Photo: Reddit
Whose baby is this?
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Jan 13, 2023
Near the bottom of the list titled “Things You Would Expect To See While Walking Your Dog,” you’ll find that seeing a stranger’s baby crawling into an intersection is one of them.
One man was caught by complete surprise when he was walking his dog around his neighborhood and stumbled upon exactly that, and almost didn’t believe his eyes.
He recorded his encounter with the completely unsupervised baby in the crosswalk.
The 28-second video was posted onto the subreddit “r/facepalm,” where tens of thousands of people upvoted it into one of the most viewed videos on the platform that day, January 12, 2023.
“Am I really seeing what I’m seeing?” the man said aloud in the video the moment he started recording. “Who the f--k just let their baby out the house?”
Text in the video itself reads “I’m calling CPS,” as the man who had just been walking his dog moments earlier now approached the baby that he was, all of a sudden, now responsible for.
“Wow, [the baby is] about to go out to the street,” he says, as the toddler crawls into the intersection. “Whose baby is this?”
Luckily, as he surveys the area around him with the camera, it’s clear that there are no cars nearby — but there are also no people, meaning that this baby’s parents are nowhere to be found.
When the man gets closer to the baby, they stop crawling and sit down with their legs spread out, tapping their leg with their hand and seemingly acknowledging and smiling at the dog by the man’s side.
The baby makes baby sounds before the man says “come on,” and cuts the video short, likely so he can pick up the abandoned child and search for their parents.
Stories in the comments show just how often something like this happens.
“I found a baby wandering into an intersection one time, during lunch traffic no less,” the top comment read. “Grandma thought he was safe playing in the sandbox while she went in the house to do god knows what, never mind that the backyard had no fence and backed onto a busy road.”
This person also mentioned that their boss, on a separate occasion, had encountered two toddlers waddling down a set of train tracks toward a busy road on her way to work.
“I know it's hard sometimes but holy s--t people, watch your babies,” they said.
Dozens upon dozens of comments were just like this, with stories of how people have encountered abandoned babies in the strangest places, so much so that comments even started to show how shocked they were about the seemingly frequent occurrence.
“Shocked by all the various comments about people finding babies. This should be such a rare occurrence but it sounds like it's far from,” one of the comments read. “As a parent, I can't imagine being so irresponsible with your child, let alone a baby!”
Since there was no update on the situation of this particular baby, one could only hope that he was able to find the parents.
Suggestions in the comments said that if this were to happen to you, the best idea would be to stay in the same area in case the parents showed up, but this is something that should never happen to anyone in the first place.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.