And Then There's The Baby Monitor.

There's one item I forgot to mention in my epic post about first-year baby gear:

The baby monitor.

I loathe baby monitors. I think they are the first step toward over-paranoid helicopter parenting. I also find them horribly distracting, the opposite of white-noise generators. Was that a significant sound? What about that one? That one? Wait, what was I supposed to be doing again?

I can see it being useful in, say, multi-level homes, or other specific situations, but none of those applied to me. I live in a three-bedroom flat, for one thing. The babies are just never very far away. And I have enough anxiety, thank you, I don't need to enhance it with baseless fretting about their breathing patterns or whatnot.

So I vowed not to buy one. Not to register for one. To turn down all gifts, suggestions, and hand-me-down ones. There would be No Baby Monitors in my house. The nursery would be a Monitor-Free Zone. I would make signs.

And I would have stayed blissfully monitor-free if not for a slightly complicated situation in my household.

After the first six weeks, the twins had settled into a loosely predictable sleep pattern, but still required two or three or so nighttime feedings. One of my partners had used up his parental leave and had to return to work; the other one, like me, was unemployed at the time. And I was in desperate need of a solid night's sleep once in a while. Up until that point, we'd been splitting the night into three shifts. Whoever was 'on shift' would stay awake and listen for a baby's cry. Now, we sat down and hammered out a different shift rotation. We each would take a certain number of nights a week. My working partner, S., would take Friday and Saturday nights.

S. sleeps with a C-PAP machine, which assists with his breathing at night (he suffers from obstructive sleep apnea). It's a quiet machine, but not silent, and S. sleeps at the far end of the flat from the nursery. He was worried that he wouldn't hear the babies until they'd awakened the entire household, thus defeating the purpose of taking shifts in the first place.

So, reluctantly, and with much gnashing of teeth, I bought the simplest digital monitor I could find. No bells and whistles, please.

And yes, it did work. I still hate sleeping in the same room as the monitor - my mommy instincts are tuned too high, and I never get any sleep at all. Nonetheless, it's handy in its own way. You still won't find me praising it to the skies or recommending anyone add it to their registry, but OK. Sometimes they have their place.

Sometimes.