Have you ever seen the episode of the Simpsons where Homer’s brother (played by Danny DeVito) moves in with the family and using baby Maggie as a his test subject creates a device that tells parents why their babies are crying? The Simpsons is just a cartoon but it seems someone has actually managed to create such a device. Check out whycry.com. Using a microphone, the gadget listens to your baby crying and then translates it into one of five expressions, hungry, bored, annoyed, sleepy and stressed. The site claims they are 98% reliable and through a digital processing of the signal there is a maximum of 20 seconds wait time. What do you think? Can a machine really tell you what’s wrong with your baby?

Another item I thought was pretty clever was the Squirt baby food dispensing spoon from Boon, Inc. The bulb holds three ounces of baby food and when you squeeze it dispenses “just the right amount of food” on to the spoon. What is “just the right amount of food?” Well, for my son it was probably more than this little spoon can hold, but I’m all for anything that will cut down on the mess that is involved with feeding babies and teaching them to eat!