Guest Post - Gender Reveal Party

I have a special treat for my fabulous readers today! When Lance and I started dating he lived in Suwanee in a neighborhood.....where the houses were really....no- really close together! It's a good thing he had fabulous neighbors.....because the Friend family is part of our adopted family. My guest blogger today is a girl I met when she was 15 and I have seen her learn to drive, graduate high school, start college (to become a teacher :), and will ONE day watch her graduate from college. Whenever she has a crafty project, she knows just who to call......me, of course! So this post is about one of our fabulous Saturdays together! I'm going to turn this over to Laurin.....

Hello! I am thrilled to be a guest blogger on the blog this week. I have been trying to convince Michelle to start a blog since she was pregnant with Addi, so I am sure you can all imagine my excitement when you finally gave me the go ahead to create her blog. :)

I’ll start by introducing myself. I am Laurin. Michelle and I have been friends since 2005 when her boyfriend (now husband) lived next door to my family. I wanted to be a teacher so I started helping out in her classroom. Since then, I have watched her get married, move an hour away from me, have two beautiful little girls and have even been honored with being her youngest, Sofia’s godmother. Now lets get to the fun part!

I have two sisters, one older, one younger. I have a horrible case of middle child syndrome. Jokes. I don’t have it too bad. We all live in different places so it can only be SO bad. My younger sister is still in high school so she lives with my mom, I am in college so I live in the town I go to school in and my older sister is married and lives with her husband in a town about a half an hour away from me. I am the closest family member to my sister and brother-in-law, Jennifer and Jesse, so I was overly thrilled when they announced in February that they are having a baby in August! I adore entertaining at any level. My mom is the best party planner that I know, she throws the best parties. With her awesome parties in my head and Pinterest as my most commonly clicked shortcut on my computer, a gender reveal was a must in my head. I started at my sister Jennifer almost immediately. She was not totally sold on the idea. She said it was a new idea that was a bit weird. Not being one who gives up easily I kept at it, one night after work she said she has officially decided yes! I went to straight to her house and we planned almost everything that night, with the help of Michelle and my mom. I was out of town for almost two weeks leading up to the party so we really had to get our butts into gear. We went to Michelle’s that Sunday and spent the whole day making decorations. Jennifer did a great job of pulling most of the other details together while I was out of town.

Now for the rundown of all the fun stuff we did and pictures from the awesome party!

For the front door I made this adorable burlap pennant banner. It was a fun little project I whipped up in 30 minutes. That is the lovely pregnant lady on the left. And my non-pregnant self on the right.

We did a fun game of going through some Old Wives Tales, just to see which ones turned out to be ‘true’. Sitting on the fireplace on the bottom left side is a canvas that everyone who came filled in their finger prints with their guess on a girl or boy. One of our cousins is going to draw a box that looks like the one outside and then make the fingerprints look like balloons to match the party.

We used an old changing table to put desserts on. The added touch of the ‘flags’ on each cupcake is actually drink stirrers that were left over from their wedding in 2011. We knew they’d come in handy one day!

The pink and blue punch was my favorite part!

A- My mom always prewrapped the silverware, so of course, we did that as well. B- Michelle helped us make this fun banner for the fireplace. C- We had baby clothes hanging around the party. It was a nice touch. D- These adorable duckies kept watch over the punch.

This is the adorable set up outside! That box contains the colored balloons. Nana is responsible for the adorable banner.

The BIG reveal! Both Jennifer and Jesse were going to be overjoyed whether it was a girl or boy. There were so happy it was a girl! Let the pink overload begin in our family.

After the big reveal, we enjoyed hamburgers and hotdogs with some fun sides made by friends.

And Hershey candy bars for the road.

We had such a great time planning this gender reveal party in addition to it being just a wonderful party with family and friends. I hope everyone enjoyed this post and hopefully I will have a few more guest post in the future!

I'm so sad that I wasn't able to make it to the gender reveal party myself....due to my family have the 12th stomach virus of the year. No joke it really is the 5th. Everything turned out so precious! The picture when the balloons were released is just precious! I can't wait to meet this sweet baby girl...and most importantly I can't wait to make some goodies for her! Girls are so much fun! Thank you so much to Laurin for writing this post for me.....and thank you Jennifer for allowing us to share your story!