Posted by Our twins’ gender reveal is the most popular post on our blog. It has been pinned 2.4 THOUSAND times on Pinterest and is in the top 10 pins if you search “twin gender reveal.” I love party-planning. Birthdays, baby showers, gender reveals that require food and decoration prep? That’s my wheel-house. Hosting friends and family when I also get to decorate with mason jars, paper banners and burlap?! Yes, please. 🙂
When we presented to the adoption agency for Mama J, we presented “gender unknown” so we did not know whether baby would be a boy or girl at the time of presenting our profile. Our children had very strong preferences about what type of sibling they wanted, but T and I had decided that we were not going to put any parameters on God. We wanted to be open to the exact child that God had waiting for our family, no matter the gender, race or medical conditions that might be present. When we interviewed with Mama J back in August, she told us the gender and sent us some ultrasound photos for when we announced the baby to Noah, Eli and Emry Jane. We did not doubt that she was told the correct gender, but we decided to wait to reveal the gender after we had met Mama J and had been to an ultrasound with her. After September 18th, with more ultrasound photos in hand, we were ready to reveal Noah, Eli and Emry Jane, as well as our friends and family. I knew that we wouldn’t have a party on the same scale for our adoption gender reveal, simply because we did not have the same time frame for planning the celebration. We wanted to announce our news as soon as possible, so that we could bring purchasing and preparing for baby’s arrival, just a couple short weeks later. I wanted to let our children know right away BUT I still wanted friends and family to feel like they were participating in the gender reveal with our immediate family.
Since we could not have everyone in the same place at the same time, we decided to have a virtual gender reveal using Facebook Live on Tuesday, September 19th. That way, friends and family that were interested could find out the gender alongside our children. An added bonus would be seeing Noah, Eli and Emry Jane’s VERY authentic reactions to finding out whether they were getting a little brother or a little sister!
I bought the party decorations, balloons and cake mix on Tuesday morning while the twins were at preschool. I baked and iced the cake while they were napping on Tuesday afternoon so that they would not know what was going on before Noah. Since we learned from the adoption announcement photos that Noah does not enjoy surprises, I wanted to have it all prepped and waiting for the big reveal before he got home from school.
We asked the kids before Noah cut into the cake what they would like for their sibling to be. Noah and Eli both said “boy” and Emry Jane said “girl.” If you had asked them a few weeks ago, all three would have said a baby sister. We’ve been nonchalantly working on fun things you can do with a brother for the past couple weeks so we would have not a full-sibling meltdown “if” baby was a boy.
Mama J suggested that we use candy in the middle of our cake when she and I were talking about revealing to the kids the weekend we went to FL to meet her. I wanted to incorporate her idea into my plans and the candy center was a BIG hit with the kids. It also made it really clear what the gender of our next child would be …
A BOY!
At the time of our LIVE reveal, we had around 30 friends/family logged in to watch our live video. I’m really glad that Noah’s bonus mom Jennie sent me this photo from when she was watching it live on Facebook. Just in that photo above, you can see that MaMarsh and Granddaddy Jer, Meema, my best friend Dani and other friends and family from multiple states were joining in our fun celebration! Since it has been posted on the 19th, our gender reveal video has been watched over 750 times with over 60 comments!
After we logged off Facebook and the kids finished their cake, we headed to the front yard for some photos and confetti!
We popped those pesky pink balloons. No more little sisters for this family (we think.)
The kids loved the big mess of blue and silver confetti, much more than we enjoyed cleaning it out of the front yard. We are still finding shiny blue and silver pieces along the sidewalk. The confetti poppers, bought at Party City, were hard for the twins to twist/shoot so Tommy popped several of them just outside the camera shot (or threw the confetti at the kids, haha) to help get the falling confetti effect for my pictures. Eli wins for best reactions to the falling confetti!
I had to take a few artsy photos just because it’s fun 🙂 Also, this face profile ultrasound photo is my favorite picture that we have of our little one so I used it in most of our reveal photos posted to social media. If you do not already, you can follow our adoption journey on Instagram through the hashtag #christiansonadoption.
Once we revealed the gender, we decided to create a little guessing game for the top donors (those that had donated over $100 dollars through our t-shirt sale or direct donations to us or our Adopt a Love Story family page) to our adoption fund by letting them guess baby boy’s due date. Whoever picked the right date gets to know sweet baby boy’s name before we announce everyone else (after his arrival!) As of today, 12 of these people have already guessed wrong, including Tommy and me 🙂
Update on October 11th: Baby Boy is due on Friday, October 13th– just 3 days away! As of today, we have raised $10,095 towards our second adoption agency payment, which is about 25% funded. While $10,000 helps us make our monthly loan payments, we are still fundraising to cover the remaining balance and our travel expenses once baby arrives. We know that we will need to stay in FL about 10-14 days after baby is born. If you would like to donate towards our remaining costs, we would greatly appreciate it! Every little bit helps! You can make donations to us directly through the mail or a tax-deductible donation online through https://www.adoptalovestory.com/family/christianson/. Thank you for your continued prayers and support!
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