We Have a Winner!

The saga of the baby monitor has been the second most intense and frustrating thing about the last couple months (the first, of course, being my own journey of finding balance and happiness in my life). Here's the back story: Once upon a time we were young recent college grads who had a bouncing baby boy. A family member gave us a monitor as a gift. It was great! We used it constantly until one day, when our second bouncing baby boy was about a year old, it started to die. I found a Graco monitor on Amazon for really cheap, so I bought it. It worked fine, but the minimum volume was much louder than mute. This was fine with a one year old who already slept through the night, but I knew it would be a problem with an infant, so we figured we would get a better monitor when Talia arrived.

A couple weeks after Talia was born I got really fed up with her sleepy grunting waking me up in the middle of the night when she wasn't really awake, so the hunt for a new monitor began. Price wasn't really an issue since we were gifted a large gift card from friends at Ian's work. We still wanted good value though so we started with the Fisher Price Lights and Sounds monitor (incidentally this is the same one we had originally). The new model of it was horrible. Wow. Lots of static. You could barely hear the baby cry. We didn't even use it for a night. We left it on for an hour or two before deciding it wasn't going to work.

The next day I went back to Babies R Us to return it and try a different brand. We went with the pricier Summer Infant Slim and Clear monitor. This one was digital. It had no static interference and let us hear baby clearly. We actually used this monitor for a few weeks before we nixed it. The problem was that the power indicator light was a very bright blue LED light. It was like having a nightlight on our dresser every night. Another thing I didn't like about it was the volume control was a plus and minus button instead of the traditional dial. The quietest increment before mute was not very quiet. I could hear too many sleeping baby noises and the crying was very loud. The volume control buttons also beeped when you pushed them to turn the volume up or down. Lame. Don't they have actual parents test these products?!? Back it went.

Next we bought the Sony BabyCall monitor. This analog monitor seemed to work pretty well when we first plugged it in, but as we moved around the house the receivers kept randomly beeping. It was the out-of-range alarm. We do not have a very big house. There is no way the receivers could be out of range anywhere inside our house. We think the signal was being blocked by our bodies or something. It's also possible that we have too many other devices on analog signals in our house. Ian thought maybe we had gotten a bad set since the BabyCall was highly rated and we really wanted to be done with monitor shopping. We exchanged the monitor for another one of the same at Target. It was worse. It beeped non-stop. I couldn't even leave the receivers on. Sigh.

Yesterday we returned the second BabyCall monitor. The only monitors at Target that we hadn't tried were the Graco Digital Connect and the First Years Two Receiver monitor. We bought them both because we were so sick of buying and returning. We hoped that one of the them would work well for us. We plugged in the First Years monitor first hoping that the cheaper one would do the job. After one night using it so far, so good! We are going to use it for a week or so and make sure it continues to work well, but I think it's going to let us hear Talia when we want to and allow us to turn down the sound when we don't want to hear her. It is simple and has minimal static. Hurrah! A winner at last! I am so glad that the hunt for a baby monitor that will let me sleep more soundly is over. :)

We didn't even take the Graco Digital Connect monitor out of it's box. It probably would have been another overpriced failure though. When I looked it up on Amazon for this post I saw that it was rated with only one star by all 8 reviewers. Not a good sign. I guess the moral of the story is you just have to try all the monitors at your own house to know if they will work for you. Also, don't believe the saleslady at Babies R Us who tells you that you get what you pay for when buying a monitor and tries to get you to buy the $200 one.
Sidenote: I had a few people recommend the Summer Infant Day and Night Video monitor to us. I really didn't want a video monitor and that's the reason we didn't try it.