Heidi’s flour child

I was just getting comfortable with being a grandmother when I learned I would be a great-grandmother for a week. Our granddaughter’s health teacher assigned her students to carry a 5 pound sack of flour around for a week, interacting with it as if it were a baby.
Our granddaughter chose the option of combining her flour child with a baby doll. She dressed her flour baby in her old baby clothes. Between classes as she knelt in front of her school locker gathering books, the flour child lay on the floor patiently.
When she couldn’t take her flour baby with her, she arranged for childcare. The band director told his students he had arranged a band day care program: a row of empty chairs at the back of the room. During soccer practice her dad sat in the car with the flour child as it laid sleeping in the seat beside him. When she shopped for a new tennis racquet her dad held the blanketed bundle. At the restaurant our 15-year-old felt the wondering stares of strangers as she arranged her baby in a booster chair and fed it during the meal.
Quite fittingly that was the week that her older cousin had her second child. Granddaughter and ‘great-grandchild’ went to the hospital to visit and see the new arrival. As she walked down the halls of the hospital, folks smiled knowingly at her bundle of joy. A few tried to see the infant. Our health class student said, “I opened the blanket. They were surprised that it was not a real baby. They looked at me like I was not quite right for carrying around a doll and a sack of flour.”
The nurses on the maternity floor, however smiled knowingly. She wasn’t the first teenager to visit the maternity wing during the week-long assignment with flour children.
When the assignment began her mother said, “I didn’t know how responsible she would be. A lot of kids take the flour child home and set it on the counter every night. The first night she made it a bed out of one of her dresser drawers: One up high enough so the dogs would not get into it. I watched her sing and dance with it. She played computer games holding the baby.” The only way she did not experience the reality of having a baby was the 2 a.m. feeding. Alarm clocks just do not wail as long or as loud as a hungry wet baby does in the middle of the night.
After a week of caring for her flour child and keeping a journal of their activities, her insights, experiences and reactions, the teenager returned the sack of flour to the shelf for its original purpose. She was convinced she did NOT want a baby any time soon.
Our teenage granddaughter ended her week saying the flour child showed me how much work and more difficult a baby was than I thought. I am going to wait until I am married and have a good job before I have a child.”
A good resolution for any teenager.
That is fine with me. She’s not ready to be a mother and I for sure am not ready to be a great-grandmother.


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