Wednesday, January 13, 2010

A Little Baby Monitor Advice

So we went baby supply shopping in a bit of a hurry. One item that we weren't quite sure we'd even need was a baby monitor. We quickly realized that between our inexperience and our apparently sound proof house, a baby monitor would be a Good Thing.

As a side note (and to earn a few geek points here) - we initially worked around the problem of not having a baby monitor by putting a laptop in the kid's room and starting a Google Talk voice call. We muted the microphone on the laptop we were using to listen in on. The setup actually worked pretty well, and with a bit of an equipment change, we could have had video too.

Anyway, we realized we needed a baby monitor. I was the first one out at the store, and standing in the baby monitor isle I was a bit overwhelmed. So I got Shira on the line.

My instinct was to go with the bare-bones model. Heck, they all do the same thing, right? Thankfully, Shira convinced (told?) me to go with the slightly fancier Fisher-Price Sounds 'n Lights Monitor. The bonus here was the extra receiver, which we thought we could leave strategically in the basement next to the TV.

The fact that the monitor had pretty flashing lights seemed to be a total gimmick.

Turns out, I was actually wrong about the lights. When I'm working at night, and Shira's trying to catch a little shut-eye, I often have my headphones on. The result is that I'm not going to hear the baby monitor. Those little lights, on the other hand give me a visual clue that the little one is asking for a bit of attention.

Is the Fisher Price monitor the best one to get? I have no idea, as we didn't really do any research. But I can tell you, those lights are actually useful and far more than just some pretty decoration.

Note: the monitor gets terrible reviews on Amazon. We haven't had any issues with static yet, so maybe we got an updated model or something.

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