For a long time we had the plan to announce baby's gender via our Christmas card to a lot of our friends, but we knew we wanted a fun way to tell our families. We were seeing both of our family's for birthday celebrations the weekend after our big ultrasound, so we started thinking about ways to tell our families. We wanted a way for people to guess and I started seeing the idea for scratch off cards (on Pinterest of course). I've made scratch off cards before, so we looked at several and David chose the design for a Thing Pink or Thing Blue Scratch Off card and I recreated it to give to our families:
At first, I followed this tutorial for making the scratch off part. Basically you mix about 3 parts acrylic paint with 1 part dish soap and paint several coats over it. Once it's dry you should be able to scratch it off. Luckily I tried just one first, because it didn't work. It completely tore up our cardstock and you couldn't read what was under it.
So after searching for a few more tutorials, I remembered that the last time I had made a scratch off card, I put clear packing tape down over the spot first and then painted on top. And then paint over that with the same mixture of dish soap and paint and it scratches off easily. While searching, I also found the idea of using contact paper and painting it all and then cutting circles out. Because I was making so many of them and I already had contact paper, this is the route I took. I painted several coats on the contact paper and then used my Silhouette to cut out the right size circles. It ended up working out pretty well--although I do think it is a little harder to scratch the paint off the contact paper version than it is the packing tape version. If I was making only a few scratch off cards I'd probably go with the tape version, but the contact paper one worked well for us!
And here's how they turned out! I mounted most of them on blue or pink cardstock since we were giving them to our families as a group, but I also took one to Erin when I went to meet her precious babies in the hospital and I didn't want to sway her decision, so I used a gender neutral green for her. :) She, along with several of our friends and I think all of our siblings guessed girl. David's parents and our nephew guessed boy.
The other part of our reveal to family was his name. We've had a lot of people ask about the meaning behind or the decision process for picking his name. Honestly, Cooper is just a name that we both really like. We had made a list of baby names one day long before we were pregnant and Cooper was one we both liked then and has been at the top of our list since then. And since we found out we were expecting, any time we've talked about boy names we both liked Cooper more than any of the other choices. In fact, we had a much harder time settling on a girl name that we both liked and when I would bring up the name conversation, David would jokingly say "we don't need to worry about that because it's going to be Cooper" since we were both pretty convinced it was boy. So once we found out he is a boy, we knew his name would be Cooper. And his middle name is Paul after my grandfather who passed away last year. We wanted to use a family name and considered several options, but really liked the way that Cooper Paul sounded together.
The ornament with his name on it from our Christmas card is actually one that I made for my mom. I made ornaments for both of our moms with his name on it for our name reveal. I just held on to my mom's for an extra week so we could use it as a prop if we wanted to in our photo shoot. And it ended up being a perfect tie in for a Christmas announcement!
It was so fun sharing our news with family and close friends after we found out we are having a boy. Cooper is already loved by so many!
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