Matey or Lady? A Beach Gender Reveal {with FREE Printables!}

A Message In A Bottle Beach Gender Reveal

Ahoy! We were oceanside last week and everything about it was awesome. Well, except the sand in my 2 yr old’s pants. But hey, life’s a beach.

Awhile back my sister-in-law Kristin pointed out that I would be at the halfway point in this pregnancy by the time our family vacation rolled around and that we could do a beach gender reveal. She even found this idea from Carol-Ann Photography on Pinterest. #awesomeidea

So, a “message in a bottle” themed gender reveal was hatched.

A few weeks ago I had my anatomy sonogram for baby #4. We had the technician write down baby’s gender & seal it in an envelope.

I made these cute little signs using PicMonkey. Find your free printables below – What, what!

 

Ahoy It’s a Boy

Ahoy Matey It’s a Little Lady

My original plan was to print the signs on resume paper that I had tea-stained and crumpled to get an aged look.  For the record — this is a bad idea.  The printer was very angry with me.  Oops!  I learn something new everyday. 🙂 Instead, I printed them on cream colored resume paper then burned the edges.  I nearly smoked my family out of the house when I did that last part but again I say…oops!

Next I took the boy & girl signs, some brown craft paper, twine, a clear bottle with its label removed, and the oh-so-special envelope on a girls’ weekend with my sisters. Since we were going to be at the beach with my husband’s family I wanted my sisters to be involved somehow. So they were the lucky ones in charge of opening the envelope & putting the proper message in the bottle! (And then my poor sister Andrea had to get in the car and drive 5 hours home with me. #torture)

Turns out my resume paper was pretty transparent so they used some double sided tape to adhere the proper sign to brown craft paper. No cheating eyes allowed! They tied it up with a little twine, popped it in the bottle and — voila!

Now to keep myself (and anyone else) from peeking for one more week…

I did it! The actual opening of the bottle was all part of a super fun pirate treasure hunt on the beach that we had planned for the Mountain cousins (more about that later).

The day finally came when the whole Mountain range had arrived and the treasure hunt was underway. Once the kids had followed the clues, found the map, and dug up the treasure chest they found the message in a bottle at the bottom.

Our oldest was the one who got to unroll and read the great news on the beach.

Ahoy, it’s a boy!

We couldn’t be happier.  Two girls followed by two (surprise!) boys .  I feel like I couldn’t write a better story.  Granted, the story I would have written for our family would have been a lot different.

But I like this story better already.