Baby shower? So 2010. Edgier moms-to-be have a baby gender reveal
Forget the baby shower. It's a ... "gender reveal!" For moms-to-be who want drama in their shower of baby gadgetry, gender reveal parties let everyone – including Mom – find out the sex of the baby together. "Huh?" asks our pregnant blogger.
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I also saw some people advocating a piñata approach. Apparently guests (or mom and dad) can bash through one of those paper animals – sometimes with a question mark drawn on its side – to reveal a cascade of either pink or blue candy. (Am I the only one to find that one a little disturbing? Especially as my own form begins to increasingly resemble that of one of those piñata donkeys... I mean, really, folks.)
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Stephanie Hanes is the lead writer for Modern Parenthood and a longtime Monitor correspondent. She lives in Andover, Mass. with her husband, Christopher, her daughter, Madeline Thuli, a South Africa Labrador retriever, Karoo, and an imperialist cat named Kipling.
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A lot of party planners will encourage parents-to-be to have their guest pick sides, or vote, or otherwise get into the Gender Reveal spirit. You know, pink buttons for Team Girl, blue for Team Boy.
And most importantly – all of this looks really good on Facebook.
Ok. So parents-to-be out there who have embraced the Gender Reveal party, you’ve got to help me out with this. Because honestly, I don’t quite get it.
Sure, finding out the sex of your baby is cool – either at 20 weeks pregnant or on the child’s birth day. But hard as this might be to believe before it happens, it’s a piece of info that way pales in comparison to the actual existence of the kid. (Which is why some people who decide to wait to find out the child’s sex at birth realize later that they never even asked or thought about it in the moment.)
And here’s another thing:
While this little nugget of he/she info is pretty important to parents-to-be (how else to know how to decorate the nursery for Pinterest?), your friends – I promise you – do not care. I mean, they’re interested, sure, just in the same way that they’ll be interested in your first baby pictures and the name you pick and all of that good stuff. They care about the you, and the baby. But for 99.9 percent of the folks in your life, it matters not at all whether the upcoming bundle is a boy or a girl. Even if balloons are involved.
So maybe this is just an excuse for a party. And that’s cool. There have been far sketchier reasons for get-togethers.
But I can’t help feeling (I know, I know, grinch over here) that there’s something just a wee bit narcissistic about the Gender Reveal. We somehow think that our boy-girl moment is something other people should celebrate. It’s an Everybody Gets a Trophy kind of party. (I differentiate this, albeit with scant logic, from the general baby shower, or baby party. Because all babies are worth celebrating. Even if there are lots of them born every day.)
Moreover, there seems to be a growing sense that incredible moments are only truly special if they are photo-ready, admired by others and, preferably, color coordinated. Put it in the same category as the professional birth photographers. But with more decorating potential.
But, I guess it’s whatever floats your boat. If the Gender Reveal brings joy, who am I to question it?
Over here, our Gender Reveal happened in the ultrasound room, when the technician asked whether Husband could identify the sex from our baby’s little parts, displayed on the fuzzy, black and white screen. He got the answer wrong. The technician corrected him. And then we went home, happily, to where there was no cake, and to where we could enjoy imagining our future with Baby Two To Be.
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