It's a...puzzle!

Today's the day we're finding out if baby #3 is a boy baby or a girl baby. We're leaving the girls home with Grandma so I thought it would be fun to surprise them with the news somehow. But thinking up an easy-to-execute idea was a little harder than I thought. There are a ton of ideas online—you can bake cupcakes and put pink or blue filling inside or put a slip of paper in a balloon and pop it but neither of those ideas seemed like they would work for us. I don't feel like making cupcakes and we only have pink balloons. We could run to the store after the appointment but Andrew has a three-hour midterm to take so I don't think we'll have time for that. I went to bed last night unsure of what to do.

But then, just as I was rolling out of bed this morning, inspiration struck. I could have the girls put together a puzzle. My girls love puzzles. 

I thought it would be an easy idea because surely someone would have thought about it and made something and put it up online, right? I mean, everything is online these days. I looked but found nothing to suit my fancy so I quickly whipped up my own. 

Here's the "It's a boy!" puzzle:

 Here's the "It's a girl!" puzzle:

I just printed them off on cardstock, coloured them in, cut them out, and shoved the pieces into envelopes. We'll hand the girls the appropriate envelope when we get home and let them put it together.

The more I think about it, the more I think finding out the gender early is good. I was so disappointed when my baby brother was born (darn it all if he just wasn't supposed to be a girl—that's what I was praying for!) and it took me a while to get used to the idea that the sister I'd been dreaming about ended up being a brother. We'll have twenty weeks to sway our girls' expectations because I know Rachel will be a little disappointed if it's a girl and Miriam will be a little disappointed if it's a boy.

But by the time this baby comes we'll all just be expecting it to be what it is and no one will be disappointed about the gender...unless the ultrasound proves to be incorrect (which does happen occasionally).

Anyway, feel free to use these if you want to—I took the puzzle template and baby picture from online (both touted as public domain/free to use) and threw them into Illustrator/InDesign to get the outlines/transparency/text. It was a fairly quick project (apart from the cutting).

Stay tuned for the big reveal later today!