Friday, August 14, 2015

Gender Reveal Party

Almost a month ago, Matt and I had our doctor’s appointment to find out if Baby Nolte is a boy or girl.  Let me tell you: technology amazes me and to how much ultrasounds can show and do!  I had no idea that they could measure certain things, like the circumference of the baby’s head—like, that’s just insane to me!  THEN, when the technician started creating the 3-D images…Holy Cow!
After our appointment, Matt went to work and I went straight to Kohl’s, to buy this onesie:

Matt had already bought the first item for Baby Nolte to wear, just three days after we found out there was a Baby Nolte. Haha.  I’ve always loved these cute little animal hooded towels, so he picked up this one:

After going to Kohl’s, I headed to meet Mom so we could go buy some last minute decorations for our Gender Reveal Party (we already spent the previous Friday buying lots of stuff!!).  After a late night for everyone on Friday, and me going back to sleep until about 11:00am, Mom and I spent the rest of the day shopping for food and preparing the food.  It was a LONG day, to say the least!!  The cupcakes were probably our favorite thing, and they were fun to make!
We sent Abby this picture of the cake mix after I poured it, and she said it looked like Trix Yogurt—she’s so right! It looks like the cotton candy flavor, so of course that’s all I thought about for the rest of the night making them! Haha.


Time for the frosting!


Matt even helped frost the cupcakes :)

We wanted to tell as much of our family at one time as possible, so we invited everyone over for the party!  I wish I could say that we couldn’t have asked for better weather, but it was just the opposite.  It felt like a million degrees outside for the first hour, and then started raining just after we did the reveal.  We started emptying the water vases on the tables earlier than planned, and I felt so bad that everyone had to leave earlier than we planned. :( Hey, at least we got to do our reveal and THAT wasn’t rained out!!

These vases from our wedding centerpieces have really been useful as we've been having more and more parties and events to decorate for! 

I punched out all of the confetti (which was a lot of fun) and also the reason I wanted to save it.  No way was I letting all that work go into the trash so quickly! haha


This was Matt's idea to have by the drinks:

We had three beer options, with Matt's most recent home brew, appropriately named "Ice Ice Baby Brew."

Matt's dad made the bottle openers made for the party:


I loved making this chalkboard to display:

Lots of good food!
Since it was SO HOT outside, we waited until the last possible minute to set everything out.

For the reveal, I knew I wanted to have a box hanging up where everything inside would just fall down. Matt then came up with the idea to paint it like one of the question mark boxes in Super Mario.  He did SUCH a great job painting it—it turned out awesome!!  On Sunday before the party, we filled the mystery box with the appropriate color balloons, streamers and ribbons, and we made our first haul of all our stuff for the party.  We had a few things left to prepare and a few more cupcakes to frost!


My cousin Gabby took this video for us:


My cousin Brooke sent me these next three pictures!


The kids that were there loved the balloons, so those are the only pictures we have of the balloons.  My favorite ones were the polka dot ones I found.
Since Abby is already in Northern Virginia for her new job, Aunt Sherrie FaceTimed her in between her meetings so that she could see the reveal. Later on, everyone else found out that Abby had known since we knew!  Right after we left our doctor's appointment, I called her to tell her.


We asked everyone to wear blue or pink, depending on if they thought it would be a boy or a girl.  Matt and I had thought all along that it was a boy, so we knew we'd be wearing blue.  A couple days before we found out, I told Mom what color we were wearing, so if we were right and it was a boy, it wouldn't seem like we changed our minds on the color, just to be right. haha.

TEAM BLUE


TEAM PINK


Mom bought this flag and had it hanging up at the party...I didn't even see it until she pointed it out later that evening! She also bought one for Matt's parents.