Living Outside the Stacks

Raise your hand if you remember getting an egg to carry around for a week during sex ed.  looks around Yep, I did too.  I also remember being a little put off because my egg wasn’t ethnically correct, so I took some crayons and markers and turned my little white egg into a little multi~culti oval shaped facsimile of me.  Lemme tell ya, that’s not easily done when you’re a high yellow glasses wearing braces having freckle faced black chick, but I digress.

For one week, Little Egglivia (See what I did there?) went everywhere with me.  I dressed her in a little tissue diaper, slept with her nestled on a pillow and made sure she survived for one week with nary a crack.  On the last day of the week, I happily showed up at school with my two page report on what I’d learned about taking care of a baby.

Scrrrreeeech!

Yep, that was the assignment:  learn to care for a baby by taking care of an egg.  Hmmmm, now that I’ve had children of my own, I can state emphatically that an egg is not a baby.

Enjoying the sweetness

But those creepy little crying dolls?  They’re as close as you can get without bringing home the real thing.  Yesterday, Miss 16 brought home one of those animatronic babies that they give to high school students to teach them what it’s like to care for an infant. Miss 16 is enrolled in a child development course at the high school.  This class is basically a first~year college course for students who plan to go on to college and major in Child Development or Elementary Education.

Miss 16 and Aunt Miss 14 Loving the Baby

Anyway, when Miss 16 brought the baby home, we were absolutely thrilled.  Yes, I realize that this was a doll but I was positively giddy ~ so much more exciting than an egg.  Aunt Miss 14 and Miss 16 named the baby Micaela Kate something or other, I called the baby “MK”.  Yeah, the girls and I were totally in to this baby thing.  About 20 minutes into the doll’s arrival, I’d had enough and booted the kids, the doll and all other noisy things away from me.  The girls, on the other hand, were still in baby heaven.  But Miss 14 bailed after a couple of hours and my son and husband refused to get caught up in our insanity.  That left poor Miss 16 on her own…

So ready to get rid of the baby...

That baby cried.  And cried.  And cried.  The hubs and I could hear Miss 16 pacing around in her bedroom all night.  By Thursday morning, she couldn’t wait for me to get her and Baby MK back to the school.  And, honestly, I couldn’t wait either.  Miss 16 definitely looked like the mother of a newborn ~ she had dark circles under her eyes, she was dragging and, at points, during various conversations, her eyes sorta glazed over.  Her plan for the weekend?  To catch up on the sleep she missed while playing mommy.

When you were in high school, did you get the egg, bag of flour or the baby?  Do you think these programs teach teens responsibility?

I have the research skills of a librarian, the preservation skills of an archivist, the organizational skills of a mother and the domestic skills of a Stepford wife. I have the research skills of a librarian, the preservation skills of an archivist, the organizational skills of a mother and the domestic skills of a Stepford wife. Read more from this author