The Baby Monitor Chronicles

If Tony and I ever write a book about our experience as parents, that's what it will be called. Don't steal it! It's ours! Copyright Cawlamone.

My husband has gotten some flack from my side of the family for always having the baby monitor on him. We'll be at a family gathering and Des will be napping soundly upstairs or a couple rooms away, and Tony will have the cordless monitor hooked on to his pocket like a beeper. On high volume and vibrate mode. If conversation gets a little loud, he'll put it up to his ear and step out of the room.

My family has a lot of kids around. They figure if the kid is screaming, you don't need a monitor to hear that. This thing with Tony and the monitor.. it's funny to them.

It's not that I'm not the Concerned Parent. Honestly, if Tony wasn't around, I'd be the one with the monitor in my pocket. But since I know he's always there, listening, on his toes, ready to go, I get to sit back with a glass of wine. The baby monitor is kind of a metaphor for our relationship.

We never sprung for one o' dem fancy shmancy video monitors. I know myself. I know that if we had the capability to watch our son every second that he slept, I would sit and stare at that thing for hours. Make sure he was still breathing. Search for patterns in his movements. Call my mom when he rolled over, "Oh my god, it was sooo cute!"

No. Our monitor is actually a hand-me-down (shocker!), 5 years old or so, but it does the job just fine.

Tony, who's a bit of a nerd in case you haven't spent 5 minutes with him ever, recently set up a video monitor in Desmond's room that we happened to have lying around. I believe he bought it years ago when we were going on vacation and he wanted to keep an eye on his cats. Yes.. I married that guy.

So ten months into the parenting thing, we got the video monitor set up. It's really only useful during his morning nap, when the sunlight in his room is just so, because this thing does not show video in the dark. But in the few weeks we've been watching that one nap, we have learned so much.

Like, before Des goes to sleep he'll chat with his monkey friend while kicking his legs up in the air.

Much of the time he sleeps with his butt in the air:

No real surprise. I did that a lot a child. Still do. Don't judge me.

And he actually naps 5 or 10 minutes less than we ever realized. When he wakes up, he sits and and chills out for while, gathering his thoughts and recounting his dreams, then he makes a peep.

Oh, and he bites on the crib rails. I don't know how we missed the teeth marks, but we see them now.

All of this has made me realize... I want a real video monitor. It might be the worst idea ever. For both of us. Like, maybe we should think about taking a step back instead of sucking ourselves further into the vortex of Everything Desmond. But I got a taste and now I want more.

Santa?