The Monitor

In the old house, Iris started out sleeping in the guest bedroom downstairs, if she ever really was able to sleep away from my person. This was mainly because it was closer and less noisy to get to her if she woke up and had the potential to be coaxed back to sleep. The creaky stairs to the finished attic would have, at the time, killed any ability to reestablish sleep if there was one. Still, in a bedroom, behind a door just a few feet from where we were, Iris always slept with a baby monitor.

I remember people rolling their eyes at me for jumping to tend to her when, to most, there was nothing happening. She always sounded just as asleep as she had moments before to anyone else, but to Kyle and me, she sounded awake, because the monitor allowed us to hear the moment her breathing changed from "deeply asleep" to "going to wake up in 5.3 seconds." We were not wrong. Even just the few relatively silent steps we had to take to get to her once we noticed the breathing change always overlapped with her zealous scream of wakefulness. The thing is though, that change in breathing which allowed us to act short seconds faster than we could have had we waited to hear an actual cry, always meant the difference between relative ease in reestablishing sleep, and the unholy terror that is infant Iris, righteously pissed off that you dared to wake her. Even though she likely woke up because she did something like stab herself in the eye with the points of all her fingers and then sit up (while still asleep).

When she was older and much better at sleep, and she did sleep upstairs in her own room, we still had to keep a monitor on her. She was gated from the stairwell, so even though she was of an age where most children wake up and then walk down the hall to let their parents know that nap time is over, she was trapped a few feet away from the top of a 60 degree-angled stairwell of doom. The only way to know that we had to go get her was to listen to the monitor. So we did.

Then we moved to the Ugly Brown Ranch (shush. you know I love her, but she is ugly. and brown.), and Iris' bedroom was merely down the hall. No monitor needed. I mean, where would we be? The kitchen? She was fine. I was 64 months pregnant, so I wasn't exactly moving from wherever I'd parked my butt once she finally passed out.

We lived in this house for like a week and a half before Cormac was born. I managed maybe 15 days of monitor-free life before I had a brand new baby who almost sort of liked to sleep alone, and who subsequently needed to be monitored. Let me tell you, those days of monitorless life were really awkward for me.

Almost without break, I have been listening to the soothing sounds of white noise via oscillating/box fan through a monitor for three years. Every moment I have to myself, truly to myself, alone reading or pretending to care about chores or something, I have heard the sound of rushing air through a baby monitor. I'm listening to it right now. I have come to the point where I actually, literally and completely cannot relax unless I can hear the monitor buzzing away next to me.

Sometimes I almost grab it when I'm gathering small purse items before I leave the house. I sleep with it cranked up to "it even annoys the crap out of white noise-obsessed husband" volumes. I take it to the bathroom with me. Kyle and I had a rare night away on our recent anniversary (THANK YOU JENNIFER PARKER, YOU ARE THE BEST PERSON EVER), and I found myself standing outside the hotel with Kyle, lamenting that I couldn't quite relax because I couldn't hear the monitor.

As I sat here tonight with my monitor-cum-binky, I realized that someday, because we now live in the Ugly Brown Ranch (bountiful and beige though she may be), I won't actually require the use of the monitor anymore.

I'm not completely sure what I'm going to do when that day comes.