I recently threw my best friend a Gender Reveal!!! Let’s first start off by saying I felt so special for being the one who had the honor of knowing what the gender was prior to everyone else!!! The day went so smooth and came out beautiful. As simple as it was, it looked extravagant for the amount of time and money put into it. The most time putting into the gathering was cleaning and getting my house in order; I mean come on….FIVE kids guys!!!! The night prior to the big day is when I did all of my cleaning. I have to do all of my cleaning at night; if I do it while my kids are awake, it’s pretty much for nothing, it’s as if they follow me around the house and Tasmanian Devil every room that I literally just cleaned. The morning of the Gender Reveal is when I did all of my decorating with the exception of the balloon garland, I made that the night before.

Because we already own tables and tablecloths, which pretty much makes up more than half of the party, the rest was pretty easy. I decided to use pub tables and white tablecloths and do away with chairs. With pub tables and no chairs, you sort of create cocktail party ambiance; you can get away with this when you’re using finger foods and appetizers. It has been in the triple digits so indoors it was, there’s just no way we could have done this outdoors in this heat. I wanted to keep the Gender Reveal fairly simple and short, but long enough to get together to get our friend fix.

I used round mirrors as the base of my center pieces (Hobby Lobby), vases (Dollar Store), cuties, baby breath, and greenery. I bought my baby breath from Costco, it was $9.99 for a bunch; this was just enough to create three center pieces.

I live in a development where they are still building and in one of the empty lots there is this giant tree with pretty greenery. Having this tree in mind, I based my theme around it. I knew that I didn’t want to spend to much time or money on the gathering, being as how we will be planning a baby shower shortly, and with that said……. who doesn’t like to save money. It took me about ten minutes to cut a bag full of branches and twigs of leaves. With those leaves, I shoved several branches throughout my balloon garland, throughout the drink and desert table, and around my pub table center pieces. These leaves literally made the Gender Reveal come together!!!

I wanted a couple of helium balloons but had no helium… what to do?                                  At this this point, I blew up my balloons and used stickies to tape the top of the balloon to the ceiling. (funny-I know!) But it worked!!!! They looked so cute; I used a leafy green string to hang from the balloons. (The green leafy strings and white balloons were purchased from Target as a package in the Bulls Eye area)

For my Desert and Drink Table, aside from the greenery, I used grape fruits and lemons. I simply cut them in half and scattered them throughout the table.

For my water pitcher, I used lemons.                                                                                                I’m not sure if you have ever had a pitcher of water full of sliced lemons and because the peelings were left on them, it left a nasty taste, but I have. I did not want this for my pitcher of water but loved the sliced lemons look. Trying to avoid this odd taste, I used a cupcake pan and added water and sliced lemons and then froze them; these became sliced lemon ice cubes.

For the cake, we had ordered a round, white, scraped, layered cake. I wanted it to fit into my theme so I sliced grapefruits and lemons up and left them outside to dry up. After they were hard and dried up, I placed the slices around the cake.

With everything in place, The Gender Reveal came out perfect! My Bif (aka my best friend) loved it……and that’s all that really mattered to me!