Spirit and HNS Kindergarteners Photos for Trading Cards April 2023

Spirit and the Holy Name School Kindergarteners
Taking photos so we can make the class their own set of trading cards.
4/6/23

Last year we created a set of trading cards of the Holy Name School kindergarteners who read to GloryToo.  Unfortunately, we never had the idea to do that in time to have them created and give them to the kids before school got out.  I had to mail them to the kids and both the teacher, Emily, and I missed seeing their reactions to their own photo on a trading card. 

See the 2022 Kindergartener Trading Cards

This year I vowed to get the trading cards done early.  I never know how long it will take Epiphany Printing to create them – how many rush jobs keep bumping mine back – so I decided I’d better get the photos taken so I could edit them and get the chosen photos to Epiphany before Lovely’s litter arrived.

That was, of course, a great idea.  The only problem was that Lovely decided to whelp on April 8th instead of April 12th, so I lost the weekend to work on the kid photos.    It was the evening of April 18th before I got all the photos edited and sent to Emily.  I can imagine the difficulty she will have to get the kids to choose their one – and only one – favorite for their card.  Hopefully they’ll do their part so we can get the cards done in time.

They also need to pick a couple of group photos to use, which may take a while as there are some hilarious ones, but only a few where all the kids look pretty good.  You can probably imagine the difficulty of getting 10 kindergarteners AND Spirit to face and look at the camera and smile long enough for me to take a photo.  I always laugh as I edit photos, and tonight was no exception.  We have a couple of real clowns in this class, plus a new-to-the-US Vietnamese girl who had never been around dogs and is scared if Spirit looks directly at her or moves toward her.  She always wants to pet Spirit, but I have to work hard to get Spirit to hold absolutely still and not get her feelings hurt when I restrain her from going to the girl. 

Spirit also gets her feelings hurt when I try to keep her from kissing the kids.  Therapy dogs aren’t supposed to kiss, but it’s so hard for her not to because she’s crazy about the kids.  You’ll see some of the photos where she’s getting ready to kiss – and actually giving kisses.

Enjoy the photos that I took of Spirit with the kindergarteners.  You might have fun picking the ones you would use.  I will, as usual, post the finished trading card on the website once I have them.

We can do 9 cards per card-stock page. Last year there were only 7 kindergarteners, so we did 9 trading cards – 7 individual photos and 2 group photos.  This year there are 10 kindergarteners, so we will do 18 trading cards total.  Besides these, I will probably use a photo of Spirit in her Halloween costume at the school, of the kids with Spirit’s letters she wrote back to them after they had their very first letter-writing class and chose to write to Spirit, and of the kids with the “Reading Pups” we created for the kids to read to in-between Spirit’s weekly Reading Dog visits.

see other photos of Spirit and the kids
Spirit Celebrates her 8th birthday with the Holy Name School Kindergarteners