Its a......

We had the thrill of my 20 week scan on Monday, which all went really well. There was plenty of things to celebrate on Monday, and lots of excited phone calls to make! 

But, we wanted to be able to surprise our dear friends The Bells, so invited them around for dinner and cake the following night. I have watched many (MANY) youtube videos of couples finding out the gender of the baby via a cake, and thought, well, that looks like fun! Its definitely more popular in the States, but a lot of couples have the doctors write down the gender of the baby, which the couple then send on to bakeries/patisseries and have a cake made in that colour. The cake will then be iced in a non-descript colour, so that when they cut through, they find out what they are having! Our patience levels aren't quite up to waiting for a bakery to do all that, but I loved the idea and thought that I could surprise the Bells the same way! 

Now, for those of you who know and love Holly, you'll know that she doesn't tend to be the biggest fan of surprises. She was over before everyone last night, snooping around for signs of what gender we were having. Was the pink Kitchenaid a sign, or the blue hand soap, or the pink flowers, or blue chocolates! She even checked my hands for traces of food colouring (which, having anticipated all of this, I may have been very careful in my colouring techniques so as to not stain my hands, and may have also planted a few things around the house to try and throw her off-course!). 

After we ate dinner, which, I must say was a yummy New Zealand roast lamb (which I stuffed with pitted dates, ahhh yummy!), we finally got to the cake! After MUCH anticipation, we gave Holly the knife and set her to cut through and reveal what we were having! 

And.......

It's a girl!!

Pete and I are both thrilled and I can't wait to meet her. We feel so incredibly lucky to that she's well and healthy and we are enjoying very much calling the baby a she now!! 

The Bells were incredibly sweet and had brought gifts over for us already, a blue one and a pink one! So after the big cake reveal, we opened the most adorable little girl clothes, which, being our first pink items, made me cry many happy tears! Pete was given a pack of nappies! He can spend the next few months studying hard, but I'm sure by day two he'll have achieved beyond my expectations in that too! A big, big thank you to Holly and Jason for indulging me in the surprise and for the adorable gifts. 

This is the dessert I quickly made for Pete on Monday night... Pavlova swirls with strawberry cream and fresh crushed strawbs on top! I think he's worried we'll never eat non-pink food again!

A healthy little girl. New realms of happiness await...