Amongst Stringfields

I freaking love Pinterest. I think every girl does, there’s just something about collecting beautiful photos, recipes, and ideas that has me seriously addicted to the website! All the food looks SO tasty and the makeup tutorials look SO easy yet when you attempt to achieve these “pin-worthy” looks, sometimes they may fall a little short. I refer to the story I am about to tell, “the balloon incident”, or the time I let my hormones got the best of me and threw a hysterical tantrum in Party City…so badly, that employees refunded the money to our purchase and let us walk out of the door with free service.

It was about that time. After several weeks of going to the doctor we finally reached the appointment where we were able to take a blood test to know the sex of our baby! I knew that wanted to have a gender reveal party since I saw so many fun and cute photos of all over Pinterest and I thought it would be a super fun experience to share with our friends! With that being the case, when I went in to the doctor’s office, I told them to put the results from my blood test in an envelope so I could figure out exactly how I wanted the baby’s gender to be revealed!

After doing research on what other people did for their gender reveals I decided that it would be so much fun to find out by popping a balloon filled with confetti! A few of my closest friends were super sweet and helped put together my ideal day; a laid back BBQ in the park, playing sports, and playing all Team Boy Vs Team Girl kickball. Everyone brought all sorts of amazing goodies, from burgers to brats, to pasta salad, & desserts it was so much fun to hang out in the park, play kick ball and drink “beer” (no beer for me but, it was still fun just having everyone enjoy themselves). I made T-shirts for all my friends in pink & blue with their nicknames on the back so that when we split up into teams they would have a pink team shirt or blue team shirt. After several games of kick ball, it was time to pop our balloon! We hung it up on a tree and had our friends record a video of us popping the balloon! We held the balloon in place & “POP!”, as confetti rained down on my husband and I we could not be more excited. We were having a little baby boy!!!

So, in short that is how the story played out but, let me back track a little, to the insanely ridiculous part of the story. So before all of this amazing balloon popping fun. I had ordered a confetti filled balloonon Etsyfrom a shop called DylanisMemoryBox. Their balloons are truly gorgeous and I was excited that I was able to find a gender reveal balloon that wasn’t black, I was able to purchase a gold balloon! I had my mother in law (who already knew the sex of the baby) contact the Etsyshop to tell the maker which color confetti to fill in the balloon with, pink or blue. The balloon was double lined so that when you fill the balloon with helium you won’t be able to see the color of confetti through it.

The week of the gender reveal I called around to ask different stores if they would be able to fill my balloon with helium and all of the stores said yes. Most stores recommended that I didn’t fill my balloon the day before because balloons typically only lasted for 8 hours. On the morning of the party I decided to go out and fill my balloon with helium. I began by going to the Dollar Tree, where they told me that they would not be able to fill up my balloon based upon store policy, after they told me on the phone that they would be able to earlier in the week. I then went to Albertsons and, the girl there attempted to fill the balloon but, could not seem to figure out why the balloon wasn’t inflating so I left that store with my un-inflated balloon. My next stop was Walmart, and at this point I was thinking that I just needed to buy a tank of helium and fill up the with helium myself. As I walked into Walmart I began to panic thinking that the whole point of this party was to pop a balloon that so far I didn’t even have inflated! I went to the party aisle and they were fresh out ofsmall helium tanks. I then asked a manager if they could fill my balloon up and I would just pay the price for however many balloons the air was worth, at that point I was desprate. Of course he said he couldn’t do that, so I left Walmart in a panic. I went and picked up my husband and we had one more place to go, Party City. I was already close to tears because no one could fill up my balloon and all seemed lost and pointless. I kept thinking why even have a reveal party if we don’t even have something to reveal! When we walked into party city the balloon attendant told us that she had to charge us for the balloon as if we were filling up one of their big giant balloons. Which at this point, I didn’t care how much I had to pay to fill up this damn balloon. The girl began to fill our balloon after we had paid, and half way through she said she didn’t fill comfortable filling the balloon all the way up because she was afraid it was going to pop. She tied off the balloon and filled it with some air but the balloon didn’t even float or fly and…. I was immediately furious. My husband kept asking me what was wrong, whats wrong? since I wasn’t saying anything… and then I snapped, I just had a total melt down. I started to cry in the middle of the store and said ” is this some sort of sick joke? No one all day can fill up this balloon after they all said that they would be able to do it?! and now when we get it “filled up” it doesn’t even freaking float?!” I was in hysterics. I couldn’t handle it any more. I freaked out to the point where my husband told me I had to sit in the car and cool off. Of course this made me even more angry since I was in a raging fit of fury, so upset, so hyped up on hormones, an hour late to our own gender reveal party with no balloon to show for it! All I could do was sit in the car and cry. A few minutes later my husband walked out of the store with a limp balloon filled with air but, not enough for it to float. He got into the car and told me that the manager refunded us the money because they felt so bad that the girl couldn’t inflate it for us. He drove me to the party telling me that it was all going to be ok, and they can just hang the balloon from a tree or something and then, he started laughing. I responded and said “why are you laughing this isn’t freaking funny.” He said, “I can’t believe it, I’ve never seen you do anything like that before, it was hilarious you were acting like a crazy person.” Then after a few moments of silence, I started to laugh too because I realized that I was, for the first time in my life, THAT crazy woman.

The moral of this story is, pregnancy is going make you act a… little… bit… crazy…. but, don’t worry, it’s going to be ok! Secondly, don’t always have huge expectations for things you want to be “Pinterest worthy”, real life isn’t like Pinterest with perfect photos, perfect lighting, and amazing recipes. Life is messy sometimes, wonderfully crazy and always unpredictable — all in the best way possible. Finally, don’t try to fill up your own gender reveal balloon up with air. Have a friend do it to take the stress out of it all, and don’t sweat the little things (obviously easier said than done). As a side note now whenever I get really fired up about something, I know to always tell my husband, “I am about to have a “balloon incident if we don’t ____”. usually I fill that blank with “eat soon”, those hunger grumps are a real thing, when a girls gotta eat, she’s gotta eat!

See below for photos from my, Team Girl Vs. Team Boy Kickball Gender Reveal party!