Teacher Appreciation

I've missed a few years of door decorating for teacher appreciation week.  And this year I decided that life was always going to be busy and I just needed to figure out a way to make it work.  The theme was "Hats off to you".  That was challenging for my mind.  I just couldn't figure out how to make something around hats work, without saying 'hats off to you'.  So I spent a few weeks mulling things over and doing searches for many combinations of ideas to try to get something to click.  We came up with an idea for Tessa's focusing on the many different hats teachers wear.

Greta's however was so hard to figure out because she gave me an extra requirement:  It HAD to have a panda on it.  There are many more people out there smarter than me who could have come up with something better and faster, but it had me stumped all the way to last Monday night (doors had to be hung on Friday).  Normally, that might have been enough time, but I had a crammed packed week.

On Tuesday I worked hard to carve out time to project images for Greta's design up on a poster paper. But it didn't happen.  Late that night, Tom recognized my overwhelming situation and jumped in to help me.  As he rolled out the paper to start projecting the images, we realized the paper was far too short.  Delay.

On Wednesday, I procured more paper and again worked to find a small space of time to start tracing.  Early evening gave me a little spot and I got to work.  Just after I finished the lettering, the projector bulb burned out.  I tried to find a place locally who might have such a thing, but we are talking an overhead projector....  At that point, I began to recognize what was happening.  I had an important meeting on Thursday evening where I was presenting and opposition was being permitted to see if I would be distracted and allow myself to be overwhelmed and unable to have the help of the spirit like I desperately needed.  I immediately knelt down and sought for help for all that was on my plate. The solution that came for the posters was to text my friend to see if the library had an overhead projector.  They did, so that solved that.

Thursday morning I went to get my hair cut first thing (that took forever!).  That only left a little window of time to get the images traced before I had to pick Greta up from kindergarten.  I got Greta's finished and put Tessa's teacher's up and the library's overhead projector bulb burned out.  Really.  But since I was aware of what was happening, I breezed through that and chuckled at the comical chain of hang ups with this silly project.  Somehow in about 28 hours, I would be able to pull off Tessa's without the help of projected lettering, plus the coloring and line work on Greta's.  I was confident that somehow it would happen.

Friday morning was quite free other than an orthodontist appointment for Chandler (that too extraordinarily long...) but I still felt good about the amount of time I had.  I whipped Greta's out in a couple of hours.  Then came time for Tessa's.  And just when I needed it, an idea came to do a chalk board look with hers.  Then all I had to do was add the phone I had designed and printed as a poster earlier in the week.  Thankfully that all whipped out in about 20 minutes.  (I'll be remembering that method for other years for sure!) I'm truly thankful for divine help in everyday tasks and inconsequential things such as teacher's door decorations!

I really need to not be lazy and use another camera besides the one on my phone.  Blurry city!

This idea came from a teacher friend, Amy, a couple of decades ago.  She had done a bulletin board with this title.  In case you can't read it, The pigeon is going to wear his top hat to drive the bus because "they let pigeon's in top hats drive buses."  Gollie (from Bink and Gollie series) got the panda hat.  She will wear her's to China if Bink will go with her.  They may have a panda bonanza while there.  Scaredy Squirrel will wear his hat to the unknown, as long as there are no killer bees, germs or sharks.  Mrs. Walker will wear her hat to teach kindergarten because she gets to influence lives for good.  

In case you can't read it:  iPhone Mrs. Cummings for everything.  She has an app (hat) for that!

We all thought of many types of hats teachers wear in a day and made app images for them.  Tessa helped me with this quite a bit.  She loves the computer work.  Click to more detail.

Love these girls and I'm glad I took an opportunity to make them really happy.