Baby O’s Gender Reveal Party

Hey y’all, If you don’t know me very well yet – one of my passions is planning parties. I tend to go all out no matter the event or amount of people. The only downfall is I have a bit of an expensive eye. The party I’m going to talk about today is my Gender Reveal Party!

What you will read about in this post:

• Guest List
• Decorations
• Food & Desserts
• The Gender Reveal Activity
• Special Grandparents Activity

The Guest list

Due to Covid19, we couldn’t invite very many people for this gender reveal event. Luckily, we have this cool thing called – the internet and we can do a really fun interactive virtual party. That being said, we decided to send a text style invite to our parents only. Here’s what it looked like:

I made this digital image using the Canva app on my phone. It is a really easy app to use and I just used images from google since it isn’t being used to sell professionally.

Decorations

Ok, first off – trying to come up with a theme for this party really took us (or me) a long time. There are so many ideas you can do with a party like this. Do you make it specific to the couple and make it really funny? Do you keep it very simple and obvious? How can you make it clever to be memorable? So complicated!

We landed on Lures & Lace because I didn’t have to worry about having to hand make everything on the computer or with crafts. We also thought this theme fit our personalities really well. My husband is really into fishing and of course, I have a passion for fashion! Lures & Lace is also a common theme being used so it made it easy to find specific decor online.

In this picture you’ll see the table we did that I’ll talk about in a different post when my husband finishes the other two chairs. 🙂

I kept telling Zach that I wanted it to vomit pink and blue in the apartment. HAHA. Any area that I could put something pink or blue I managed to do that.

Where I Purchased The Decorations:

• Banner –> Boy or Girl Gender Reveal Backdrop
• Balloon Arch –> Gender Reveal Balloon Garland Kit
• Lure’s & Lace Kit –> Lures Or Lace Gender Reveal Decoration
  • 1 Lures & Lace Banner, 30 Pink/Blue/White balloons, 1 Lures & Lace Cake Sign, 36 Toothpick pink/blue toppers
    • I used the balloons & plastic strip from this kit in my arch as well as around the apartment
• Flowers in the Arch – Michaels
  • I purchased my flowers at Michaels because I saw that they were having a huge 80% off sale of spring flowers. However, if this is not the case for you here are some options I found on Amazon:
    • Pink Roses: Artificial Roses Flowers 12 Heads
      • Just cut the stems so they aren’t a cluster anymore so you have more to stick in various locations on your arch
    • Pink Ball Flowers: Artificial Flowers Chrysanthemum Ball Flowers
    • Blue Hydrangeas: Artificial Hydrangea Heads with Stems
• Tassel Garland on chairs – Michaels
  • I purchased my tassels from Michaels because they were on a summer discount but here is a lookalike from Amazon –> Tissue Paper Tassel Garland
• Balloon Clusters & Streamers – Party City
  • These are the only helium balloons I did at Party City but I used my balloons I got from my kits to save money. In total for those balloons I still spent a little over $11.00. Not that expensive but party supplies add up!
  • Amazon didn’t have a ton of options for one roll of streamers so I ended up getting 1 pink roll and 1 blue roll at Party City for $1.99 each
• Marble Plates –> Marbleized 9 in. Paper (Set of 8) Disposable Plates
• Marble Napkins –> Marble 10″ Cocktail Napkin 16 Pack
• Picture Frames –> Sonogram Keepsake Photo Frame
• Letter Board
  • I got my letter board from Target several months ago but here is a similar one from Amazon–> Letter Board 10×10 inches

Balloon Arch Tips:

The arch is not as hard as it looks! At first, I thought I needed to go to Party City or another retailer and get it made by them but YOU CAN DO IT YOURSELF! The kit I mentioned above comes with a clear strip that once the balloon is blown up – you just stick the balloon inside the holes on the strip however you want!

• Start balloon arch the night before your party if you are able to.
• I’d get a balloon air machine if you are doing this alone like this one –> Electric Air Balloon Pump
  • It took my husband and I all night to blow these balloons up because we needed to take breaks!
• Both kits I bought came with a clear strip to put the balloons on – when you start to build your arch – make sure you leave a good amount at the end; this will be helpful for securing your arch on the wall or wherever your location is. You can always add more balloons if your arch is looking ‘sparse’ in that area later.
• If you want a ‘thicker’ arch – put the balloons in every hole on the strip but remember if you do this your balloons won’t go as far (length wise).
  • We made our top arch thicker (put balloons in every hole) and on the side parts we skipped holes and randomly added balloons
• The balloons don’t have to be put in the same direction; you can alternate to create a more 3D look.
• Make the balloons different sizes so you have more variety in your arch!
• Once you start putting your arch up in the location you want it – you can start to see where needs fixing. For example – we put our top arch up first (because we had 3 parts to our arch). Once we did that we could see that the left side had too many of one color and started replacing balloons to make it more balanced.
• The kits do not have an even amount of balloons so be cautious about where you are putting the gold and clear balloons so you don’t run out at the end!

