Don’t Go Towards the Light…

Product Review, Video Monitor by Summer

We received a video monitor as a gift from my baby registry before our son was born. I was glad, thinking it would be one of the most important pieces of baby equipment that I needed right away. It did turn out to be an extremely useful tool, but not right away. Our son slept in our room in a cradle for the first six months of his life. He would have stayed longer, but we discovered that we were waking him with our snoring (for some reason, we both started snoring after the baby was born…). I thought it would have been the other way around, that he would wake us up, but he was a very sound sleeper and learned to sleep through the night on his own, very quickly.

Anyway, back to the review of the monitor…. The first night that he slept in his own room, in his crib, I was miserable. I missed him sleeping in the room with us and I was terrified that something awful was going to happen to him. I kept having nightmares that someone was going to break into his room or that the house would catch fire. I even woke up one time, staring at the screen of the monitor, and thinking that I could see great tentacles sliding in between the slats of his crib. I placed the monitor right next to my side of the bed on the nightstand so that I could look at it easily. Having it during those first weeks without the baby in our bedroom made me feel more comfortable. It made me feel like he was still in the room with us in a way.

Now, months later, I still turn the monitor on when I go to bed. But I do so grudgingly. I hate the loud hum and the blue glow of the screen. I don’t think I get decent sleep because of it. It's as if the screen light is beckoning to me... beckoning to me to stare at it... to scrutinize every crackle or buzz of interference looking for poltergeists... to get lost in the glow.

I don’t know if there is a security camera on the market that eliminates background noise while capturing sound. I wish that we had that feature though. Also, I often turn the video itself off, and just leave the sound, so that I don’t go crazy with the screen light. I suppose if one is used to going to sleep with a TV on, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but I must have absolute darkness to sleep well. When the baby was first born, this was not the case. I could fall asleep standing. But now that I have caught up with my sleep debt, I have become more finicky about my sleep conditions.

On the other hand, I am loath to get rid of the monitor all together. The thought of my baby boy being all alone still bothers me. Unfortunately, his bedroom is rather far off, so I don’t feel confident that I would hear him if he needed me. So the video monitor is still a valuable product.

The solution I’ve come up with is to move to a house with the bedrooms next to each other…