The AngelCare Monitor

Our daughter is a stomach sleeper.  I know, (gasp), shock, horror…we are awful parents.  My very colic-ridden son was too, and after we quickly figured out this is the ONLY way we could get him to sleep longer than 5 minutes at a time (literally), we became Those Parents, standing in line at Babies R Us purchasing the $90 AngelCare Monitor in our son’s first weeks of life.  This thing beeps if there is no movement detected in the crib for 20 seconds.  Sounds psychotic?  It is.  We have determined that this largely works b/c it does not allow the parents or the child to sleep at all.  If the child shifts too far to one end of the crib, the monitor doesn’t pick up movement and it beeps so loudly and quickly you think it’s either the apocalypse or a spaceship is landing in your front yard.  If your children are sound sleepers (at night, when our children actually fall asleep, they basically petrify into rocks and I am the crazy mom constantly checking to make sure they are still alive), they may not make enough movement, again sending off the piercing alarm.  This serves efficiently to wake both them and you up.  So bottom line, no one is sleeping.  Of course, the device gets awesome reviews for being effective–children can’t stop breathing in their sleep b/c they are never allowed to actually remain asleep for longer than a few seconds and you, as the parent, spend the entire night hovering over their crib.  So yes, no one dies, but no one sleeps either.  And after several months of this, you get to that blurry point where it isn’t really clear if you are sleep-deprived or dead, so maybe it all comes out in the wash anyway…

BTW–my husband has threatened to throw this out the window numerous times and I believe is currently devising creative ways to dispose of the device after we are officially done with it.

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Meredith

Meredith blogs at The Mom of the Year, where she dedicatedly earns her title one epic parenting fail at a time, offering quick, relatable laughs for fellow parents and all their empathizers. She has been part of several best-selling anthologies, featured on prominent sites such as Huffington Post, In the Powder Room and BlogHer, and loves her role as the Executive VP/Operations Manager of The BlogU Conference. When she's not breaking up fights over Legos and juice boxes, she remains fully committed to sharing a less serious look at the world of parenting.

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