While most teens are sleeping till noon or going out with their friends on the weekends, students in child development are up at 2 in the morning, caring for their screaming robotic babies. And this is for a major grade.

Sophomore Rose Doherty was looking forward to taking a baby home for the weekend, but things did not turn out so great.

“I thought ‘this is going to be so much fun’,” Doherty said. “It ended up not being what I expected at all.”

To show what life would be like if students were to have a real baby, those enrolled in child development classes had to take home a Real Care baby that would cry at random times every day and at night. This experience taught students how to care for a baby and meet its needs ranging from diaper changes, to burping, to rocking and feeding them. The electronic component built into each baby recorded how fast or how careless each task was performed.

“I think a lot of us didn’t realize how hard it was to have a child,” Doherty said. “When we took home the baby, even though it was not 100 percent real, it did make us realize it was quite a bit less work than what we would have had to do with a real baby.”

Not only were the students trying their hardest to care for the baby’s needs, but to also keep it safe and healthy. With temperature detectors and a sensitive neck and head, there was a record of any time the baby’s temperature was too high or too low, or number of head drops, which could result in shaken baby syndrome or a serious brain injury to an infant.

“When I took home the baby over the weekend, I slept with the doll sitting upright on my stomach so I wouldn’t have to get out of bed completely to assist it when it cried,” Senior Emily Huber said. “On the night before I was supposed to turn it in, I rolled over to my side and the baby fell off my bed and hit it’s head on the floor. It started screaming and it dropped my grade to an 86.”

With crammed weekends, homework and barely any sleep, students became aware of the difficulty of raising a baby at any age or during their teenage years.

“My weekend with the baby was horrible,” Doherty said. “It was the weekend band members were doing the mulch fundraiser, so I had a lot of stuff going on. It was even more difficult trying to live my normal life with an electronic baby. We went out to eat, and I couldn’t eat while I was rocking the baby. I couldn’t sleep, because it was crying. I was up for about five hours a night, and trying to do homework with it was hard, too.”

Doherty and her twin sister Anna took home a baby the same weekend. That literally made the task double the trouble.

“It was probably one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced,” Doherty said. “If we went to the store, we’d both have to be sitting with the giant car seat, because their wasn’t enough room in our cart for all of us. Also, our babies weren’t on the same schedule. Mine was about a minute off from hers. So when hers started crying I would be like, ‘Oh no. Mine’s about to start crying.’ If hers kept crying after mine had stopped, I couldn’t fall asleep because of it.”