Gender Announcement!

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Hey There!

I can hardly believe we’re already to week 23 of this pregnancy! We revealed the gender to the immediate family last weekend, and now I’m excited to share it with you!

Little Bit is a girl!! She’s due in October, and we’re so excited.

We asked our families to guess what they thought the gender would be, and I saw a lot of pink guesses. My father has this bizarre knack for guessing genders. Chalk it up to mountain voodoo, but he’s never wrong and, of course, he was right about Little Bit.

I had a blast planning and organizing the reveal BBQ. Since it’s summer and The Fellow has an undying love for Hawaiian shirts and I’m still riding out this pink flamingo obsession, I decided to go for a luau theme.

My mother made the macaroni salad, and my mother-in-law made deviled eggs, so I only had a few dishes to prepare which made the prep portion nice and easy.

Something that was not as easy as anticipated was the balloon cluster. I had originally pulled inspiration for a balloon arch from a Pinterest image, but a few factors led us to shortening the arch to a cluster. First, I was NOT anticipating how round a balloon arch is! Our little porch space was not going to accommodate the whole arch and have room for the food. The second was that the air compressor we had wasn’t working, so we wound up blowing all of the balloons up ourselves. When I say “we,” I mean The Fellow and Little J. I was in charge of attaching them to the arch string.

Can you see the gold-speckled balloons in the picture? I had thought they’d be printed with the gold, but they were actually filled with confetti! The Fellow was blowing one up, and it popped and confetti went EVERYWHERE. I laughed SO hard.

Overall, the decorations were easy to find and assemble. The leaves in the arch and the sand shovels and pails came from Hobby Lobby. The table cloth was from Michael’s. The flamingo cut-outs were from the Dollar Tree, and I scored the adorable flamingo party pack on Amazon.

The actual reveal was a cake I baked with Little J’s help. Sticking with the theme and some Pinterest inspiration, I made a pineapple cake, but not the type you normally think of. This was a white cake (dyed pink) in the shape of a pineapple!  This was my first experience with shaving a cake, and it went pretty smoothly. I used the top off of a real pineapple and fastened it with a skewer to keep it secure. I was a little worried about dyeing the batter pink. (BTW, 4 drops of red food dye to 1 box of white cake batter is the perfect ration), but it all came out well. I didn’t even bother with a piping tip to do the icing. I just cut the end off of the pastry bag and did little dollops around the base of the cake staggering them.

It may not have looked like real pineapple, but it was cute and served its purpose.

Overall, I think the theme was a success, and it was nice to get the two families together to celebrate the new addition.