The North Platte High School (NPHS) child development class carried flour or sugar babies around for a week. 

Elizabeth Odle is the instructor of the class and wanted the students to learn something and figure out how to care for the baby. 

“It’s just a small taste of having a newborn infant in their life for a week,” Odle said. 

This project is designed so that the students have to care for their children during school and their personal time. 

“I learned that babies are a great responsibility,” junior Alexa Flatt said. 

These students had to take their babies everywhere unless they paid a sitter who was over 18. 

“I didn’t really have anyone babysit my baby,” junior Kylee Edwards said. “I just ended up taking it absolutely everywhere with me just so I didn’t forget about it.” 

This assignment was hard for many reasons, and the students that didn’t use babysitters had to have their babies with them at every waking moment and carry them everywhere. 

“It was not fun because people don’t move out of the way so they just hit the carrier,” Flatt said, “I mostly liked having it but it was hard to carry in the halls.” 

These students had a few ups and downs, also, as parents normally do. 

“Well at first I didn’t like it, then on my last day I was kinda sad because my baby [passed],” freshman Cameron Gehrke said. 

These babies were not real, but they still gave their “parents” challenges. 

“It is harder to take care of a baby even if it is a bag of sugar,” Edwards said. 

These students learned a lot in the week that they had their babies. 

“The point was to have people learn that it is harder to take care of a baby than people think,” Edwards said. 

This is an important experience for the students to get a chance to have a child and how tough it is even if it’s only for a week. 

“After carrying it around for a week with their parents making a big deal out of it, they think twice about what it actually might be like to have a child in their life,” Odle said.