Category Archives: mom

(Still no word back from doc about EEG results – no news is good news, right?)

Michael is nearing his birthday. In a few short weeks he’ll be three years old. Amazing how time flies, although truth be told, I cannot for the life of me remember him being an itty bitty baby. As far as I can tell, he was always as large and as in to everything as he is now. My memory is definitely not what it used to be. I swear, it isn’t alcohol that kills brain cells, it’s toddlers.

But I digress again.

Despite the fact that Michael is as of advanced an age as he is, we still have a baby monitor for him.

What I mean to say is, his Mom still wants to keep the baby monitor on him. From time to time I’ll ask whether we still need it. “I like to hear him breathe,” she says. I kid you not. On many mornings, if things are too quiet, she’ll ask me to turn it up so she can really hear him breathe. I keep reassuring her that he is way too hardy to just “go gentle into that dark night”, but would either pounce on the grim reaper, take his scythe away and menace him with it, or would be sent back from the hereafter if he otherwise did suddenly succumb for some reason. Not that we have any reason whatsoever to believe he would.

As for me, I’d like to take that thing out back and have at it with a sledgehammer.

Mostly, because it has this really great “feature” that will alert the concerned parent if the receiver should ever lose contact with the transmitter. The alert consists of a loud, persistant, obnoxious, staccato BEEP. The idea is that you can always be sure you’re actually tuned in to KBABY and hearing the real deal instead of being lulled into a false sense of security by listening to static.

The problem is, the thing will go into ALERT MODE if the conditions aren’t exactly perfect between transmitter and receiver. I’m not kidding nor exaggerating: if ANYTHING at all is wrong about the receiver’s reception, it freaks out. If the transmitter is turned off, or tuned to another channel, it’ll beep (Michael has already found this out – he loves turning it off in his room and then hearing the obnoxious BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP from Mommy & Daddy’s room). If the receiver is out of range (as can happen when Mommy takes the receiver outside to do yardwork or plops it in the garage so I can keep an eye on things when she’s occupied), it’ll beep. If the receiver is in the wrong position it’ll beep. If something that could be considered an electrical conductor (such as a lamp or a person’s arm) is positioned in one of several useful positions in some vicinity of the receiver, it’ll beep. Seriously. It has gone off when we walk from the bedroom to the bathroom. It sometimes goes off when I roll over or reach to hit the snooze bar on the radio.

You may think Michael’s room is on the other side of the house. No, his room is right next door to ours. There is less than ten feet of wallboard and pine studs between the transmitter and the receiver, and yet it still goes insane from time to time. I think it’s just because ordinarily its job is so boring it has to make things up just so it can feel like it’s making a difference somehow.

The other really fun aspect is the fact that it has to reside right over my head, on the bed’s headboard.

See, I have really good hearing. My wife, not so much. If I keep it on my side of the bed, I can keep it turned waaaay down, just so its set to my perception level. My wife has offered to have it on her side since she knows it annoys me, but the times we had that arrangement, she’d have it turned up so high that I couldn’t ever fall asleep, for hearing Michael’s every movement in his crib: breathing, random lip smacking, rolling over and setting off one of his many musical toys that must occupy his crib, rustling in his blankets, his snoring or wheezing, etc. “I can’t sleep with all that noise, honey!” I’d protest. “But I can’t hear him unless it’s this high!” She retorts. So it stays on my side.

And of course, since she can’t hear him while it’s on my side and set to my perception level, she doesn’t respond when he does cry. It’s up to me. I don’t mind that, though. Her method of dealing with his crying is to drag him back into bed with us, whereafter no one sleeps at all. This is an autonomic response on her part; she isn’t consciously aware that she’s doing this, at least, not until she’s been kneed in the belly and poked in the eye enough times to really wake up and realize what she’s done. My method of dealing with him is a few pats on the back, and a reassuring “Go back to sleep”.

So far, Michael has stayed alive and healthy and hasn’t stopped breathing once since we’ve had him. I’m sure the baby monitor has been a major contributor to this success.

As for when the baby monitor will no longer be necessary, my wife says “When he’s fifteen,” in a joking sort of manner. Only I think she’s not really joking.

I have my visions that Michael will have this monitor with him when he goes off to college. He’ll probably have to hide it behind his mini-fridge in the dorm, or his roommates will give him grief about it.

And then later, when he is married, I’m sure his wife will have an issue with it.

“Mike, that thing is giving me the creeps. I’m not sure I can be in this room with your parents listening to us.”
“Sweetie, you know my mom worries. She promises that next year we can get rid of it. She just wants to be sure I’m still breathing.”