Surprise! It's a....

...REVEAL CAKE!

Several months ago, I saw this article in the Star Tribune and knew immediately that I wanted to do the same thing for Baby #2. Although we were certainly excited about Baby #2's arrival, things didn't seem as special with this pregnancy as it did with Landon. There wasn't a sense of newness with the whole experience and there wouldn't be registering or baby showers or a whole slew of new baby items that there were with our first. I wanted to do something meaningful and special for our second and this seemed like the perfect way to do it. Oh, and I also love cake!

I contacted Amanda of "I am Baker," a blog that I absolutely love and adore to see if she would be willing to make a reveal cake for us. She so graciously agreed and things were set in motion. I knew that our 20 week ultrasound would happen in the beginning of November and knew that we would be celebrating Thanksgiving with my side of the family at, well, Thanksgiving (so, basically 3 weeks after the ultrasound). For the ultrasound, I had an envelope pre-addressed and stamped to Amanda and told the ultrasound technician that we wanted her to put the gender results in the envelope and seal it and that we would find out the results later. The techinician was absolutely amazing. She asked us if she should just turn the screen away when she was getting near possible sightings or if we wanted to keep our eyes on the screen figuring we wouldn't know what we were looking at. We opted to have the screen turned away because it was pretty obvious with Landon that he was boy and didn't want to risk anything with this one! It was hard laying on the table knowing that she knew but I figured I had been waiting to find out the gender, what was another 3 weeks?!?

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I went to pick up the cake from Amanda's husband's office and LOVED it. So did all the ladies in the office, because they came to the receptionist desk to see the cake and hear the story of how we didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl, but Amanda and the ultrasound technician knew. Wednesday and into Thursday was probably the hardest. We had the cake in our possession and just had to refrain from cutting into it. Apparently, it was hard for other people too. On Thursday, my Grandma called and left me a cell phone message worried that we wouldn't be able to get a hold of her to tell her the news because of the poor cell phone reception in the area of Iowa we were in. When I called my Grandma back (prior to cutting the cake), my Grandpa answered the phone and as we were exchanging greetings and "How are yous?" I could hear Grandma in the background, "Well, did you cut it yet?"



We sufficiently stuffed our faces at Thanksgiving and I refrained from eating dessert so I would be in the mood for cake later. Finally at 7:00, we gathered Landon, my mom, my sister, her husband, and their 3 kids together to cut the cake. For added dramatic effect, my brother-in-law turned out the lights as we cut into the cake.



As I pulled the knife out, I saw a glimpse of blue but wasn't quite sure if it was from frosting on the inside or the frosting on the outside.


When we fully cut the cake (and the lights were turned back on), this is what we saw:

Blue, blue, blue! Definitely a boy! And do you see the image there? It's a heart. Because Amanda's cool like that and she makes designs on the inside of her cake! Which, by the way, not only looked amazing but tasted so, so good as well. We had such a fun time finding out this way and was so glad that we could share in this moment with family. And now we wait some more for a different kind of sweet thing in March!