Stolen Sleep

Now it's one thing to have to wake up in the middle of the night with your child. Luckily (knock on copious amount of wood), Henry never wakes up in the middle of the night. So, I go to bed at 11 planning on waking up at 7 or whenever the babe rises. Good deal.

It's a whole completely different thing to have to wake up in the middle of the evening, night, morning, naptime with your baby monitor. As a mother, I didn't sign on for taking care of a sweet baby boy and an *sshole baby monitor.

Let me explain. We have the Angelcare monitor that detects motion. We bought it as a recommendation from friends who have a young son. They said it was the best thing they owned. It was especially nice once Henry was born considering he spent the first week of his life in the NICU with breathing problems.

Early on, my relationship with the monitor was chummy. We had a few false alarms where we jumped out of bed like someone had told us Oprah was outside, but all in all I gleefully smiled every time I saw the monitor blink. Our baby boy was breathing and all was right in the world.

Then. One day. One day that monitor lost it's cool. Maybe its monitor girlfriend had broken up with him. Maybe the diaper stench had become too much. That monitor started alarming all day and all night. Naptime would be ruined because it would go off and Henry would wake up after being down for 7 minutes and decide it was time to play. It would go off in the middle of the night when Henry was dead asleep. He'd sleep right through it while we'd (mostly Tom) would be stumbling blindly into Henry's room to reset the damn thing.

I was on the brink. I'd been woken up one too many times from dreams about the baby napping 3 hours while I sipped lemonade and read an actual book.

It was immature and not mommylike but when the monitor alarmed this morning, I tore the covers off, threw myself out of bed and across the room, and karate chopped that monitor to kingdom come.

Hours later when I woke up for the day, Tom had left for work, and I felt bad. I plugged Mr. Monitor into the wall to see if he still worked and he does. Hopefully now he'll think twice before false alarming again.


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