Celebrating Life's Special Events

These days it seems like everyone wants to make a big show of life's special events.  Elaborate marriage proposals, surprise baby announcements, and these days even prom proposals or promposals as they are known.  So it should come as no surprise that revealing the gender of your baby would warrant the same pomp and circumstance. 

The Big Reveal

The days of waiting until the baby is born to find out the gender is almost a thing of the past.  And once you know yourself, you can't just casually share this information in a passing conversation. I shutter at the thought.  Maybe you could just gather everyone you know into one room and shout it's a...  Well sure that fulfills the need to have everyone staring at you for your moment in the spotlight but that still sounds just so mundane and boring.  

Scour the internet and you'll find plenty of suggestions.  Everything from colorful cakes to water balloons filled with dye.  But do any of those feel right for me?  Well let's see, I do like cake and the the idea of being covered in blue or pink dye sounds like a real pain.  That was easy, let's eat some cake.  

Not so fast.  

A Simple Plan

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable".  In our situation it turns out that our plans were indeed useless.  

For us the plan started out simple enough.  We would take a paper and envelope to our week 20 ultrasound and ask the technician to write the gender on the paper and seal it in the envelope.  We would then take the top secret document to the nearest baker and ask them to bake the gender appropriate color into an icing laden confection.  Cake in hand we would invite our family over and all find out together.  So far I don't see how this could go wrong.  

The Best Laid Plans...

The unraveling of a sweater often happens in such a gradual way it's hard to recognize the damage until you feel a draft.  Our unraveling started in the most innocent of ways.  About a week before our week 20 ultrasound my wife suggested maybe we should find out the baby's gender before the rest of our family.  This would allow us to have our own little special moment together and then a separate special celebration with our family.  The paper and envelope was still in play as we didn't want to know until we were alone together.  Sure, this is a slight modification to the plan but if anything this enhances the plan.

Around this same time my wife had invited my mother to join us for the ultrasound appointment.  This would be her first chance to see the baby "in person" so to speak.  Apparently one key piece of information was not clearly communicated.  My mother met us that morning fully expecting to find out the baby's gender.  Not wanting to disappoint her we made another slight modification to the plan.  Paper and envelope... check.  The only difference is she would peek at the paper before it was sealed away.  You might be thinking, she shouted something out and gave away the surprise.  I'm happy to say that was not the case.  

That evening my wife and I had a lovely dinner at Disney's Grand Floridian.  Our meal was followed by a romantic stroll around the grounds, finally finding the perfect spot, we settled into a bench in the garden.  Our anticipation had been building for months.  Both of us were sure it was a boy but something in my moms face and the expression of the ultrasound tech each time we said he or him made us think it could be a girl.  We would know in a moment.  Carefully I tore into the envelope to release the coveted parchment from its prison.  I held the folded paper for a brief tense moment before it was unfolded.  We finally knew that our baby boy who we affectionately referred to as peanut was in fact a girl.  

Despite this minor correction to our earlier assumptions, all was right with the world.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't just the slightest bit disappointed I would not be having a son. Fortunately those feelings drifted away on the breeze as we talked excitedly about the future of our little girl.  Not to mention the impending festivities of telling my wives family.

Out With the Old and in With the New

In the days leading up to our gender reveal my wife discovered that one of her nieces would be having her birthday party the Saturday after we were to find out the baby's gender.  Initially we though we would just do our gender reveal the following weekend.  However, since my mother now knew, my wife didn't want to make her family wait.  The solution... family members would arrive to the party a little early and do a gender reveal before the birthday party started.  

With her sisters and nieces blessing my wife decided this would be the new plan.  Now in the eleventh hour there was no time for the cake.  Still we wanted to do something special.  Cue the balloons.  The new plan would be to get two 3 foot helium balloons filled with confetti and burst them above our heads.  With hours to spare my wife confirmed our local party store could fulfill this request in the time allotted, with 2 foot helium balloons instead of 3 foot.  With no time to waste this would have to do.  

I had several errands that needed to be run that morning, so it was decided I would stop and pickup the balloons on my way back home, with just enough time to hit the road for the hour long drive to the party.  The party store was quite busy, particularly with other balloon orders but the staff there was very accommodating and understanding of my tight schedule.  I just needed to pick out the balloons and confetti and they would take care of the rest.  

