Baby Name Reveal Party

A surprise reappearance on the blog!  Yay!  Although I very much liked the idea of closing the Grand Life blog with our last Cayman entry, I decided this was the best venue to share the details of our fun gender/name reveal party.  Yes, to catch you up a tiny bit from the last post - we are having a baby!

We were super excited to schedule our 18 week ultrasound.  Finally we'd find out if a "he" or "she" was on the way.  An occasion like this certainly warranted a little party. We decided it would be fun to have family over to announce not just the gender but also the name!

I designed the invite and party trimmings myself, using coral and teal as the main colors.  

My favorite detail from the party were these little salad jars.  Each of our moms offered to contribute to the party, so I had my mom (aka "Winky," as her two grandsons already call her) bring pasta salad and Brent's mom (aka "Gaga") bring fruit salad.  They turned out so cute!

Now on to the game we used for the big reveal!  This is an idea I actually had a while back, before we were even trying for a baby.  I knew I wanted to have a boy and girl name picked out before the ultrasound so we could start calling baby by his or her name right away.  Then I thought how fun it would be if we revealed the name at the party to let everyone know the gender.

So we came up with 8 girl names and 8 boy names (there were 16 people at the party).  We wrote the boy names on blue name tags and girl names on red name tags.  At the beginning of the party everyone drew a name from a bowl.  Then every 5 minutes we crossed off a name from the list.  The person who drew the real name was the winner!

We made this board to keep track of the names that were left throughout the party.  Brent wrote the boy names and I wrote the girl names, a nice personal touch (though I really wanted to avoid the pressure and print the poster!).

People were kind of surprised that we decided to play this game since we are pretty tight-lipped about the names we like.  But, although each of the names on the list was considered at some point, all but the real one had been ruled out for one reason or another.  Some were names only one of us liked, some were names that had become too popular in recent years, and some just weren't favorites.  So none were names we would actually use in the future, which means our top 2 or 3 names for each gender are still safe for future kiddos!

Like many gender parties, we had people dress in pink or blue to show if they thought baby was a girl or boy.  We debated doing this, but I do think it's a fun way to record people's guesses.  As you can see, the girl votes far out numbered the boy votes!

The game was a hit!  People stayed engaged and got excited every time we rang the "elimination bell."

Timer's going off!

We had the real name written on a second board tied behind the name board.  So once we had it narrowed down to one girl and one boy name, it was time for the big reveal!

We have a SON on the way!  It's so exciting to know that we are now anxiously anticipating our little Gio's arrival!

That's my boy!  Love him so much already!