This week we’ll find out if sweet Baby Deer is a boy or a girl (at least we hope to—fingers crossed!) and we couldn’t be more excited. With this pregnancy though, we no longer live close by to all of our family. With my last pregnancy we had such fun telling everyone what the baby’s gender was. The evening after our 20-week ultrasound we invited all of our family over for dinner. Since we found out the baby was a girl, we stopped and picked up some pink balloons. That evening we had all of our family close their eyes and my niece quietly walked into the room holding the pink balloons and then shouted, “it’s a girl!” It was such a fun moment and I loved that our family was there to celebrate it with us.

The past few weeks I’d been racking by brain trying to think of a fun way to tell our family the sex of the baby from afar, and I couldn’t come up with anything. I didn’t want to just make a bunch of phone calls, yet I also didn’t want to do something big and elaborate. I did think it would be more exciting if people actually had something in front of them that they could open up, so I thought it would be fun to send some cards.

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I started out by perusing Etsy to see if there were any cute cards already out there that I could buy or print. While I liked some of them, none of them quite fit what I had in mind. I decided it would be fun and cheaper to make them myself. I went with a bumble bee theme (what could bee cuter?) then started thinking about the layout. While I did want the cards to look nice, I didn’t want to go over the top with making them look perfect. I only had one evening to get them all together so that I could pop them in the mail in-time. Rather than design something on the computer that I could print, or even use layered paper, I just grabbed a pen and some colored pencils and went to work.

I thought a trifold card would be a little more exciting to open, but I couldn’t find any at the craft store. In the end I just glued two plain white cards together to create the effect I wanted. I dedicated one card to be my practice design, then once I had the design down, I made the other cards. I found it to be quickest to work on one thing at a time for all the cards, such as doing the lettering on the front for all of them at once before moving on. I think that helped keep them consistent too. Even so, it took just a couple of hours from start to finish to make all of the cards. We’re sending them to four households, so I made eight total. I’m happy with how they turned out, and I hope our families enjoy them too.

Once I finished the cards, I popped them both into a larger envelope (along with some instructions) and mailed them out. Later this week once we’re home and settled after our ultrasound appointment, we’ll Skype with our family members and watch as they open up the cards. Yellow or orange? Boy or girl? I cannot wait!

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How did you announce the big news to your families?