Anyway

A few thoughts on baby mon­it­ors; how you par­ent will affect how (or wheth­er) you need a baby mon­it­or. I’ve got a couple of “how to buy” tips if you do want one which I wish someone had told me!

First, do you need one? If you think you’ll be spend­ing quite a lot of time where you can­’t hear the baby without help (e.g., out in the garden, in the base­ment, in the work­shop or gar­age), you’ll prob­ably want one. Depend­ing on how you handle the first couple of months, you may not need a baby mon­it­or dur­ing that time. Little babies sleep a lot and are light enough to carry around that much of the time you can just keep the baby near you any­way. I was­n’t up to spend­ing much time in the work­shop or garden­ing in the first couple of months, so there was­n’t a prob­lem there. We also had the baby sleep in our room at night so we could wake up quickly when she did, feed her quickly, and get every­one back to sleep quickly. By the time she moved into her own room, she could yell or cry loudly enough to wake us up in the night (and don’t worry, even if you’re a good sleep­er, once you’re over the first sleep depriva­tion phase, you’ll wake up when the baby cries even without a baby mon­it­or as long as her room isn’t too far way from yours).

After the first couple of months, when the baby’s a bit big­ger and get­ting onto a routine of reg­u­lar naps (at least in the­ory, ours does­n’t nap much) it’s handy to have a baby mon­it­or so you can start doing more things a little fur­ther away and be aware of when the baby wakes up. Ours usu­ally wakes up cheery and not mak­ing many sounds at all, so I would­n’t hear them if I did­n’t have a mon­it­or. For this to work, of course, you need a mon­it­or you can rely on, one that does­n’t have so much stat­ic that you can­’t hear the baby over it.

So how do you choose a baby mon­it­or? The most import­ant thing in my exper­i­ence is to get one from a store that will let you return it if it does­n’t work prop­erly in your house/apartment/condo. We failed to do this with the first baby mon­it­or and when it did­n’t work, had no recourse. With the second I made sure I could return it for a full refund if need be. 

There are lots of types of baby mon­it­ors, mostly clas­si­fied by how they work. Those that use a 49 MHz trans­mis­sion fre­quency have been around for years (we had one with our first child), are cheap, and usu­ally work. They tend to have quite a lot of stat­ic, inter­fere with one anoth­er (import­ant if you’re liv­ing close to oth­er fam­il­ies that also have baby mon­it­ors), and can inad­vert­ently eaves­drop (one of our neigh­bours picked up a con­ver­sa­tion I had on a cord­less phone on hers; I promptly bought a new 2.4 GHZ phone). Those that run on 2.4 GHz are in the­ory bet­ter but have prob­lems of their own. We bought a Sum­mer Infant 2.4 GHz mon­it­or, which sup­posedly changes chan­nels to be secure. In our house at least, it was so secure you could­n’t actu­ally get it to work if you had the par­ent end more than a few meters away from the baby’s end. It would­n’t work from the liv­ing room to the baby’s room, let alone from the base­ment or out­side. (This was the one we bought first and could­n’t return). I’ve read lots of reviews of this mon­it­or and oth­er people seem to have got it to work, so I assume it’s some­thing about our house, either the fact that we’re sur­roun­ded by wire­less net­works (which in the­ory might be inter­fer­ing), or the fact we have some stain­less appli­ances in the kit­chen (a the­ory pro­posed by someone at the store where I bought the second monitor). 

The baby mon­it­or we finally bought and are extremely happy with is the Graco iMon­it­or. It uses some­thing called “Digit­al Spread Spec­trum (DSS)” tech­no­logy to trans­mit the sig­nals, has very little stat­ic, and works through­out our house and in the garden. It’s more expens­ive than a lot of oth­er baby mon­it­ors but saves an immense amount of frus­tra­tion, so if you think you need one, I’d recom­mend look­ing at this. 

Hal­loween is a big deal here in Van­couver, at least if you have chil­dren. In New Zea­l­and (at least while I was grow­ing up) we did­n’t cel­eb­rate Hal­loween at all so it was­n’t until I got to Canada and had chil­dren that it became part of the yearly cycle.

