Meet Lucy

She's our new baby...well, Julianne's baby, to be more precise. And she's temporary. I suppose you could say that Julianne is doing foster care. A fake baby, to be sure....but one that is realistic enough to give Julianne a pretty darn good idea of what it's like to be a mother of a newborn. I can't count how many times, in an effort to elicit sympathy for how hard and time consuming it was to take care of this baby, Bryan and I rolled our eyes and said, "Yep...welcome to parenthood!"

This is a teen living class baby. Julianne is not actually in the teen living class. But the teacher of the class at her school is none other than my best friend, Heather. After explaining to Heather her envy of all her friends who were carrying around babies as part of this particular parenting unit in teen living, Heather told Julianne that she'd let her take a baby home over the weekend to see what it was like.

And Julianne loved it....despite the fact that Lucy kept her complete attention all weekend long. These teen living babies are programmed to give you the full experience. You have to figure out why the baby is crying. Is it hungry? There's a bottle...and it takes a long time before the baby decides it's done. And then you actually have to get a burp out of it. Does it need a diaper change? There are two diapers that come with the little tyke and you have to actually change it each time. Sometimes the baby is just fussy. Other times it is screaming because it's head wasn't supported and fell back too far. The "mommy" of the baby has to wear an electronic wristband and check in with the baby frequently...this calms the baby down as well. And makes it so the student can't just hand the baby off to a friend or sibling. Much different from the babies we carried around back when I was in high school...regular dolls we brought from home weighted down with pennies or rice to make it feel more realistic.

(Multi-tasking....feeding Lucy while playing Candy Crush. Reminds me of how I used to read books while nursing my babies...)

Julianne made a great little mommy. Only once did she threaten to shut the screaming baby in the truck out in the garage because she couldn't figure out what was wrong with it and needed to get some homework done. After all, she wasn't being graded on this baby experiment. But overall, she did a fabulous job....even with the baby waking her up every night consistently at 3:00 AM. I think she'll be as sad as she is relieved that the baby experiment is over....Heather came to pick up little Lucy on her way to work this morning.