Quote:
Originally Posted by 4X4
Congratulations to the non-video monitor people who choose not to indulge in awesome technology. I am willing to bet that each of you went upstairs in the evening or went to the baby's room in the night after something made you want to check on the child a whole bunch of times. Congratulations to the people with video monitors that didn't have to do that and risk upsetting the kid by opening their door.
Hey, it's a luxury. I'm not going to lie. But it's such a useful luxury it's like sending a text message instead of writing a letter and putting it in the mailbox. You know immediately, and you don't have to walk anywhere to find out. And I don't care how lazy that sounds, because sleep is a very, very precious commodity around a new parents household. And minimizing little scraps about "it's your turn to go check" is probably another side affect that I didn't even notice we were avoiding.
And it's not really boring to watch your kid on the monitor. You're not going sit there and watch for minutes and hours, but when you see her doing the spin-o-rama in bed to position herself completely opposite of how you put her down, it's pretty cute. My daughter is a morning person. She sits in her crib and fools around for a good hour before she gets cranky and demands that someone let her out. It's kinda funny to glance at the monitor and see her playing with her toys at 7am. And it's also nice to know that she doesn't wake up and cry immediately. I don't know why I'm happy that I know that, but I am.
But go ahead and forego the video monitor like these other hippies and enjoy blissful ignorance, if that's your style. I guess that makes me a helicopter parent.  |
Disagree. There are tons of methods pertaining to bedtime and not all of them involve constant check-ins. In our house, monitors were a barrier to sleep more than they were useful. We didn't risk waking the kid up by opening the door a bunch of times because we didn't open it at all (once several months had passed and the kid didn't need to eat every few hours). We have friends with video monitors and it's a blast to watch them screw around in there, but at the end of the day my wife and I agreed it's something we would spend way too much time checking when we'd rather be sleeping.
I think the important take-away for Table 5 here is that everybody seems
quite pleased with how they did things. You'll sit down with the mrs. and determine what is and is not important to you. Whether you want a video monitor, audio monitor or no monitor at all it's going to end up just fine.