Drop down menu showing post categories under page

I’m not sure the best way to what my client wants… and I’m not coming up with anything thru searching and brainstorming on my own… Hoping someone here can offer a solution or different idea.

I’ve created a post category called Inspiration. Under inspiration, we’ll have child categories such as color schemes, cards, projects (to name a few). She doesn’t want any posts directly under Inspiration, only the ones that will go under the sub-categories.

She would like a page also called Inspiration – where she will update with a thumbnail image and blurb about each post from those sub-categories.

What I am trying to figure out how to do, is have the page Inspiration in the menu bar, and then the child categories drop down under it.

I thought about creating a custom template for the category ID… but I’m using thesis and can’t figure out how to do it – plus, She needs to be able to go in and easily edit (like from the dashboard, under page or post). And in the past when I’ve created a custom template category template, I’ve had to add content directly to the template, rather than like a custom page template.

Any suggestions? I’d sure appreciate it.