Candace Lajeunesse 12/16/14
Family Life-Tracey Period 5

Baby Think It Over Project As a student I have taken the responsibility to bring home a child in my Family Development class to learn how it would be to be a parent as well as how it would be to have a newborn infant that you have to attend to all of the time. Throughout this experience I have experienced the reality of what a new mother has to go through and the process she has to go through with taking care of a child and how much responsibility comes along with taking care of one. I have learned that having a child takes a lot of time out of your day and that you need to show a lot of love and affection towards your child as it begins to mature. Further along in this essay I will share with you the experiences I have faced while taking home my baby, Antwon. As picking up the baby from my family development class I began walking home in which the baby began to cry. I attended to it right away and began undressing it while trying to find the right key that would attend to the baby’s need. This is in relation to real life because when baby’s cry you need to attend to them and since the baby cannot talk you have to try different alternatives to find out what the baby needs. The baby needed a feeding key because it was hungry due to the fact that it was around dinner time. I gave the baby that key and continued my walk home. Further along the baby began crying again and I knew that once a baby has been fed that afterwards it will need to be burped. When the next cry occurred I supplied the baby the burp key because it had already previously eaten. I finally reached the comforts of my home and it then began to soak in that having a child is a fascinating thing and can also be a stressful thing that you have to accommodate to. After about two hours Antwon began to cry again. Before he started crying I was laying on the couch with him in my arms cradling him as a real mother would do to provide her child the nurture and comfort that he or she may need. When the baby began crying again I did a diaper changed because usually after feeding and burping the baby it will usually digest the food it has eaten and will release the urine from his bladder. I provided the baby the key and it stayed silent for a longer period of time then the first time. About three to four hours later Antwon began crying again as it was becoming late. As he was crying my mother was by my side explaining to me that having a baby for the first time is a lot of work and that I was supposedly in for a rude awakening because the baby was surely going to cry all night in which my mother was right. Throughout the night Antwon cried constantly in which I had to feed the baby, change the baby, and burp the baby all throughout the night. After waking up in the morning from the long night of Antwon excessively crying I woke up and realized that having a child means having more responsibilities then when you do not have a child. You have to wake up during the night because the baby is unable to take care of itself and does not know any better in which you then have to take care of it until it learns how to by itself. The first time being a parent with my child, Antwon, was a first pinch of reality of how it feels to be a mother and how tiring it can be. The second day of taking care of Antwon I had a basketball game so I had my mother otherwise known as the new grandmother watch Antwon. When I came home from my game I found my mother laying down with Antwon watching Disney movies. She told me that while I was gone that Antwon needed a feeding due to it being the morning in which it was breakfast time, burped twice, and then needed a diaper change to release his waste. As the day slowly progressed Antwon would not cry for a while but my mother, Isayah, or I would continously hold the baby because all babies need to feel comfort and babies love to know when someone is there and loves to be in