I'm Ron Popiel in a nursing bra

As I'm going about my day with the baby, because I am a smart, talented person with no current means of expression except this blog and the perverse little twists I give nursery rhymes when the correct words escape me, I am always coming up with ideas for inventions.

If I had any business sense, I'd be contracting folks to build prototypes, do patent research, raise venture capital and whatever else one has to do to cultivate a tiny germ of a brilliant idea into a giant, fecund, fruit-bearing tree. And by fruit I mean money. And by germ I guess I meant seed.

So much for crafting metaphors, I need to be building a lucrative business empire. Or at least come up with one more cheaply produced piece of crap that people are foolish enough to believe they can't live without. And it just so happens that I think of things all the time. Here are two examples and the circumstances which inspired them:

Beeping Baby Shoes
My daughter is a veritable Houdini when it comes to removing her shoes. (Socks too, but those are cheap enough that I don't care so much.) Even when she is wearing this brand of elastic-topped leather bootie-like shoe that, besides being festooned with unbelievably cute apliques of ice cream cones, or puppy faces, or spouting whales and being crafted of butter-soft leather, is supposed to be IMPOSSIBLE for the kid to remove. But of course my daughter flicks them off her feet with abandon. And then strangers tap me on the shoulder and hand them back to me, making me feel both grateful and guilty for being such an unobservant mom.

So, I figured, how hard would it be to attach some sort of beeping device to each shoe that would activate when it hit the ground? You can buy greeting cards that sing Happy Birthday when you open them and magazine insert ads sometimes beep or play tinny little tunes, so how expensive would it be to produce a kids' shoe that alerted a parent when little Katie or Connor's shoe hit the mall floor in front of the Cinnibun stand? I figure I'll be a millionaire by the time my baby hits preschool.


Bubble machine
This one is another sure winner. You know how babies all love bubbles? How about a cry-activated bubble machine that attaches to the crib? Baby wakes up crying at 5:47 and you want to sleep until the sun comes up? Bubbles ON! Baby happily watches them and drifts back to sleep...

Breast milk filter
Decent ideas, no? They come to me all the time. I had another one since I started this post and it involves a Brita-like filtration system for breast milk. Since the stuff is worth more than gold to those of us who get performance anxiety when faced with the pump, how bad do you feel when you (and by you I mean me) have to dump a bottle after having a second glass of wine or puckeringly tasty margarita? I mean, I could stop drinking entirely, but motherhood's stressful.

So I made a few sketches, but they were on a cocktail napkin and I think I used it to wipe up a macerated cheerio on the bartop. (And yes, the baby has been to a bar. She sat in her infant seat and was rocked and fed and cooed over by our friendly neighborhood bartenders. We have anti-smoking laws, so it's not as tragic as it sounds.)

Anyway, the filters would attach to the breastpump. But now that I think of it, maybe we could also manufacture portable ones that would stick onto the nipple itself, like a pasty on a showgirl. But instead of a tassel, there would be a charcoal filtration system to remove impurities before they reached baby's little lips.

So what do you think? Anyone with a line on some venture capital?