How should one announce if baby is a boy or a girl?

There is a rather new trend that I love, Gender reveal parties! Life is short and I really believe we should take what ever good reasons we can to celebrate and share our joy together. As I still haven’t really found a “Tribe” for our family in Georgia, I thought it would be good to share our news back home where I grew up. We did something super simple though instead of a party. There so many creative and fun ways to share the news of baby being a boy or girl and we picked what I thought was a rather simple one! Simple was good because thanks to the military messing with our leave dates we had to spend most of Easter on the road! After traveling for near 20 hours over those 2 days we needed simple!

Before letting the kids run and find their ester eggs we gave them cans of silly spray that didn’t indicate their color. I love that about the brand we found of silly string! We just had to make sure we hid the covers so the kids didn’t see them. Then we asked them to spray me.

My thinking was that if the kids quickly learned of what baby was and then moved on to hunting for Easter eggs it would specially help our 9 year old son.

        Helping a child deal with gender disappointment of sibling

About 5 years ago we took our 3 children to an ultra sound to learn the gender of their coming little sibling. We had at the time 2 girls and a boy. To our shock when learning baby was a girl our very level headed and smart and sweet boy had a full on melt down like we have never seen before or since. He fell to the ground and cried and sobbed and was so inconsolable until finally he stood up and wiped his tears and sternly told us all that it would be ok, the next baby would be his baby brother. My husband and I didn’t have the heart to tell him then that there would be no more babies, that was not the plan!

But plans change!

So here we are, expecting our 5th, and this time we did not take the children with us to the gender ultrasound!

            Our reveal plan worked!

While the video is really terrible and I admit I have no talent for such things I wanted to share the quick moment we had under a stormy New England sky while visiting family on Easter.

It has now been 24 hours and all the kids have settled right down with the understanding it seems that they will have another sister in about 20 more weeks!