Baby Shower

How to pull off a fun-for-all Gender Reveal Party!

Gender Reveal parties are a super fun way to celebrate finding out the gender of your baby along side all of your closest family and friends. There are countless ways reveal the gender, but when it came time for our gender reveal, we wanted one that everyone could be involved in. 

First, we started with a Bowties and Bows theme. I found a great invite on Etsy that went with this theme, and used Celebrations.com to send them out digitally.

I ordered small pink bows and blue bowties as seen below. When our guests arrived, they had to cast their vote, boy or girl, by either clasping a blue bowtie around their neck, or attaching the pink bow to their clothing or hair. My husband was team girl, and I was team boy!

The Games.

Before we revealed the gender, we had several games for the guests to participate in.

The name game. Our guests wrote down their name suggestions for both a boy and girl, and entered them in the buckets. Our family has a fairly unique naming tradition, so we indicated what letters we wanted to names to start with.

We then went through the names and picked our favorites, one boy name and one girl name, and gave the winners a prize. Some were cute, some were deep, and some were funny (like Ravacado, named after my husbands favorite food).

We also played a wives’ tale game, where we tested how well our guests knew the old wives tales about how to determine the gender of the baby.

The last game was a baby charades game. Where people got to act out words associated with babies. The best part was watching all the single men try to act some of these things out (like changing a diaper)! We also had some physical games going in the backyard like "corn hole" and badminton. 

The Reveal

 We wanted something exciting and visual, and nothing screams fun and messy more than silly string! We bought silly string in both pink and blue, and wrapped them to look the same before hand. We kept them separate, and then had my sister-in-law Sage be the one to read “the envelope” first, and pick the right color. Each family got a silly string, and on THREE, everyone sprayed us until their cans ran out.

It’s a BOYYYYYYYY!!!! My husband was screaming, as I hid my face from the silly string attacking my face! He seems awfully excited for someone who was “Team Girl” ;-)  We were both elated, and were so happy to share this moment with our family, friends, and my parents on Skype!

Looks like this squad of boys will have one more member joining their team!


How To Make a Diaper Cake

This was my first time making a diaper cake for my sister-in-law Victoria's Peacock themed sprinkle. Since Honest actually sells super cute peacock diapers, I simply couldn't pass this opportunity up! Based on what I've heard from mothers who have been on the receiving end of diaper cakes, it is EXTREMELY annoying to unroll each individual diaper if you choose to make it that way. So, I chose to make it the (slightly) more challenging way, which is to keep all the diapers in tact and maneuvering them around to make a perfect circle. 

Here's what you will need:

- About 36 diapers (I used size 2 diapers, but only because that's the only size they had in stock of the peacock design. I would have rather worked with size nb or 1)

- Durable string or twine & scissors

- Ribbon (at least 1" wide)

- Double sided tape

-Any desired add-on decor. 

The easiest way to create the cake "layers" was to find 3 different sizes of bowls or, in my case, pots, to use as my "molds". I started with the biggest one, and started placing the diapers in about 4 at a time, making sure that the folded part was on the outside. Because there would be layers to cover this one, I wasn't extremely concerned about what the inside looked like (only that the outside was aligned evenly. Once I fit as many diapers as I could, I got the twine ready. I flipped, and slowly let the diapers slide out while I was ready to wrap the twine around the diapers, keeping their circular shape.

After tying the twine as tight as possible, I set aside, and started working on the second layer. 

After repeating this for each layer, I rearranged any of the diapers that did not appear to be evenly dispersed from the outside. Then I wrapped the diapers in ribbon to cover the twine, closing with double sided tape. You could also tie in a bow, but I wanted this cake to look clean. 

Finally, I topped off the cake with a peacock bird I found at Michaels, and placed peacock feathers throughout the layer. Here is the final product (in really bad lighting!). It was absolutely perfect for the welcome table!