1. You will create a flour-child (an artfully designed 10 lb. sack of flour or sugar.) Make your child distinctive yet appropriate (e.g.: no tattoos, piercing, hair coloring), with his/her own personality or style.
2. Name your child.
3. During the school day, you must carry your child at all times. In this class you must hold your child at all times. Lockers and trunks are not cribs or day-care centers.
4. You should be extremely protective of your child. If a tragic loss or injury occurs, you will be responsible for clean-up (NOT the custodians.), reporting to instructors, and negotiation of the penalty. Penalties range from additional research to a report on child abuse. If someone else attacks your child, or uses him/her in a recipe, find a teacher as a witness to spare you some penalty.
5. You are not allowed to put the baby in your backpack, go anywhere without your baby, leave your baby in the care of anyone else, or let anyone abuse or neglect your child.
6. You will lose 25 points every time you are seen without your baby! There will be no negotiation or discussion, just a 25 point deduction!
Valerie Farnsworth’s Flour Baby evaluation:
1. Appearance: To this day, my mom laughs at what she looks back on as a unique dry sense of humor that no one else really understood…I think most people thought I was weird…but I thought it was hilarious. I decided that on one side of my baby would be George Burns and the other would be Prince Charles. Why? I obviously took this project seriously. Based on the pictures you are about to see, you could probably guess my teacher didn’t necessarily agree with my take on “distinctive yet appropriate” – whatever, I laughed every time I toted Charlie-George around…
The following are as close to the pictures I carried around for one week as I can recall:
2. Name: Charlie-George.
3. Pretty sure Charlie-George was left in at least two classes in my daily 6-class schedule. Pretty sure my teachers did not have a hard time identifying whose “child” was constantly left behind. Pretty sure this racked up an extreme amount of deductions resulting in a not-so-fabulous grade.
4. Hmmm…well, Charlie-George developed a couple of leaks throughout the week…all of which were lovingly attended to with duct tape – he may not have weighed the full 10 lbs at the end of the week, which well, could’ve ended up in an additional amount of deductions towards my grade…
5. No comment.
6. And well, this pretty much was the nail in the coffin.
Let’s put it this way, if the Flour Baby project were any true indicator of things to come for me it was this: I would be an awful parent, with an extremely not-so-attractive baby, that leaks incessantly. Hmmm…mission accomplished for this 8th grader.
Fifteen years later I find myself expecting my first child, a boy, in the next couple of months. To my eighth grade teacher I have this to say:
Dear Ms. Home Ec (your name escapes me),
I don’t know why I got a B- on my flour baby project. Could your personal opinions regarding Prince Charles or George Burns have anything to do with it? Or could it have possibly had to do with my constant lack of attention to where my “baby” was half the time?
Well, here I am 15 years older. I still have a hard time holding on to critical things each day…my keys, my driver’s license, cell phone, mascara. Keeping this chronic absent-mindedness in mind, I find myself 3 months away from having my first real “flour baby” and I can’t help but reflect on my success (or lack thereof) of my flour baby project.
Let’s hope I can keep track of my real “flour baby” this time around, that he’s a bit more attractive than Charlie-George and that nothing will come to duct tape repairs. In terms of a grade however, I have a feeling I’ll be lucky if I end up with a B- at the end of this “project.”
Here’s to Charlie-George Jr. -
Valerie Farnsworth (now Payette)
p.s. this time around…please call me val.
