Abby started first grade a few weeks ago in a new school. Normally for such an occasion I would’ve had the ghetto studio fired up, but since we had just moved, chaos reigned. I had to do with the poor light on the back deck just before we left to drop her off.
The school let us come in to take a few pictures of the first-day festivities. Arriving at this first day was no easy task. The reason Abby was able to get into this school is that we had closed on a new house a week earlier. This new place is in a different school attendance zone from our rent house. Although we closed a week earlier, we didn’t get to take possession until two days before school started, so everything was upside-down. But Abby was fired up about starting first grade and going to a new school. Unfortunately, her first day did not go well. She lost her lunch box and she didn’t make any friends to play with on the playground. For the last four years through pre-K and kindergarten she had gone to a small private school where she ate a hand-delivered lunch in her classroom and then went and played with the 30 or so kids in her grade. At the public school she was confronted with a playground teeming with over a hundred kids in the first grade alone and she didn’t know a single one of them. She told Gina that “it was like I was invisible.” The second day was not much better as she failed to successfully negotiate the lunch line. She’d never eaten in a school cafeteria before and apparently it’s never a problem for other kids because no one – not a teacher, not a lunch lady, not a another kid – offered to help her out. Things got much better in the subsequent days, though, and now she loves going to school. She’s made a bunch of friends and she really likes her teacher.