Food & Desserts

For a party of 6 it’s actually quite difficult to figure out what would be good for dinner, snacks and dessert. Mostly because 6 people isn’t a lot of people in the grand scheme of things. For instance, you don’t want to have too many desserts just to have a pretty table because they won’t get eaten. That being said, I had to figure out a way to provide enough food but not too much so we didn’t waste it.

We decided on tacos because no one can go wrong with some delicious tacos! Pretty positive this is a universal food that everyone loves – like pizza :). For dessert we landed on cookies, brownies, jelly beans, and cake. Enough to fill my table but not too much where I was throwing out food (even though I did have leftovers ;)).

Dessert Table Details

• We taught ourselves how to make royal icing for the onesie cookies. We prepared these the night before our party. Be cautious on how you store them as they can get damaged really easily. But, it isn’t too complicated – if you want more info on this just message me!
  • What you’ll need for Onesie Cookie Royal Icing:
    • Onesie cookie cutter here –> Onesie Cookie Cutter
    • Meringue Powder which you can get here –> Wilton Meringue Powder
    • Decorating Tip for cookie border –> Wilton No.4 Decorating Tip, Round
    • Decorating Squeeze Bottles –> Icing Squeeze Bottles for Cookie Set of 3
    • Powdered Sugar, Water, vanilla, and food coloring
• I ordered the cake from our pick n’ save a couple days before our party. They didn’t have the gold flakes I wanted so I had to purchase those here –> Wilton Gold Heart Edible Accents
• The blue & pink jelly beans I got at Party City
  • They were expensive about $6.99 each but it was difficult to find anything cheaper that only had those two colors.

The Gender Reveal Activity

I know what you’re thinking – about time we get to the point of this post!! But here’s the thing… the decor is JUST as important as the point of any party. Or, at least I think so.

The reveal itself was actually the hardest part to plan because of Covid19. The fact that we couldn’t have a ton of people at our gathering we had to come up with a way to involve our friends and family virtually. At least, that’s what I wanted to do.

I didn’t want to just order a balloon with confetti inside, pop it, cheer and then say, ‘thanks everyone for watching’. HAHA. I wanted to value our viewers time and allow them to feel like they were apart of the celebration; if they wanted to be of course.

The Virtual Party:

• Create a facebook event 1.5 weeks before our event to allow attendees to accept and plan for the virtual party.
• Add my Old Wifes Tales Trivia and invite guests to vote if they think we would have a girl or boy by using the poll option on the event page.
• Day of we began asking questions to our attendees about 6 hours before the virtual party such as — Who do you think will change more diapers? & Who do you think will be the one to get up in the middle of the night to assist baby? and so on – it was quite surprising and fun to see what our guests answered!
• Finally – Log into Facebook Live & Facebook Room
  • We decided to do both options (one on the computer and one on the phone) because we weren’t sure if our guests would find us so we wanted to be prepared in case people were confused. So glad we did because it was confusing!! Though, we managed to get it all worked out!
  • We chose facebook because we didn’t have a zoom account and didn’t know how long it would last for – plus the majority of our viewers use facebook.

THE REVEAL

This part was extremely tricky! The majority of gender reveal parties that I’ve seen generally have a friend or family member assist them in taking the envelope you receive from the doctor and planning something for you. In our case because of Covid, we first decided to do it on our own. We were trying to come up with some sort of plan where we wouldn’t find out but we could still do some sort of surprise reveal. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with anything besides a balloon confetti pop but I didn’t want to do that because it wouldn’t be very interactive for our virtual guests.

That being said – I came up with an idea to do a sort of Bingo/Fishing Game. We recruited our good friend Annie to assist in the creation of the board and the finer details of the activity. We dropped off the envelope to her as soon as we received it so we wouldn’t be tempted to sneak a peak and she went to town creating a masterpiece!

I gave her some boundaries such as – has to be fishing related, wanting it to be bingo inspired and you know like – it can’t damage our walls or floors in our apartment. I also wanted her to incorporate some sort of ‘explosion’ which I was unsure about how to do. The cool thing is – Annie is a teacher and she is WILDLY creative!! I knew I could trust her with this HUGE secret and opportunity to surprise us with our baby’s gender and she blew it out of the park with perfection.

