S/O Baby Monitors

[catbus]

Hearing every noise is not good for my sleep. That said, I love having a monitor. Our house is small--it's probably about 18' between our bed and E's crib, with one room between us. We have the Angelcare video monitor. We sleep with our door open and E's door closed. The monitor is on all night, but the sound is off. We can hear him if we're awake and listening, but if we're sleeping only insistent noises wake us up--so crying or sustained babbling. It's perfect, because we don't wake up with every little noise, and the video monitor allows me to roll over and check whether he's settling himself back to sleep (in which case, I go back to sleep_ or really working himself up.

[jamer]

We LOVE our video monitor. It saves my sanity to know what she is doing at all times.

[catbus]

Oh yeah, it can definitely wait! We didn't have any kind of monitor until E was about 12 weeks old and we started putting him down for naps in his crib (in preparation for moving him there a few weeks later).
FWIW, I went with an "open box" deal on Amazon for our monitor. It saved us about $40 and was still covered by Amazon's return policy: www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B004E9SWQ2/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used&qid=1364490999&sr=8-1

[cdmay]

Our house is two stories, so we'll need one, but also we thought it would be useful for gardening, or if we are able to pull off naps and bedtimes elsewhere, it would be useful to be able to take with to friends' and family's houses.

[jennlin]

we didn't use the monitor at all during the first few weeks/months of life, esp since she slept in our room. until they roll over, it's no big deal..they're not going to fall/run into anything, and you'll hear him if he needs you.

catbus, can you link your monitor? from you describing it the last few days, i think i really like it (i'm not a fan of mine, but it works).

[catbus]

Mar 28, 2013 12:50:00 GMT -5 jennlin said:

we didn't use the monitor at all during the first few weeks/months of life, esp since she slept in our room. until they roll over, it's no big deal..they're not going to fall/run into anything, and you'll hear him if he needs you.

catbus, can you link your monitor? from you describing it the last few days, i think i really like it (i'm not a fan of mine, but it works).

Yep; we have this one.

[jennlin]

Mar 28, 2013 13:01:23 GMT -5 catbus said:

Mar 28, 2013 12:50:00 GMT -5 jennlin said:

we didn't use the monitor at all during the first few weeks/months of life, esp since she slept in our room. until they roll over, it's no big deal..they're not going to fall/run into anything, and you'll hear him if he needs you.

catbus, can you link your monitor? from you describing it the last few days, i think i really like it (i'm not a fan of mine, but it works).

Yep; we have this one.

thanks. tell me more about the motion sensing pad---do you use it? it beeps after 20 seconds of non movement? what if the baby is sleeping?!

[jennlin]

Mar 28, 2013 13:30:15 GMT -5 spunbutterfly said:

Mar 28, 2013 13:29:01 GMT -5 jennlin said:

thanks. tell me more about the motion sensing pad---do you use it? it beeps after 20 seconds of non movement? what if the baby is sleeping?!

We use it. The motion pad. (Occasionally.) It will give us some false alarms. We have it on 4 sensitivity.

It will tic for each movement (if you want to turn that option on). Or it will blast an alarm to all the monitor devices and at the base when it doesn't 'sense' any kind of movement (Breathing movement included) for 30 seconds.

interesting that it senses breathing movements. that sounds insane. and just peachy for a mom who's worried about sids. (sarcasm). i'd lay awake watching the blinking light (i read the light can blink instead of tic).

[catbus]

Mar 28, 2013 13:29:01 GMT -5 jennlin said:

Mar 28, 2013 13:01:23 GMT -5 catbus said:

Yep; we have this one.

thanks. tell me more about the motion sensing pad---do you use it? it beeps after 20 seconds of non movement? what if the baby is sleeping?!

We initially weren't going to use it, but friends use it and said it actually works really well and they hadn't had any false alarms, so we tried it out, and it does work perfectly as long as you take a couple minutes to calibrate. When calibrated correctly, it's sensitive enough that it picks up the movement of the baby breathing. No lie, I can rest my hand on the mattress and it detects that as movement. The trick is to have it sensitive enough that it picks up those movements, but not so sensitive that it detects ambient room movement (like loud white noise) as baby movement. This sounds more difficult than it is. We have only been using it for three months, but haven't had any false alarms yet. Our friends also haven't had any false alarms, and they've used theirs longer.

That said, you absolutely don't need to use the pad. Oh, and some Amazon reviews make it sound like a hassle to turn off the pad when you take the baby out of the crib, but really all you need to do is either hit the pause button on the parents' unit, or push a button on the camera unit.

[catbus]

Mar 28, 2013 13:32:39 GMT -5 jennlin said:

Mar 28, 2013 13:30:15 GMT -5 spunbutterfly said:

We use it. The motion pad. (Occasionally.) It will give us some false alarms. We have it on 4 sensitivity.

It will tic for each movement (if you want to turn that option on). Or it will blast an alarm to all the monitor devices and at the base when it doesn't 'sense' any kind of movement (Breathing movement included) for 30 seconds.

interesting that it senses breathing movements. that sounds insane. and just peachy for a mom who's worried about sids. (sarcasm). i'd lay awake watching the blinking light (i read the light can blink instead of tic).

Yeah, I don't know that it's a great option for anxious parents. Or maybe it is, IDK. I'm not anxious and am not the type to wake up in a panic worrying whether my baby's still breathing. I chose the monitor more for the combination of video and high-quality sound. It sounded like the Motorola video monitor was not good at filtering out white noise, and would click on and off all the time, which would drive me batty. The Samsung video monitor didn't have enough reviews at the time for me to spend that amount of money.

I have the "tick" sound turned off, and there's no ticking light that I know of. There's a little pendulum icon at the top of the screen that swings back and forth as long as movement is detected. Proper calibration is definitely important, though.

[jennlin]

if i pull the baby out of the crib, i wouldn't need the parent unit on anyways, right? am i missing something? oh i guess maybe naps outside of crib? i can deal with that.

[catbus]

Sorry, I meant like if you're doing a MOTN feeding or something. That's when you'd maybe want to "pause" the motion pad. The pause feature makes the camera and parents' unit blink so you remember to turn it back on. Or you can just turn it off completely, which is also easy.

And yeah, spunbutterfly, some of the reviews are "special." There was someone on my BMB on The Bump who said the AC is useless because the alarm goes off all the time. Someone else asked if she had it calibrated correctly, and she said yeah, but it can't tell when the baby's out of the crib. So she was expecting it to not go off when the pad was turned on and there was *no baby in the crib*.

[dana86]

I personally love having a monitor. We didn't use our until M was moved into her room so around 5 or 6 months but we use it every time since then. We are a one story house but the rooms are on opposite ends so it's nice to have but mostly I love having a video monitor. I can look to see what she is doing as she puts herself to sleep, it's mostly for peace of mind which for me it's worth the cost. Not to mention it will be great for when we move her to a toddler bed I can see if she is staying in bed or not.

PS- we also made sure to get one of the monitors that don't let others around us try and pick up on the frequency to see in our house. (just added safety)