by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (Make Mine A Double)
With my first daughter, I wasn’t sure if we even needed a monitor seeing as our bedroom was about eight steps from the baby’s plus she spent the first four months in a bassinet making her whimpering noises next to my right ear. I laughed in the face of people who had video monitor. You’ve just spent twelve hours with your baby. Now you want to spy on them while they sleep? I’d have to be at the rock bottom of my DVR queue to choose “watching my baby sleep” as an option.
But then we started letting Elby sleep on her stomach – hang on, there’s someone at the door… aaahhh…it’s CPS! They’ve come for me! Did you call them you b------ ? I can explain! Look, she accidentally slept through the night for the first time on her belly and my husband and I didn’t want to mess with a good thing so we just decided to let her continue. But we bought a kick ass Angel Care monitor that sounds an alarm if your baby stops breathing for ten seconds. I became a dichotomy between the laid back, “Dude, whatever works” and the decidedly less sanguine “Holy crap, what if something horrible happens?” But, the child slept and thus, so did we; everyone was happy. Eventually the monitor was lent to other paranoid new parents for periods of time until the twins came and the monitor made its way back to us – still in perfect shape.
Quite a few times a night, even if I have the volume turned way down, I am stirred awake by crying and have to decide whether to lay back and pray it stops on its own or if I need to do a “drive-by” whereby I creep into the babies’ room and check for a client that needs to be held a minute or two or just given a little pat and an “It’s okay” or even, God forbid, a ‘nother round of Rick Springfield; every once in awhile it’s something a little more serious.
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Raising preemie twin girls plus a sassy preschooler while trying to make a book deadline isn't for wussies. In her Mommy Tracked column, Make Mine a Double, Stefanie Wilder-Taylor takes imperfect parenting to an art form. Each week she breaks the pristine laws of the mommy manuals as she reveals how she attempts to parent her three children through instinct, intelligence, and a lot of trial and error. She is the author of Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, Naptime Is the New Happy Hour, and It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections from a Terminally Optimistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman. She’s appeared numerous times on The Today Show, is a member of the Us Weekly Fashion Police and writes on her blog, Baby On Bored.
