Baby Banco's Gender Reveal Party

    I cannot confirm nor deny that this post may or may not be almost two months late. Haha. But better late than never, right??!  I guess I can say that I've truly been too busy living life to actually blog about it, which I suppose is a good thing. The last couple of months have been a whirlwind. In the last two months we finally discovered the gender of our little sweet pea and officially named him, I started the 2014-2015 school year, which has kept me incredibly busy, and we have finally started working on our little man's nursery.  I am currently 26 weeks pregnant and my how things are changing quickly.  As I sit here on the couch with my laptop in my lap, I am watching my belly move all over the place with all this baby's movement. He must have enjoyed the Cinnamon Toast Crunch I just ate!  Haha.  But let me back up and tell the long overdue story of how we came to find out about our son, Harrison Andrew Banco.
    Back on August 7th at 17 weeks and 2 days pregnant, we had our gender ultrasound at Wee See Imaging over in Northeast Columbia (which we would highly recommend...they were awesome!!).  We had a 20 week ultrasound scheduled at our OB's office, but it would have been after school started and I wanted to have our gender reveal party before I started back school, so we decided to get an ultrasound early.  Plus, we were DYING to know what our baby was!  As any pregnant woman or mom can attest to, when you are expecting you have this innate urge to get everything in your life set and organized....aka "Nesting Syndrome."  I had been itching to start getting the baby's room ready, but I felt like I couldn't make any definite decisions about anything until I knew the gender, so that was another reason I wanted to find out ASAP!  We arrived at Wee See and we made sure to tell the ultrasound tech upfront that we did not want to know the gender. So she turned the screen around and started to poke around with the wand on my belly until she found out whether it was a boy or a girl.

According to her, the baby had its knees up by its chest and was bearing all for the world to see, so it didn't take her long to make the call.  I guess the Wendy's Frosty I had eaten right before then had put baby in a good mood, so it was cooperative.  After she made the call, we called our friends Molly and Jason and handed the phone to the ultrasound tech.  She left the room and told them what the gender of our baby was, because we had put them in charge of getting the balloon box ready for our gender reveal party.  Then we got to play around and get some good pics of the baby.  My favorite shot of all is this sweet shot where the baby had its arm up near its face - even at just over 17 weeks it looked just like a little person....very skinny of course (look at those ribs poking out!)...but a little person nonetheless.  It was so amazing seeing our sweet pea on the screen, and it made us even more anxious to find out who HE or SHE was!
    We left Wee See Imaging with a huge collection of ultrasound photos, but the actual pics that showed the gender were sealed up inside an envelope and stapled shut.  Tony threatened me if I tried to look early, so we decided we would lock them up in our fire safe box when we got home to keep us from being tempted to look before the party on Sunday.  On our way home, we stopped for dinner at Red Lobster.  You can't go wrong celebrating an important milestone with some fried shrimp and garlic cheese biscuits....am I right?!! Haha. We had a very nice dinner together and after finding out that we had just been for our ultrasound, our waiter brought us a free dessert and even decorated if for us.....so sweet!! It made our night!
   So, basically, we endured three more agonizing days of waiting until Sunday.  After church, we rushed home to get last minute details together before all of our friends and family came.  We decided on a Prince vs. Princess theme for the party, so our decorations reflected that accordingly. Everything turned out great!

     At 3:00 everybody started to arrive and our house quickly became VERY crowded.  We had not received RSVP's from everybody, so we figured there would be some people who wouldn't show, but we ended up having almost everybody we invited come.  So there were literally almost 40 people in our little 1500 square foot house! But it made us feel so blessed and honored that so many people loved and cared about us enough to be a part of our special day.  We had planned on having everyone eat first, but we quickly gathered that everyone was anxious to find out the news as quickly as possible, and we also were seeing some rain headed our way on the Doppler, so we decided to head outside and do the reveal!  Molly and Jason had our balloon box ready!  Everybody lined up on the sidewalk, Tony thanked everyone for coming, and then we bent down together and slowly untied the ribbons.  Out came.........BLUE BALLOONS!!  We were having a BOY! I had been convinced my entire pregnancy that I was having a girl, and then about two days before the reveal I changed my mind and decided that it was a boy, but I decided to wear a pink dress anyway since Tony was wearing blue.  For some reason my intuition changed, and it turned out to be right!  At the moment I saw those blue balloons fly into the air, I was flooded with all kinds of emotions at once.....gratitude, bewilderment, anxiety (Oh Lord! What I am I going to do with a BOY!?! Haha!), joy, and lots of other things too.  It was emotional, but so exciting at the same time.  It was truly worth the wait for that moment.

         After the balloons were just tiny blue polka dots floating up into the sky, Tony and I announced the baby's name to everyone.  I guess it was lucky for us that it was a boy, because we had only been able to agree on a boy name! :)  We told everyone that our little boy would be named Harrison Andrew - Harrison being a family name from my side of the family (my great, great, great grandfather on my dad's side), and Andrew being Tony's dad's name.  We knew we wanted to use family names, and thought it only seemed fair to use a family name from both my side and Tony's side of the family. After pouring through our family trees looking for inspiration, we came across lots of um....interesting....choices (let's be honest....both sides of our family have some CRAY-CRAY names), but Harrison and Andrew were the only ones that resonated with us.  We just loved the sound of it. We apologize to our other male ancestors who didn't make the cut - Gartrell, Amaziah, Coke, Major Aldophus, and the list goes on.  We have some good ones!! Hahaha.

        The rest of the party was slightly overwhelming just because there were so many people, and it was hard to get around to everybody to talk and say hello and thank them for coming.  It kind of felt similar to our wedding day in that manner. You feel like you're pulled in a hundred different directions.  But it was so great having all of our friends and family together to celebrate, and Tony and I were so grateful to everyone for being there to share in our joy.  We truly have the best friends and family ever!

     Tony and I are so excited about our sweet boy and we are anxiously awaiting the day we get to meet him!  Until then.... we are quickly trying to get prepared for this little man's arrival. Hopefully a nursery reveal post will follow soon!