A few weeks ago my baby monitor broke. The cord to the receiver finally frayed enough that it was no longer able to provide power to the monitor. This has actually happened once before- that should tell you how much I use it. This time, I endured 10 painful days of withdrawal, as I impatiently waited for the new cord to arrive in the mail. Each day when there wasn’t a package in my mailbox, I quietly cursed myself for being too cheap to choose expedited shipping. This is no ordinary audio monitor… nope- I have the big brother-esque video monitor complete with two cameras to keep a watchful eye over each of my daughters. Now, I know plenty of moms whose children survived babyhood without a monitor all together or simply used an audio monitor to alert them to a crying baby. But when I got pregnant with my preschooler, my sister insisted the video monitor was a necessity and she started my baby registry with this all-important item. When C.R. was about 2 weeks old, I complained to my mom over the phone that the baby made such ridiculously loud noises while she slept that I was checking on her most of the night. She told me that it was time to put her in her own room since I needed every wink of sleep I could get. That night, my husband took the video monitor out of the box and attached the camera to the wall above her crib. This one moment would define so many to come in the future, it was the beginning of a long term dependency that has become very hard to kick. My name is Melissa, and I am a video monitor addict.
My husband was and is much more relaxed about monitoring the girls, but I quickly became obsessed with watching. When other mamas see the video monitor, they almost always ask how much I like it. My answer is always the same- it is a blessing and a curse. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great advantages to having a bird’s eye view of your baby. I am able to see if it’s a leg-caught-in-crib-slats cry versus a just-want-one-more-cuddle cry. I, unlike most mamas, know the exact day that my daughter first rolled over onto her tummy. I know that C.R. likes to sleep with her shirt pulled up so she can rub her belly button. I know that the baby sleeps on her back with both hands raised above her head, similar to how she slept in my tummy.
I remember when C.R. was about 4 months old. My husband came home from work around midnight and tiptoed into our bedroom to kiss me goodnight. The baby had been sleeping through the night for a few weeks by now, and I was enjoying the new-found freedom to roll over in my bed without fear of crushing her. As usual, the video monitor was casting its eerie, blue glow across the room with a view of our sleeping babe in her crib. I stirred enough that my husband sat down and asked how my evening had been. After a little bit of small talk, he asked me why I left the video portion of the monitor on while I was sleeping. I told him it was so that at any time during the night, I could simply wake up and look over at the baby to make sure she was OK. He started to argue with me that the majority of the time my eyes were closed, so what was the point- but he soon realized that he was dealing with an overly-protective mother hen. I did eventually realize that sleeping in the dark was preferable and I agreed to turn the video off while we slept.
When the baby was born, we discussed my desire to buy another camera so that I could keep an eye on both of the girls. I wasn’t in a hurry since I knew the baby would sleep in our room for several weeks, but my husband thought we could just take C.R.’s camera off her wall and move it to the nursery. How ridiculous!! She was only a few months past two and had recently transitioned to her big girl bed, there was no way I was ready to relinquish my spying habit. A new camera was ordered, but then the dilemma of what to do when the monitor was set to one room and how would I know what the other was up to? Solution- I bought the cheapest audio monitor I could find and plugged it into the baby’s room. This way I could keep a watchful eye over the wandering toddler and an ear out for newborn cries. If the baby cried out, I could switch channels on the video monitor and see her in an instant. Problem solved. With one exception- two monitors was quite a chore to keep going. Several times I would go up for bed and leave one or the other of the monitors plugged in downstairs. At night, the audio monitor hummed annoyingly and the video monitor sometimes encountered feedback, perhaps running into interference from the audio monitor. I kept up this silly routine right up until the cord broke on the video monitor. I was now in quite a predicament. With only an audio monitor, I put the girls to bed and was forced to listen only to the quiet hum from one of their rooms. I was unable to see if C.R. was wandering around her room or illegally jumping up and down on her bed. I had no idea what time she actually drifted off to sleep and I didn’t know if she cried out for me in the middle of the night. The only upside that I could see was that I was able to foster my guilty pleasure of creeping into their rooms before I went to bed to plant one last kiss on their heads and watch them as they slumbered. But- I survived the night, and more importantly, so did she. I actually slept quite well that night and the subsequent nine days without my baby spy camera. I realized that there was not any reason to keep C.R. on the monitor throughout the night- she was old enough to get out of bed and come looking for me if and when she needed me. Now that the new cord has arrived, I have amended my ways. I put the baby on the audio monitor when she first goes down at night and keep her big sis on the video monitor. This way we can keep tabs on her post-bedtime antics that we silently hope she will outgrow (tomorrow). Then when I go up to bed, I unplug the audio monitor and leave it downstairs. The video monitor accompanies me upstairs and is tuned to the baby for the remainder of the night. This solution has been just one, albeit important, step in my steep learning curve toward letting go as my children grow and mature.
If a new mom asked me if she should get a video monitor, I would probably still answer the same way- it is a blessing and a curse. But it is hard now to look back over the past three years and imagine my life without it. I was able to avoid injury when my then two-year-old learned how to climb out of the crib. I was able to see that the baby was crying only because she had spit out her binky and not for a more serious reason. Is it a blessing or a curse that I know exactly what my kids are doing 24 hours a day? I am still figuring that one out.
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