Hal­loween here has three parts: dec­or­a­tions, cos­tumes, and events. The dec­or­a­tions are the easy part, because I have neither time nor inclin­a­tion to go over­board. Jack­’o’lan­terns are com­puls­ory; I bought a bat­tery-oper­ated pump­kin from a vari­ety store a couple of years ago which is re-used every year, and Tim and our son carved two pump­kins on the week­end before Hal­loween (if you carve them too early, they go mouldy and mushy before Hal­loween arrives, des­pite attempts at pre­ser­va­tion). Then with assor­ted dol­lar-store-style extras such as plastic bats and spiders, and sheets of plastic prin­ted with witches and skel­et­ons, our son and I made it obvi­ous that we were going to take part in the Hal­loween tra­di­tion of trick-and-treat. If you put up dec­or­a­tions in Van­couver, then you’re expec­ted to also hand out candy on Hal­loween; if you don’t want to hand out candy, then you don’t put up the dec­or­a­tions. Since this is a film town, lots of people go over­board and the loc­al paper lists the best ones to go and see, much like they do for Christ­mas lights later in the year. All too much for me to do, although it’s fun to see what people come up with each year and to guess which film they might be props from or inspired by.

Cos­tumes in my fam­ily were easy this year as well; our son got a mask a couple of years ago that he loves, so with that and a dark sweat­shirt and dark trousers he was set. The baby got a red sleep­er and some red dev­il’s horns to match; the horns had black fake fur at the bot­tom which lent an incon­gru­ous touch on her almost-bald head and most people thought she looked cute rather than scary. Tim and I did­n’t dress up for Hal­loween although Tim did get face­paint for the Parade on the 28th. Vis­it­ors to the door were mostly dressed for sports (ice hockey, soc­cer) or as fair­ies or Dis­ney-style prin­cesses. We mostly have young­er kids show­ing up, so there were a few anim­als as well.

Tim went drum­ming at the Parade of Lost Souls on Sat­urday 28th; I made some acerbic com­ments about bal­an­cing it with the found souls, but All Saint’s Day isn’t cel­eb­rated (or, I sus­pect, even known about by many people) so one could won­der where the Lost Souls go to be found. Van­couver does have its pagan-cel­eb­ra­tion side, and it was out in full force on that night. Many of the cos­tumes were ima­gin­at­ive and com­plex, some simple. The baby was fas­cin­ated by it all and not the slight­est bit scared by any of the appar­i­tions passing in front of her stroller. I did­n’t see any polit­ic­al cos­tumes here, although I gath­er they’re pop­u­lar in the US, par­tic­u­larly in an elec­tion year. Choos­ing the wrong cos­tume can, how­ever, cre­ate problems.

Hal­loween even­ing itself was dry, for­tu­nately. I got the candy a couple of weeks before, a total of around 150 mini­ature bars and pack­ets (about a quarter of the usu­al candy bar size). The gro­cery stores here must sell a heap of these at this time of year; no child or par­ents will accept home-baked stuff or fruit, ever since vari­ous threatened or actu­al pois­on­ing incid­ents. Even this year, some idi­ot in Van­couver put Tylen­ol in bags for kids, so par­ents always have to go through the bags and check everything their chil­dren were giv­en. Any­way, our son went off with the neigh­bours and their chil­dren, after being so excited he could barely eat any din­ner, about 6 pm. The pump­kins were lit, the lights out­side on, and the first trick-and-treat­ers arrived about the same time. Some­times I like to ask what they’re meant to be, the num­ber of kids who can­’t give a coher­ent answer is remark­ably high, they tend to be con­cen­trat­ing on the candy and mind­ful that they need a cos­tume to get it than any­thing else. Friends with a baby who live in a condo vis­ited us that even­ing; vis­it­ors were greeted by one or two babies depend­ing on the tim­ing. It was fun, our son arrived home around 7:30 pm as the num­ber of trick-and-treat­ers arriv­ing was declin­ing, our vis­it­ors took their baby home, we blew out the tea-lights in the pump­kins, turned off the out­door lights, and sent a happy boy off to bed (after that first bit of candy, of course). He now has enough candy to last him until next year — we ration his candy to one piece per day (two if they’re small).

Now the Hal­loween dec­or­a­tions have been taken down and packed away for next year, the dis­carded pump­kins are in the com­post bin, and the stores are full of Christ­mas dec­or­a­tions. The cycle continues.