Not knowing how much confetti was needed, I picked up two small packages each, of two different types.  Turns out two (one of each) was enough.  Balloon number one was filled with confetti and then came the helium.  It was pretty quickly evident that the balloon was leaking air.  As fate would have it, one princess themed confetti package contained a large number of very sharp pink and purple stars which seemed to have punctured the balloon.  The confetti from balloon one was quickly transferred to ballon number two.  One employee decided the issue was that the filling station they were using was filling the balloon too quickly and thus causing the confetti to thrash around inside the balloon and subsequently puncturing the side.  The other, much slower filling station did in fact cause less commotion inside the balloon.  We now had one of the 2 foot balloons ready to go.  Although if you ask me this 2 foot balloon looks about 3 foot across.  Not to worry because balloon two, looking more like a 2 foot balloon was now filled as well.

Unexpected Reveal

Now 45 minutes after entering the store I was on my way out with my lopsided confetti capsules aloft.  Too excited to wait, balloon number one (you'll recall the over achieving 2 foot balloon) decided that some random lady in the parking lot was the first person that needed to know about the surprise reveal.  Yes, that's right.  In mid parking lot with no external assistance, balloon one decided to burst, raining pink and purple confetti down on the asphalt.  No time to spare, the one remaining balloon would have to be enough.  Opening the rear passenger door of my car I realized that balloon number one was in fact a hero who sacrificed itself to save me the misery of trying to figure out what to do with it.  Its smaller twin would not itself fit though the door opening.  To the front passenger seat we go!  With both the balloon and myself holding our collective breaths we were just able to squeeze into the passenger seat.  

Now having just witnessed the violent demise of its sibling, I found myself sitting with my face inches from this latex frag grenade filled with dainty razor sharp princess stars.  The drive home was quite tense to say the least.

Party of Two

Having heard this harrowing tale, my wife decided she what not going to feel comfortable with this ticking time bomb of joy riding along with us for our hour long drive to the party.  She decided she would rather limit the chance of a highway balloon blowout and just pop it within the safety of our home.  Needless to say, I was not particularly fond of this idea, having gone through so much for essentially nothing more than a mess to clean up.  However as with most things in life, "yes dear" seemed the prudent choice of phrase in this situation.  So with no uncertainty as to the content of the balloon, our only source of surprise would have to be, how much will this scare us?  The answer... quite a lot.

My wife's strategy would be to use a pair of scissors and cut a small whole and to slowly let the air out.  To my surprise this actually worked... for about 10 seconds.  Then as you would expect the balloon, as balloons will, decided this was taking too long.  The sudden startle of the explosion was followed by the realization that a little confetti can make a big mess.  Though most of it was contained to within 5 or 6 feet of where my wife stood.  There were some pieces 20 or 30 feet away.   

What followed was that moment all vacuum cleaner salesmen have been trying to warn us about for decades now.  The time when you'll use your vacuum cleaner to suck up an obscene amount of random and highly visible debris.  A dozen passes over the carpet later and we were on our way.

Back to Basics

With our grand announcement now filling the inside of a trash can, we would have to adjust the plan yet again.  This time our only limit was that of our imaginations and whatever was inside my car.  Our best idea was to just give my wife's niece (the birthday girl) the piece of paper with "girl" written on it  and let her tell the rest of the family.  

Although this was not the way we had envisioned this moment it was still very special.  My wife's family was happy and to say the birthday girl was happy would be a huge understatement.  Apparently there was some side bet that if she correctly guessed the gender ahead of time she would be the one planning our baby shower.

Tying Up Loose Ends

In the days that followed by wife and I would each surprise our coworkers with a gender reveal.  Me with pink candy in a dispenser that sits on my desk and her with a much more elaborate plan that involved a plastic egg hunt and cupcakes.

Needless to say, not everything went according to plan, but that's okay.  Really, how often in life does everything go as you plan it?  My guess is some of the moments that mean the most to you didn't go as you thought they would.  In the end we have a great story to tell.  Not the one we planned but one much better.