The Studer Family: Our Gender Reveal Party!!!

I just want to make sure I document this, so I'm writing it on here...it's just the details of our gender reveal party...read if you want!

I want to document a few things on how our Gender Reveal Party on New Years Eve went down before I forget. We sent out invitations a little late (but it was only family coming, and they all knew about it anyways!), but we got them out by Christmas Eve. Our theme was all about bees…we had a bar-BEE-que, we asked the question what’s baby Studer gonna BEE? And we had lots of little things to tie in the yellow and black bumble bee theme.

Everyone was asked to wear either pink or blue based on their decision as to what they thought I was carrying—boy or girl. Almost EVERYONE wore pink and a couple people (Uncle Wayne and my dad) tried to be smart by wearing both pink AND blue! Oh well. I guess I really do need to shut my mouth and not voice my opinion so loudly. Oh well. We still had fun with it although we didn’t get a whole group shot of everyone that came. I created 2 other little game-ish type things for people to play. One was guess when baby Studer will arrive where everyone had to guess the date and time and closest guess when the baby arrived would get a prize, and the other was name suggestions. It was fun to see what everyone thought—early, late, boy, girl, family name, unique name, etc.

After everyone arrived and we had the food set, Nathan prayed a VERY nice prayer thanking everyone for coming, thanking God for his provision in 2011, and for this baby I was carrying. It got a bit emotional toward the end, but he made it through and then it was time to eat. We had bar-bee-qued pork, pulled pork sandwiches with open pit sauce, pulled pork sandwiches plain, chips, corn, potato salad, and a fruit salad. To drink we had a pineapple punch, ice water, coffee, a variety of hot chocolates, 2 liters of pop that Nathan’s parents brought, and beer (although I don’t think anyone drank one, but Nathan HAD to have beer to offer people different options and he said that beer went with our bar-bee-que theme). After eating dinner I had people finish up their guesses as to when the baby would arrive and names, and then we rounded everyone up upstairs in our living room where we were to open a bottle of colored champagne. Nathan figured that because I wanted to have a party to celebrate this baby’s gender he would get in on the creativity and figure out a cool way to reveal the gender—instead of just a boring cake cutting (according to him!).

We had everyone in the living room and we had Kyler help us hold the champagne glass. Nathan popped the cork off the bottle and it did start bubbling over a little bit to which everyone could see that it was pink, but he poured it and everyone smiled and said their congratulations. We then poured a little champagne (or sparkling grape juice for those of us who couldn’t or didn’t want to drink) and had a toast to this new life and the new year! After the toast, I made Nathan come in our dining room where we cut open a cake that my mom had purchased from a local baker who put pink filling in the cake. We also had chocolate covered strawberries and pretzels with yellow stripes to look like bumblebees and chocolate chip cookies for dessert. After we ate dessert people congratulated us and said their goodbyes and Nathan, his parents, Kyler and I cleaned up just a little bit, then watched a movie (Feivel Goes West) upon which I fell asleep (surprise!) maybe 5 minutes in. Grandpa and Grandma Studer went upstairs to bed and Kyler stayed awake to ring in the new year with Nate. He made it to midnight (they did wake me up just before midnight!) and then we took him upstairs to bed. He called Grandpa Chuck and told him Happy New Year and then immediately (I mean like 2 seconds off the phone) put his head on the pillow and was OUT! The only bad thing was he didn’t sleep well in our room and woke up at 3am, but I guess I must have had enough sleep because I was up at 8 and getting ready to go to church. All in all our party was a success, and we rang in the New Year with WONDERFUL news and had a blast doing it with family!

and now, for some pics of the night!