Jagger

I guess I should have told you sooner...the princess has a baby. Well, the princess HAD a baby. On Tuesday morning the princess was assigned the care of Jagger. Jagger is pretty cool. He's a doll, but he's full of sensors that tell how well he's being cared for. This is one of the projects available to kids in their FACS class (Family and Consumer Science). There are 3 babies. The kids named them and then signed up to care for them for 24 hours. Here are a few fun facts about the babies:

1. There are 2 boys and one girl, and yes, they are anatomically correct.

2. They have sensors in their chest, bum, and mouth.

3. Mom (or Dad) wears a bracelet with a sensor. Anytime the baby cries the parent has 2 minutes to get to the baby and connect his/her sensor with the baby's. The teacher later gets a printout of how well the parent did. This is how they are graded.

4. Once the baby starts crying and the parent has touched the sensor, the student has to figure out why the baby is crying. There are diapers with sensors in them that must touch the baby's bottom sensor. It knows which diaper the baby had on and so keeps crying if you try to put the diaper on that is "dirty".

5. It might be hungry. The bottle has a sensor too. It must line up with the baby's mouth sensor or he'll start crying again. It makes drinking noises while drinking, and the feeding can last for 15-20 minutes!

6. Sometimes he needs to be burped. This involves patting him. He knows if he's not being patted.

7. Sometimes he just coos, which is sort of cute.

8. The teacher has the babies "shut off" from 7am-8am and from 3pm-4pm. This is the prime time for most of these kids to be on the school bus, so the teacher takes pity on the poor bus drivers. She will also watch the babies for the kids while they are in PE and at lunch so the babies don't have to go outside in bad weather. With these few exceptions, the kids have the babies for 24 hours. Parents, siblings, friends can't take care of your baby because they don't have the 2 minute sensor. It is banded to the parent's arm, and can only be taken off by cutting it off. If anyone other than the teacher cuts the sensor off, the student loses points.

9. The student chooses from 3 settings for the baby--easy, medium, and hard. The princess chose easy.

10. Babies will wake up at least once/night. Jagger woke the princess up at about 1am to be fed, changed, and burped, but she did say it was only about a 5 minute feeding that time.

11. When the baby is returned, the teacher does a read-out to see how the parent did, and their grade is based on that. The princess hasn't seen her printout yet. It is very cool though. Kids often fail this assignment because they shake the baby (or a friend does), or drop them. Jagger almost fell off the bleachers while in his car seat in the gym while in the princess' care. She would have failed if she hadn't caught him.

What the princess learned:

1. It's no fun to take care of a baby when all you do is the hard stuff with no reward of smiling and being able to interact with him.

2. "Real babies don't take 20 minutes to eat." Yeah, they do!!!! We set her straight on that one.

3. My personal favorite--"Real babies don't poop twice in one hour." Yeah, they do--sometimes 4 times in one hour, and often right after you put the clean (expensive) new diaper on, and if often leaks out of their diaper so you have to bathe them and put clean clothes on...better do another load of laundry.

It was a good lesson for her. It's a very cool baby! I hope it deters many of these kids. And I pity the kids who chose the medium or hard setting! The princess could not wait for 7am yesterday when she knew he would be turned off. She was giving him back at 8am. When he cooed in the car on the way to school she yelled, "You're NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ON!" Sleep deprivation--it ain't pretty!

Jagger and all his paraphernalia!

Awwwwe.