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Remember The Baby Project? In my Christian Lifestyles class senior year, there were more girls than boys, so I partnered up with my best friend Katie to parent a flour baby. Most of the pairs in the class gave their babies trendy names like “Taylor Jean” or “Skylar Marie.” We named ours “Bossu Manon-Jean DiGuire.” Katie had just watched two French movies about a hunchback (bossu in French) named Jean (soft French pronunciation) and his lady love, Manon. We combined Katie’s last name, McGuire, with Dicker to form the fashionable “DiGuire.” Our classmates thought that naming our child “Hunchback” was cruel, but we preferred to see it as original. Katie grew up with such a common name that she wanted to make sure little Bossu stood out among her peers.
I’m not sure how much responsibility we learned from the project. I remember a couple of instances where Katie left our flour baby in our locker, or out on senior patio where anyone could have snatched her and baked her into cookies.
Aren’t the headless babies above a little creepy, especially the one that looks like it’s on a butcher block? (It’s actually an art table.)
Oh. My. God. That picture is GOLD.
Robyn and I were another all female couple and I’ve been trying to remember our baby’s name since the reunion. It still hasn’t come to me! I taped a Cabbage Patch doll to our flour sack so that it wasn’t so creepy…
Oh wow. I remember little Bossu! The headless babies really are a little creepy. I had to do this in 8th grade and remember feeling NO motherly instincts toward my little flour sack. I think I made cookies with her when I was done.
We taped a doll to our flour sack so little Bossu had a face to put to that beautiful name. Luckily, she survived until the end of the project. Not all babies were quite so lucky — if the flour strewn across the pavement outside the school every day was any indication.
Darren’s mom, Jill, reminded me that a lot of schools have replaced flour or egg babies with Baby Think It Over, a 6.5 pound electronic doll that cries at intervals all day and night. The caregiver simulates feeding, changing, and bathing the baby by inserting a key for a 5 to 35-minute care session. The doll keeps an internal record of whether its needs were met in a timely fashion, and whether it suffered any abuse. Jill said that Darren’s brother had the choice of caring for the doll or writing a 20-page paper. He chose the paper.
We never had to do anything like this in high school, probably because the school was all-girls so the parents would either have to be single moms or lesbian couples. The all-Catholic board of trustees was not so OK with either of those options.
Did you guys have to watch the birthing videos? I remember that we had to watch three of them at the end of senior year, to “show” us what giving birth was like and I suppose dissuade us from pre-marital sex. It was a little late in the game, though, and therefore required some special exceptions. For example, my friend Heather was excused from watching the videos because she had given birth to a baby boy earlier that month (who was conceived on the school trip to Europe. Ooopsies!)
LOL! Add myself and Charlotte to the list of faux-lesbian couples sharing a flour child. I can’t really remember our “kid’s” name now either. I know we had a boy….Connor? Ronin? I wonder if Charlotte can recall? I remember Charlotte giving him a face so he was less creepy. I also remember the experience being a joke. My actual babysitting experience served me much better than any flour baby ever could. I think teens would be much better served if they actually had to babysit live kids for a weekend.