My Creative Blog + SuperCreative

Yesterday, Jess posted about her fun gender reveal photoshoot with Stacy Salvatori Photography- if you don't know what she's having yet, head HERE to find out!
I was the lucky one tasked with preparing for the gender reveal photoshoot, which means I was the ONLY one to know what they were having! Mwahaha!
I knew Jess wanted to do the whole balloons in a box reveal, so I set out to create one cute gender reveal box! I'd seen some on pinterest, but usually it was just a cardboard box with some pink and blue or a little question mark or something…

Source I decided right away that we needed a box that had some style!

How to Make a Stylin' Gender Reveal Box 1- Visit your local Lowes or Home Depot and sweetly ask if they have an appliance box you could have (aka free!). They also sell wardrobe boxes at HD that would work, but I much prefer the price of free! I brought along a little friend to help with the sweet-talkin' (sidenote- kids go through such weird smiling phases! It cracks me up!)

A word to the wise, make sure you plan ahead vehicle wise… Appliance boxes are BIG and luckily I had all the seats down in my van.
We got our big ole box home and it was time to decorate it!

2- Decorate the Box- Did you know HomeGoods has the coolest wrapping paper ever? Yup, my favorites are the peacock feather paper and the faux bois paper!

For this project, we wanted something fun, yet classy to fit in with the pictures. It would be sad to have an adorable family, with cute outfits, and then this big old brown box (and yes, I'm aware that sentence sounds slightly dramatic- it's hyperbole people! lol) I simply wrapped 3 sides of the box with Homegoods navy, chevron wrapping paper (knowing you'd never see the 4th side). I also made sure that if you were looking at the box straight on, that the back inside wall was covered.

I also didn't want just the navy chevron, or people would assume boy, so I added a band of yellow fabric so it screamed classy and neutral, not baby boy! (Sorry, I hadn't ironed the fabric yet in the pic above- bad blogger!)
#3- Buy lots and lots of balloons! Jess wanted both pink and blue for some of the family shots, but I definitely bought more of the color I needed. I think I got about 30 balloons in all- better to be prepared!

It took me about 30 minutes to go from boring and blah to stylin' and ready for the big reveal!

Now, not all of you know me personally, but I'm assuming you can tell from the blog, that I have a bit of sass in me and I like to give Jess a hard time. For weeks leading up to the reveal I joked that I was going to put the wrong colors in the box, get all green and yellow etc… Since we'd joked about those things, they were out of the question, but then an idea came to me…

I noticed that the box was big enough to hold a person… and that person should be me! Here's how it went down… I called Jess on the way and told her that with the crazy schedule we'd had filming for Knock It Off that week, that I wanted to prep the photoshoot and head home to have dinner with my fam, rather than stick around for the pics. She was fine with that, and I got there, got everything prepped while they waited inside, and then drove my car out of the driveway and parked it out of site…
Then, with the help of Stacy (the photographer) I climbed into the box…

I hadn't fully thought about how long I'd need to squat in there… it ended up being about ten minutes and let me tell you, I could feel the burn! I was in there waiting as the whole family came down for the big reveal…

Look at this cute, unsuspecting family… yup, I'm in the box for this pic…

I snapped this selfie while crouched inside, waiting for the surprise!

Finally, it was time!! With excited anticipation they took off the lid…

And found out they were having… A MONICA!!!

I SO badly wish you could have seen the look on Jess' face! I scared her to death and it was awesome! I love how Cam and Charlie are looking up like,"Umm what's going on"
My legs were sore for about two days, but it was well worth it for the laughs we all had!

After the fun, I re-prepped the box with the real gender reveal and then we got to celebrate this new little baby!
So just a word to the wise… choose wisely who your Best Friends are… you never know when one will be creepin' inside your gender reveal box!