Crisan Baby Gender Reveal

I love throwing parties, but throwing parties while living in a different state is very difficult. One because you don't have weeks to prep all the pretty things. Two because you
don't get to enjoy time with family and friends while visiting, your just busy party prepping for most of the trip. Moving from Portland to Seattle, from Seattle to Dallas, and from Dallas to Savannah I've had my share of out of state party planning. When our family found out we were pregnant they were really excited. Being the first grandchild for my side of the family, everyone started bothering me throw a gender reveal party. That being said, I needed to fly to Portland for the party, where all our family and friends lived. I also needed to somehow find out the gender of our baby, without I myself knowing.

I was seeing my own OBGYN for baby, but my sister in law who lives in Dallas and is a high risk pregnancy specialist offered to do our anatomy scan for us. I was 17 weeks at the anatomy scan appointment, a few weeks earlier than my regular OB would have done my anatomy scan, but we wanted to know before our Easter trip to Portland so that we could throw a gender reveal party. We asked our sister-in-law to keep the gender a secret, so at the end of the appointment she wrote the gender on a card and put it in an envelope for us. Our trip to Portland was about three weeks after the anatomy scan. So for three weeks I kept the envelope in a safe spot and for three weeks my family bugged me about telling them the gender. They wanted me to have a gender reveal party but they also couldn't wait to know what the baby was going to be. After debating for days, I decided that I wasn't going to share the gender with anyone. I thought all of us finding out together would be the most fair and the most fun as far as real reactions from everyone at the same time.

I wanted the party to be fun but I also wanted the actual reveal part to not turn into another youtube fail video. My husband and I watched so many fails on Youtube trying to get ideas, that I was getting a little discouraged. I decided that the hanging box of balloons was a definite no (had the most fails) and the cake idea or balloon pop were boring and overused. One idea we really liked was a smoke bomb. We couldn't find many videos of a gender reveal with a smoke bomb and we later found out why. Smoke bombs are so hard to find! I found some online but we didn't have enough time to order them from another country where they were more readily available. Thankfully I married a genius husband who knows everything about everything. He found some locally!

The day of the party, my husband taped both the red and blue smoke tubes with black tape so you couldn't see which one was which. He then placed them in different spots and showed my brother in law Chris where the blue and where the red was placed. When everyone was ready and outside we gave the envelope to my brother in law Chris and he grabbed the correct ones, based on what was written on the inside of the envelope.

Here are some photos from the party. Enjoy!