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Briana Garcia, only 5, had been training three years for this day.
“I’d get her all excited,” said her mother Hilda Gomez. “I’d tell her how great it was to do homework and how much fun it would be.”
But this was Gomez’s firstborn headed for her first day of kindergarten, and Gomez was “tying myself in knots trying to get everything ready.” Then on the way to Jim Thorpe Fundamental Elementary School in Santa Ana, “we got stuck in traffic, and I thought, ‘My God, she’s going to be late her first day of school!’ ”
Not so. Typical of the nearly 600,000 students at 876 elementary, intermediate and high schools in Orange County, Briana’s first day went well, her mother said.
The day ended with the family munching popcorn and watching the home videotape of the big event, in which Briana looked a bit grumpy.
“She’s not really a morning person yet,” her mother said.
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