Updated: That's my daughter... isn't it?

Maybe it was the head full of black hair... or the cone head... or my lack of sleep... but I had my first case of mistaken-baby today.

I was walking in to the Birth Center after picking up Yuki's mom from home for a visit. As we passed the nursery, they had the curtains open so you could see some of the babies inside. One of the nurses was holding Mika and washing her hair, so I turned to Yuki's mom and pointed her out. We watched for a couple minutes, then walked down to Yuki's room, only to discover that she was lying in bed with Mika in her arms.

Yuki's mom didn't say a thing, but I can only imagine what she must have been thinking! I've spent the last 48-hours with my new daughter, but I probably couldn't pick her out of a lineup of cone-headed, dark haired babies.

I guess that's why they all have GPS tags on their legs connected back to a sophisticated computer system that constantly matches them to their mothers. If new parents were responsible for picking out their babies from the crowd in the nursery, we'd probably all be going home with someone else's kid.

Update: One of my friends at work let me know that I'm not the first father to suffer "mistaken baby syndrome." The same thing happened to Dick Van Dyke -- in the episode "That's My Boy," Dick is convinced he left the hospital with the wrong baby. Yeah! I'm not alone. That said, Wikipedia notes that the episode generated the "longest, uninterrupted span of laughter from a live studio audience." Great. If I was a sitcom, I'd be hilarious.