It’s every parent’s worst nightmare – and a German couple lived it. Taking their newborn home from hospital, the new parents left their baby in the taxi.
The mum and dad from Hamburg had taken their older child out of the car that whisked their family home and had paid the driver, only to realise they’d forgotten the baby as the taxi departed, and running after it in vain.
The driver parked his vehicle in an underground carpark and had some lunch before heading towards the airport to pick up a new fare and discovering his teeny-tiny sleepy stowaway.
He called the police, and Mutter und Vater were reunited with Säugling – with Hamburg Police sharing the story and its happy ending in a Facebook post.
This is one of those tales where it would be really easy to tut and shake your head and be like “what dreadful people”, but if anyone deserves to be forgiven a silly mistake or two, its new parents.
They’ve just gone through an absurd, exhausting, world-turning-upside-down experience and are probably totally spun out, and a split-second mistake like this is all too doable.
“Klaus, woher ist das Kind?”
“Oh…. scheisse.”
Luckily, one of the nice things about newborns is that they don’t do much – just kind of lie there, mainly asleep, and occasionally make little seagull-esque noises. The downside to this inactivity is they’re easy to miss. The other thing with newborns, of course, is that they’re really very small.
The German couple also have a one-year-old, and the thing about one-year-olds is you really have to keep your eyes on them, because those things can mooooove.
The one-year-old is way more likely to dive out of the taxi, or clamber all over their parents inside the car and generally act the giddy goat. If you suddenly go from being an only child to being the sibling with less novelty value, you can be forgiven for going after a bit of parental attention – nobody likes feeling like they’re old news.
Dealing with that kind of thing, the parents can hardly be criticised for keeping an eye on their older child. Just, you know, in an ideal world the other eye should probably have been on their new one.