the cake. It was such a great moment to share with loved ones, and now we can spend the next 20 weeks planning for our baby boy. This will include painting the baby's room, stocking up on miniature sports stuff, and building a tolerance to SpongeBob SquarePants (half accomplished).


Thanks to Teresa for taking such great pictures of the party. To see the rest of the pictures, here's the link:
http://tree-of-souls.smugmug.com/Love-Nuggets/Its-a-Boy

Also, thanks to Courtney for taking our second trimester pictures out at Town Lake. They turned out awesome!