Happy News for a Happy New Year- Gender Reveal Party

Happy New Year!

We celebrated our New Year by finding out if our baby would be a boy or a girl. PS. we're pregnant. Haven't shared it on the blog but we shared the news already on FB.  We had some friends over (at my parents home since an apartment is not made for any kind of entertaining) for a New Year's Eve celebration and the gender reveal. I've been wanting to do this for at least a month so I had been scouring blogs and pinterest for ideas but we didn't 100% implement the plan until a couple days before. We were afraid not enough friends would be in town. The day before the ultra-sound, we thought we weren't going to do it but I found myself depressed thinking we weren't going to do it, so we went forward and hoped for the best.

I'm so happy with how things turned out. I just wish I had taken pictures- I was too busy running around and my camera decided to die.  I wanted it to be a New Year's Eve party not just a gender reveal party, I think we did pretty good balancing it out... I hope. ;)

These are the pictures I was able to get as people were walking through the door.....
At the entrance to cast their vote...we used their vote to divide into teams for the games.

(In the basket are fun size Hershey bars with the "HE" and "SHE" colored in pink and blue with a thank you note on it. I actually did a small party favor! Something you always see on the fancy party blogs but who really gets that done in real life? And I actually did a small one! Ha! :) 

The dessert table...simple. Didn't get the appetizer table. So much yummy food there...I loved how I stringed the gold and silver balloons over the buffet-super simple but it turned out festive.  oh well. (this is me documenting maybe I'll just remember it by reading it without pictures. 

I tried to quickly snap a picture of Boo and I using the photo props before my camera died so it ended up blurry....but you get the idea. They didn't end up getting used for pictures but the kids played with them. (I had a hat and Boo had glasses)

I had 4 balloons hanging along one of the wide entry ways into the living room. (they had numbers on them....4-3-2-1...like counting down but you really couldn't see them). Anyway, inside each balloon were the games that we played. We popped them as we went on through the evening. We played 2 truths and a lie of 2012 (I think they all seemed to enjoy that one), a couple rounds of Pictionary, Minute to Win it games, and Guesstures.  

The winning team....which ended up being the Boys (the ones that voted that we were going to have a baby boy)., got confetti poppers to shoot off at our midnight (8:30 so the kids go home and go to bed). 

I had thought long and hard how to do a cool New Year's Eve Gender Reveal. I saw on one blog that they did fireworks. How cool would that be??? They would have either pink or blue fireworks! So cool. Unfortunately, fireworks are illegal in Lincoln. I figured it wasn't a good idea to have the bishop blatantly disregarding the law in front of several people from church, so we scratched that. I thought about a balloon drop but couldn't figure out how to hide the pink or blue balloons from the party until "midnight" drop.

So I thought I'd do confetti but struggled with how to implement it until my dad on New Year's Eve made a confetti shooter out of PVC pipe.  We gave him the sealed envelope from the ultra sound tech a half hour before so he could fill it with the appropriate color and at "midnight" shot it off the balcony (is that the right term? not sure) that over looks the living room.. It was pretty cool and messy with all the confetti poppers that everyone else shot off plus the PINK confetti from up above. yep PINK. we're having a girl!

yep PINK. we're having a girl!

It definitely made celebrating the New Year more exciting by finding out awesome news for our 2013! I'm so glad so many friends were able to make it and play with us that night.