By: Clarissa Sanchez – Assistant Editor

Nothing I did seemed to work, she kept crying all weekend. 

The child development class assignment that I thought was going be so easy turned out to be extremely difficult.

I had received a defective robot-baby. 

All CAST-Teach sophomores in child development classes started taking home real, fake babies for a weekend beginning Jan. 9 to experience what it’s like to be a parent and take care of a baby.

For me, taking care of my baby, Sofia, was stressful and tiring. I was under the impression that it would be easy to take care of her, but I was wrong.

I was excited leaving school and couldn’t wait to get home to show Sofia to my parents. I knew they would laugh at the fact that they would hear me struggle with a crying baby all weekend since I chose to go it alone and get the full experience of how inconvenient kids can be.

 On Friday, I started having trouble getting Sofia to stop crying when she needed her diaper changed. 

I tried everything; bottle, burping, and rocking, but nothing worked. At first, I thought it was just my fault because it was my first time taking care of a robot baby and throughout the entire night it was a constant struggle, waking up to see what she needed.

 I was given two diapers with sensors; one yellow, one green, and finally on Saturday night I realized that the diapers might’ve been defective and found out later that the green diaper wasn’t working!

I emailed my teacher, Brandi Clay, and she told me that if I missed too many diaper changes the baby would shut down from neglect, and I would have to take the baby home again a different week. 

Throughout the night I barely slept because of the constant crying, and since I couldn’t do anything to stop it, I just had to let her cry.

By Sunday morning, I was fed up. I already knew my grade would be affected, so I was ready for Monday to come so Sofia would turn off. 

By Sunday afternoon, I was completely over it and did whatever I could to stop the persistent crying.

After finding out my grade would be a 75, I decided to bite the bullet and take a chance at taking the baby home again. While I thought I would have to take it over a new weekend, after talking to my teacher, we decided one night during the week would be enough. I ended up with a better grade the second time, and I’ve learned that parents deserve all the support they can get from people because it takes more than a village to take care of a baby.