Monitors

Since Kennady is sleeping in her own bed now (most of the time. I still have the co sleeper up) I finally broke down and got the motion monitor.  Kennady is almost 9 months old. I understand the risk of SIDS drops with age but still it worries me. When you have a baby that was born having a hard time breathing and was hooked to machines in the NICU due to her breathing you end up being very paranoid. More so than the average mom. I don’t think I’ve slept more than 20 minutes at a time since Kennady was born. After sitting and watching a machine track her breathing I want to do everything possible to make sure she’s ok.
So far it seems to work pretty well. One thing that freaked me out was I turned on the monitor then went to change the baby. DON’T DO THAT!!!  It lets off this screeching alarm which is a good thing if your baby stops breathing but a bad one if you’re just changing her diaper. Now when I take her out of her bed I make sure to turn the monitor OFF of sound and motion and just leave it on sound. Leaving it on sound is easier than powering the whole thing off. To power it off you have to hold the power button for a second and at 3am with a crying baby it’s just easier to flick the switch to sound only to avoid the alarm going off. The nursery unit also has a really cool night light on it that has come in very handy. The parent handset is nice.  It has lights on it that indicate power and sound. You also have 3 separate channels to pick from for your signal. The motion part of the monitor beeps to show that the baby is still breathing. If the baby stops breathing the alarm sounds through the parent handset and the nursery base. Having the alarm sound in two different locations is great. The parent handset runs on 3 AAA batteries. It came with  rechargeable batteries so that’s always good. I already have a battery charging unit so it all worked out. I’m a huge believer in rechargeable batteries when you have kids.
For less than $100 it was well worth it for a bit of piece of mind.




I also went ahead and bought a video monitor. It was on sale at Babies R Us for $49.99. I figured for $50 I’d try it out and see how it worked. It works good. The picture quality isn’t that great but it does what it needs to do. You have to put it pretty far away from the baby to get a nice shot. The cord is also quite short so if where you want to place the monitor isn’t right on top of the outlet you’ll have to get an extension cord which I’m not sure would even be safe. I would suggest against that. The battery in the parent unit is quite weak. The longest I’ve gotten it to last before it died was an hour and a half at the most. The cord for the parent unit is also very short. Seeing that it has to be plugged in for extended use a short cord isn’t always a good thing. Overall this is a good monitor. The sound is clear and doesn’t tend to cut out even with my AngelCare monitor plugged in next to it. For the price it’s not a bad deal.
It seems I have traded staring at a machine in the NICU for listening to the beeping sounds coming from Kennady’s monitor telling me she’s still breathing. It’s hard to not be worried about her all the time.

Inza <3