A grandfather gets smacked in the face by an exploding baseball. Another young woman catches a line drive to the face. A 47,000-acre wildfire ultimately causes $8 million in damage and requires 800 firefighters to contain it. Burns caused by fireworks. A vehicle bursts into flames, its occupants forced to flee for their lives. A grandmother is killed immediately by shrapnel from a home-made pipe bomb.

What do any one of these things have to do with one another? The answer is a woman by the name of Jenna Karvunidis, who is credited with hosting the first gender reveal party ever. In 2008, the blog-writing Karvunidis decided to bake a cake with pink icing on the inside to let friends and family know she was pregnant with a girl. She baked it, she wrote about it, and it started a trend that has, quite frankly, gotten out of control.

“I’ve felt a lot of mixed feelings about my random contribution to the culture,” Karvunidis wrote in a social media post. “It just exploded into crazy after that. Literally — guns firing, forest fires, more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby.”

But the trend continues to grow, largely attributed to social media and the desire to have a video “go viral,” or get thousands, even millions of views. More creative ways to announce a baby’s gender are required to get those views, and sometimes that creativity verges into the dangerous territory. Each of the situations above started in celebration and ended in injury and, in one case, death.

For those expecting, with a grandchild or great-grandchild on the way, encourage your loved ones to keep a gender reveal simple — don’t risk life and limb to make a statement. While learning a baby’s gender is certainly exciting, nothing’s worth that kind of excitement. Stick to the icing in the cake. That’s a much sweeter deal.