Thursday, August 27, 2020

B'day decoration activity

While this lockdown/work-from-home situation has forced people to stay indoors, it has surely given a unique opportunity for many to attend to their inner talent or rekindling with their forgotten passion. The various singing, dancing, painting or cooking posts of your friends and relatives in Whatsapp status or Facebook timeline will only confirm this.

For sure I am one of those guys who is quite okay, in fact more than okay, about this WFH situation. The benefits quite outweigh the downsides for me.

Anyways, I’m not here today to talk about this situation but would like to talk about the unique opportunity this lockdown has offered me this year.


Well, yesterday was my son’s 8th birthday, and as we couldn't have a usual party with friends and family during this self-imposed lockdown, my wife and I decided to give him a surprise by decorating the house in secret. The planning started 3-4 days before the birthday with an action item to get a birthday banner, few of his favorite cartoon characters ready along with usual balloons around.

I decided to have the banner in a form of letters joined together; simple yet effective. I picked up paper sheets cut them up in the shapes required and finalized on the font to use for the letters. I created templates of those letters so it becomes easier and faster with repetitive ones.

 


My wife and I painted the letters in one stretch at night, in his absence of course. So it had to be post-midnight. It’s impossible to get it done during daytime with the kid around and especially with no school.

 


Then came the interesting part of getting the cartoon characters ready. This year, he’s been busy watching 2 cartoons Oggy and the Cockroaches & Bandbukh Aur Budbak, so decided to pick those 3 characters i.e. Oggy, Budh & Badri.

Very lucky that the sketches and the paintings turned out quite good. It surely was a very satisfying activity I had related to drawing and paintings since ages.

 




When the final setting was up on display and when the kiddo saw that on his birthday morning, he was surprised and importantly happy to see all the decoration. A special note of appreciation for his fav cartoon characters from him. He enjoyed it and we enjoyed more doing all this for him.