Hey Neighbor, We Can See Your Baby

This is totally freaky.  I am in Los Angeles, having arrived today to spend the weekend visiting my friend Erika and slurping on her new baby.  He is five months old and nearly edible in his cuteness.  Erika has a newfangled baby monitor with video.  I swear, even three years ago, when Hank was born, these weren't common, I don't think.  The little night vision camera is trained on the baby's crib, and when she puts him down to sleep, we thrill to his every movement and snurgle.  The night vision makes his crib mattress and jammies look white, and the whole visual reminds me of those ghosthunter shows on cable where people run around a house in the dark, and everything looks sort of scary even though it is basically normal.  

My friend tipped me off to the fact that if we switch channels on the video receiver, we can see into the crib of a baby girl two houses down.  This is so strange, and funny, and cute, and potentially creepy to me.  Her name is Lily, and she is about the same age as the baby of the house here.  My friend has met the parents (they are new in the neighborhood), but hasn't talked to them since she discovered the Lily channel.  What makes it so uncanny is that the two crib scenes are nearly identical. In fact, you can really only tell the two shots apart by the camera position. Erika's baby favors more close-up shots, and Lily has a slightly wider angle. But Lily's bedding looks white too, as do her jammies, and the babies don't look all that different by night vision.  When Erika discovered this, she thought she was seeing her own baby, but that the camera had been knocked askew.  

I have heard of people picking up other children and other broadcasts on their audio baby monitors, but somehow the addition of the picture is a whole 'nother thing.  Strange, right?  It's such an intimate scene from a stranger's house, but it's not really individual or unique, exactly, because both baby channels show pretty much the same programming.  At around 7:30, when Erika had just put her baby down to bed, we said, "Let's see if Lily is in bed." So we flipped over to her channel, and she was crying. We were like, "Oh no! Lily's upset! What's going on? Are they sleep-training with the cry-it-out method?"  Erika's husband, a more ethically-sensitive soul, said, "Don't spy on Lily." Erika said, "But it's out of love!"  Fortunately, some disembodied hands had just reached into Lily's bed to pat her and pick her up, so we felt relieved as we switched off the video.  All was quiet on the baby boy channel, and we went about our business.

A few minutes later, I said, "I have to check on Lily." I turned on the monitor, and she was in her crib crying again. Poor Lily! And poor parents of Lily! Again, thankfully for us spectators, the hands reached into the frame and picked the baby up, along with her blanket. After Erika and I switched off the video, we mused, "What sleep training method is this? In CIO (cry it out), do you actually pick up the baby or just go in and pat her? Maybe they're freestyling it? Is this Ferber? Weissbluth? Pantley? WE NEED TO KNOW."  We wanted to take a bottle of wine over to their house, but that might have been weird. Probably, definitely, would have been weird. 

   

This situation just captures the imagination, you know?  Now it is late at night, and both baby channels are quiet, thank goodness.  This could be the future of reality television, though, because it is oddly riveting.