Gender Reveal Party!

So this time around I wasn’t feeling the whole baby shower thing. I have a girl and a boy already so I have preserved everything I could possibly need. No baby shower. But I still wanted to celebrate the pregnancy in some way. So I thought, why not a gender reveal? They’re pretty popular right now and there are so many neat ideas on how to reveal the gender of your baby that I was immediately attracted to the idea. The only downfall to that would be my secret keeping abilities. That is to say, I have none. But I was determined to keep it a secret for a few weeks at least and I can’t say I completely succeeded but not everyone knew when the party came.

So anyway, I got to work on Pinterest because where else would one get amazing ideas?  I finally decided simple was best. I just moved into this lovely apartment and still had a lot of boxes to get unpacked so I figured the less time I spend on making party decorations and things, the better off I’ll be and the less stressed I’ll be.

With a ton of help from my mom and husband the apartment is not in a “I just moved in” state anymore and I was at the party store looking for balloons and streamers at the earliest possible convenience. I’m sad to say that a good chunk of change was spent on this party simply for the fact I had to buy everything. I bought it all, from the food to the punch dispensers. I’m so glad I decided to go simple! The end result was pretty amazing if I do say so myself.

  
There were other streamers and balloons around the house but I didn’t end up taking any pictures of those. I’m pretty proud of this display though. Next time though I’ll put a boarder or something at the bottom to cover the bottom ends of the streamers. 

I decided to make the cake myself and have that be the reveal. I decided to make it lemon flavored because I had a really big craving for lemons for some reason! I used a box cake (because this girl had other things on her mind besides baking from scratch) but I made my own lemon curd . . . In the microwave. Yes, you read that correctly. In the microwave. Sophia helped me and was very proud with our results.

   
 

It turned out delicious. Seriously. I suggest making this if you ever need a lemon filling. This stuff is amazing. You can find the recipe here. The lemons I had were very tart and I added much more lemon zest than was called for but I had a tart craving.

So since the actual reveal part was out of the way I needed to concentrate on the food. That was easy . . . Pizza. You really can’t go wrong with it. It’s easy and cheap and I don’t get headaches trying to figure out how I’m going to get all the food prepared by myself with a toddler and 4-year-old wanting all of my attention without ripping my hair out. So that’s that. With the pizza my mother-in-law made her delicious (famous) potato salad and I made a fresh fruit salad with a whipped cream topping (cream cheese and cool whip) to go on the side and a veggie platter. No pictures of the food but it was all delicious.

For the drinks we had bottled water and the two punches pictured above. Both I got from Pinterest. Of course. The blue/green one consisted of blue Hawaiian punch and lemonade in equal parts. It was super yummy! The pink one was made of 7-up, squirt, and pink lemonade concentrate. Also super yummy! You can find the pink punch recipe here, and the blue punch recipe here.

  
I had Sophia color in the Hershey’s bars in pink and blue. Plain milk chocolate for the ‘she’ and the chocolate with almonds for the ‘he’. I also made an old wives tale board and a voting board. It was so much fun going through all the gender telling tricks and seeing if they rang true or not.

   
 

All in all it was a successful party. I kept it small and that was pleasant. Will totally think about doing this again if another little one comes along. Maybe next time I’ll just have the technician tell only my husband the gender so I can be surprised too! He’s way better at keeping secrets than I am anyway. 

Ah! I almost forgot to mention . . . 

  
It’s a boy! 💙