Excited that we will welcome a new member to our little unit in January 2021, inshallah! To help celebrate this moment, we created a gender reveal and recorded it to share with family and friends, and our little one (one day :)). Disclaimer: Whether my kid is a boy or a girl, I will love him/her and encourage them to be true to who they are, whatever their interests might be! We wanted to have a gender reveal video with our little family, to create a special memory of the moment we found out if Faiz would have a little sister or brother. 

Everyone likely has their own approach to putting together their own reveal; here are the steps I used. 

Preliminary Research: I used the Instagram search feature for hashtags using #GenderReveal, and archived my favorite reveals. I thought through my favorite components of the archived reveals to determine which ones to use. Based on the aspects, I mapped out a vision. Because of COVID, I wanted to keep the number of people involved to a minimum, but to create a fun video we could send to our loved ones to make them feel included in the process as well.

Vision/Execution: For the location, I wanted the setting to be ‘London-eque’, to always remember our experience of living here. Also, I wanted a pink and blue background (for the easily distinguishable association with gender). My savvy friend quickly identified the perfect houses in Notting Hill. I wanted my husband and my reaction to be captured on film, so on the day of our anatomy scan, we asked the doctor to write the gender and seal it in an envelope. We arranged for my cousins to watch our one-year-old during the appointment and be ready to help film the reveal right after our appointment. (We knew we could not wait any longer than the 20 weeks we already had waited). We gave my cousins the envelope, along with a blue shirt/blue hat and a pink shirt/pink hat to put on Faiz, accordingly, because I wanted the focus to be on Faiz as a big brother. Together, we walked to the house on Notting Hill. While my husband and I stood in front of the pink/blue house, with our eyes covered, my cousins put Faiz in the color of the outfit that corresponded with the gender, and put him in our arms. Then we opened our eyes, and they recorded our reaction <3

Tool: Before the big day, I knew that as soon as we had an envelope with the gender included, we would want to execute our gender reveal immediately and have a recording for our family and friends ASAP. So I practiced using iMovie, splitting/cutting scenes, editing filters (I knew I wanted a black/white feature), and adding in songs. My mom had by chance sent me one of my favorite songs the day before, so I had it downloaded on my phone already. This all made it that much easier for me to quickly edit the video to how I wanted it to be. We were receiving constant messages from our parents, siblings, and besties, so I’m glad I had practiced using iMovie as much as possible, so that I could send it over quickly.

Either gender, I love that we have this memory for our family!