If you’re expectant parents, it has become more and more popular in recent years to find out the sex of the baby before they’re born so you can prepare for their arrival. However, if you want to keep the sex of your baby a surprise, there are still plenty of ways you can be fully prepared without having to shop for a particular gender.

Image by Tom Page used under the Creative Commons license.

The Nursery

First thing’s first, if you want to paint your nursery pink and you have a boy, there is nothing wrong with that. Assigning colours to gender is nonsense for the most part, and changes periodically. Originally pink was a boy’s colour because it was considered more masculine (QI fact)! However, if you do want to go for completely gender neutral colours, greens, off-whites and yellows are the go-tos, but you can experiment. Why not paint a mural of a forest, or a beach scene on one wall? Children’s rooms are one of the few places adults really can let their imagination loose, so have fun with it! Maybe talk with your partner about what your dream bedrooms were when you were growing up, and perhaps you’ll find some magical inspiration.

Toys

This is one area where you can really have fun: hanging mobiles, soft toys and soft books are surprisingly gender neutral. Newborn babies like to use their senses, particularly with their eyes and ears, so moving mobiles that play soft music are always a good bet. Soft things they can curl their fingers around, and learn to hold are all you need in the first few months.

Baby Clothes

This can be the slightly more difficult fix, as a lot of baby clothing can be very gender specific, but there are plenty neutral shades on offer like the aforementioned whites, greens, and yellows. However, for a bit of variety opt for warm autumn colours in browns, oranges and fawns or fun and bright reds, purples and turquoise shades, all of which you can find online at Tesco that stock a lot of options in baby clothing. It’s also worth remembering that buying clothes for your newborn is a fairy transient endeavour as your little one will grow out of their first sets in about two months, so try not to stress too much if you have to put a blue onesie on a girl, or a pink one on a boy, they won’t be in them for long!

The fuss over needing to know the sex of your baby in order to be prepared is unwarranted, no matter what you decide to do, find out or keep it a surprise, you can be fully prepared either way. So what are you waiting for? Get to shopping and have some fun!

*Post in collaboration with Tesco*