My Worst Fear Realized

Yesterday we went up to a friends house for their son's 5th birthday party. They just moved to this great big house in Pleasant Hills.

Maddie went down for the night while we were there and we didn't bring our monitor. We were lucky enough, or not, as it turned out, to borrow their old one. She went to sleep on the floor of the parent's room, which happened to be on the other side of the house from where we were all hanging out. My honeypot set up the monitor base and had the other end of the monitor on his pants. I think he even tested it when he was setting it up, I'm not sure though.

A couple hours later another guest at this event came into the kitchen and said that our baby was screaming. (She had gone to the bathroom which is next to the bedroom.) At first I paused because my honeypot was nearby and I could only hear static on the monitor. But then I reacted and ran in there and it was pretty clear that Maddie had been crying for a little while at least. Her neck was sweaty and she was very much worked up compared to how she usually is when she just wakes up and shouts out for some consoling. It took me a couple minutes to calm her down, poor thing. I felt and still feel so terrible.

As it turns out, when the light switch was turned off when she was left asleep in the room, it also turned off the power for the monitor base. Unfortunately that piece of crap monitor receiver doesn't do anything if it can't find the base signal. (Ours will have a red light instead of green and beep every couple of minutes.) Lesson learned: test the monitor with the room in the exact configuration that the baby will be sleeping in, or better yet, stop forgetting ours when there's a chance we'll need it. Hell, I might go buy one just for our "to-go" bag after this. I don't think I could handle having this situation happen again.

One of the things that so sucks about this is that I always have this fear when I'm depending on our monitor at home that it'll fail and our baby will be laying there screaming and nobody will know. It's terrible, and it makes me go check on her when the monitor is just a little to quiet for my comfort. In last nights situation, I was busy hanging out with folks and it was my honeypot's day to be the primary parent, so I wasn't really worrying about it.

My poor baby girl.