A Gender Reveal for Collectors of Vinyl Records
A Gender Reveal for Collectors of Vinyl Records
I’m on maternity leave! Baby Hasty is due Dec. 18. During this time, I’ll be sharing some blog posts I wrote throughout our pregnancy journey, but this site won’t be as active as it normally is. I may also be a bit slower to respond. Thanks for understanding and for being so supportive of me, my family, and my blog. Want to donate a few dollars to keep this blog running? You can do so on Venmo or Paypal.
The Rules
If it were up to my husband, we would’ve just received a phone call with the baby’s gender. But the plan (as of now) is for this to be our one and only child so I wanted to do it right, something a little more special than a phone call from a stranger. So my husband set a few ground rules: no party, no audience, nothing that explodes. It was a deal. Public displays were never our thing, we always liked having more private, intimate moments. So, since the pregnancy announcement reflected my interest in books, I decided the gender reveal should reflect my husband’s interest in collecting vinyl records. So I proposed that we have a custom vinyl record pressed with “boy” or “girl” songs.
The Prep
I enlisted my friend and neighbor Krista (a very close friend and excellent secret-keeper) to help me with this project. We used this custom record website that allows you to choose which songs you want pressed into a record.
You can also upload your own cover art. We wanted to keep it super simple and not give anything away until we played the record, so we designed this cover and back for our record:
I took the 12 week blood test so that we’d know the gender as early as possible. We asked that the results be emailed to us as an attachment rather than calling to tell us the news. As soon as I received the email I forwarded it to Krista and then filed it away so that it wouldn’t taunt me. Spoiler alert: it still taunted me.
As for the playlist, these are the songs we chose, depending on the results. We spent a lot of time choosing which song would be first, since that is the song that would give it away. We wanted songs with a strong, clearly recognizable first few notes and also a song we really liked. Here’s what we came up with:
Boy
Side 1
Beautiful Boy by John Lennon (4:05)
Danny’s Song by Loggins and Messina (4:14)
The Boys Are Back in Town by Thin Lizzy (4:26)
Side 2
Let’s Hear it For the Boy by Deniece Williams (4:22)
Playing with the Boys by Kenny Loggins (3:59)
Boys of Summer by Don Henley (4:48)
Girl
Side 1
Isn’t She Lovely by Stevie Wonder (3:19)*
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cindy Lauper (3:58)
Uptown Girl by Billy Joel (3:17)*
Run the World by Beyoncé (3:55)*
Side 2:
Waiting for a Girl Like You by Foreigner (4:51)
Man I Feel Like a Woman by Shania Twain (3:54)
Look At You Girl by Chris LeDoux (3:08)
Then we waited for the vinyl record to be pressed and shipped. Let me tell you, it took incredible will power not to just open that email. But I was determined to make this more special than just opening an email. I had TWO dreams that I accidentally opened the email and was super disappointed that that’s how I found out. As a result, I held out and stuck to the plan.
Finally, two weeks and one day after we received the information, the record arrived.
So…was it a boy or girl? Watch this video to find out:
