Gender Reveals May Have Just Jumped The Shark
These parents put an explosive twist on their new baby’s gender reveal
Back in the day, ultrasound technology wasn’t all that great and the sex of a baby was largely anyone’s guess. These days, we post 4D sonograms of our kids’ grainy private parts on Facebook and have entire parties dedicated to finding out what’s going on under the hood. Times, they are a-changing, and that’s why it’s not at all surprising that one couple used a full-on fireworks display to announce their baby’s sex to the world.
Monica and Graham Driscoll are expecting their second baby, and on Saturday night they gathered family and friends to announce their baby’s sex in grand fashion: by using a dynamite plunger to launch a fleet of fireworks into the sky. In a video of the reveal shared on YouTube, Graham — who is a licensed pyrotechnician — explains, “We’re going to find out if we’re having a baby boy or a girl with a very interesting means. We’re going to take a page out of the Acme playbook.”
In the video, the family counts down before pushing a lever and letting the fireworks fly. The sky lights up with jets of dark pink and an explosion of golden shimmers while everyone whoops and cheers. It kind of looks like a home run display at a baseball game, but it’s not. It’s just how we talk about what’s in a baby’s diaper these days.
Lavish gender reveals are kind of having a moment right now. A few weeks ago, a couple’s photos went viral after they used an exploding baseball to announce their baby’s sex. Before that, there was a viral “Gangnam Style” parody. Every other week, it seems, there’s some new stunt, dance, song, photo series, or intricately detailed baked good that reveals either pink or blue.
Having a baby is exciting, and I get it — I baked two pink-centered cupcakes to give to my mom and mother-in-law when I had my first baby. It’s just that the whole “gender reveal” trend is sort of jumping the shark. I mean, a fireworks display? Pretty soon we’ll all be expected to hire skywriters to draw a huge penis or vagina in the clouds while it broadcasts via live stream on CNN.
It just seems like one more task in our increasingly competitive relay race to be the best, most magical and wonderful parents ever. Our grandparents would laugh at the notion of an extravagant party to reveal a baby’s sex, but here we are in 2016, baking 47-layer pink ombre cakes and hiring actual alien UFO pilots to incorporate our baby’s sex into artful crop circles. That last one is a joke — at least until someone actually does it and puts it on YouTube.
At the end of the day, a baby’s sex is nothing but a coin toss between body parts, but if someone wants to have a giant party — more power to them. After all, everyone loves cake.
[Ed. Note: A previous version of this story failed to mention that Graham Driscoll is a licensed pyrotechnician. The post has been updated to reflect this change.]
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