The Game:

Zach and I had to make 25 fish with magnets on them. Zach was to fish out of ‘the lake’ the ‘bingo numbers’ and then I got to pop the balloons on the bingo board. The game went on until we noticed that our last bingo fish was MISSING. This of course was the fish that would determine whether or not we were going to have a boy or a girl because our bingo board had a trick – – IT COULD BE EITHER!! We were looking for 5 pink fleur de lis in a row or 5 blue fish in a row.

Annie mastermind her way to trick us throughout the game and eventually we popped the last balloon and it had blue confetti in it revealing that we were having a BOY!! What she also did was, prior to the event starting – she messaged the attendees on the facebook event to get them to make a heart/fish drawing that they would hold up on the screen when it was time for the reveal of the last fish that was ‘MISSING’!! It was a great way to get our friends and family involved <3.

Our parents were given these poppers to pop once we all realized what the gender was –> 4 Pack Push Pop Confetti Poppers – She did have to paint them/cover them because they were see-through. But they are amazing poppers and left a HUGE mess on our floor which is perfect for a party!

We had so much fun with this gender reveal game and we thank our friend Annie so so much for putting so much effort and time into creating such a memory for us!!

Looking back on how it was going to be blue this whole time —

As we looked back at some of the minor things that were happening throughout the day it’s crazy to think we didn’t already assume it was going to be a boy. Here are some coincidences that happened on the day of the reveal:

• While putting up the Balloon Arch – our last section we had was to be built with whatever random balloons that were left – miraculously, the ratio of blue to pink was heavily pointing towards blue. I even said to Zach – “Why are there so many blues left!!”
• Even after rearranging all of the balloons – taking some out, putting some in and using leftovers for around the apartment we still managed to have 3 blue balloons leftover.
• The two sets of helium balloons I got I wanted to put on the mantle and the first set I put up were the pink ones and the moment I put it up the only pink balloon on there popped!
  • After that when the helium was dying – the blue set ended up covering up the ‘lace’ sign and only revealing the LURES sign.
• I invited our parents to wear pink or blue to the party and I thought 100% my mom would be in pink because she is obsessed with that color – she came to the party in BLUE… Thus… everyone was in blue (Zach’s mom was tricky and wore both colors)
• For bedtime (noticed during breakfast) Zach puts on a random shirt that had the date 8.21.17 on it. This was a shirt gifted by his mom that was from the night of the solar eclipse! As Zach would put it – it was the moment the SON was hidden but then.. REVEALED. I know, I know mind blowing!! So basically, it was set in the stars that we’d have a SON… REVEALED 3 years later!!

Anyway, just a few funny things we started to notice after we found out that we were having a little boy. Believe in those things or not it’s still funny to see!

Special Grandparents Gender Reveal Activity

Instead of games for our party, since we only had six people total, I decided to create two projects that would involve the grandparents-to-be! There were a couple of tricky parts to this activity; 1: Would it be fun for each of them, being that they have different personalities and 2: Would there be enough time to complete the project.

I came up with having them create a Crib Mobile and a Play Gym. I wanted the grandmas to work together on the mobile and the grandpas to work on the play gym. When baby grows up we’ll be able to tell them about this special thing their grandparents did for them!

They worked so hard being creative and coming up with something that came straight from their hearts for our baby boy and it truly makes it that much more special!

Where We Purchased The Supplies:

All below items were used for both projects depending on what the gparent wanted to create. The only thing I asked was that the stuffed deer went on the mobile and the silicone deer went on the play gym. I also provided printouts of examples of other mobiles and play gyms so they could reference something.

I also provided some templates they could use for the leaves and animals or could create them on their own. Zach then ‘prepped’ the boards for the play gym so that no drilling or sawing was necessary day of.

• Baby Silicone Beads Kit – Used for both project except, Silicone Deer used for Play Gym
• Purchased three 6ft 2x1s at Menards; see below for dimensions image for Play Gym
• Purchased a dowel from Menards; see below for dimensions image for Play Gym
• Purchased the Play Gym rope from Joanns
• Organic Baby Rattle – Deer – Used for center of Mobile
• Round Hoops, 8-Inch by 3/4-Inch Depth – Used for Mobile
• Wooden Teether Bead Set – Used for both projects
• Purchased the various woodland color felt and thread from Joanns for the Mobile

In Conclusion

Wow, That was A LOT. It’s amazing what goes into creating a party isn’t it? Even if it is just six people a party is a lot of work and preparation. Of course, we could have just had dinner and opened the envelope from the doctor but – what fun would that have been?

I hope you enjoyed seeing what our gender reveal looked like and what we did to make it special to us!

Enjoy our Gender Reveal Video Here: