Sunday night, the night before my Memorial Day 10k, we ran into a little problem, the baby monitor broke! Well, kinda, the video worked but there was no sound.

The thought never crossed my mind on what we’d do sans baby monitor, but here we were with mounting anxiety over not being able to hear our baby. Actually, that’s not true, we spend a lot of the night in our living room and can hear Avery’s wails just fine without a device, but it still got to us. Plus, I was planning on going to bed a little earlier to get a good rest before waking up to run.

That night, we slept slightly longer on the couch than usual, and finally migrated to bed where I am sure we were both wondering if Avery was crying or not. Thankfully G-Ma was staying the night and her room is right next to Avery’s, so that helped comfort us a little.

Avery never woke up crying that night (or maybe we did and we didn’t hear), but we felt it urgently necessary to find a replacement. A lot of times, when something breaks, we try to figure out some way of being able to return the faulty product in exchange for a new one. Since we bought our monitor online and didn’t know of any stores that carried it, that option was out the window.

The next day, when we arrived home from the race, I thought I’d tinker around with the device to see if I could “fix” it. My tinkering entailed lightly hitting it and blowing into the speaker holes as if they were an Original NES Nintendo cartridge. Going Mom joked that you know you’re an 80’s baby when you do this, and it’s true!

Did you know that blowing into the cartridge was actually part of the problem? Apparently every time we did blew, some of our saliva would coat the game which made it hard for the system to read. There, learned something new today…unless you already “knew” that.

Back to the monitor, blowing into it and hitting didn’t work, obviously, so I did the next best thing; try pressing all of the buttons. Lo and behold, this actually fixed the freakin’ thing!

Backtrack to Sunday morning, when the monitor still worked, Kelley and I were laying in bed listening to Avery blow raspberries in her crib. C’mon, I know other parents do this, right? Kelley was about to get up to feed her, but we thought we’d have a little fun and talk to her through the monitor. Cheap entertainment at it’s best!

That stare is kind of creepy, in a cute sort of way. Well, we had our fun and went about our day, but I guess that button stuck for whatever reason. I’m actually surprised we didn’t wake her while talking that night when we thought it was just broken.

So, after pressing the button to speak to your baby again, it reset and all was well in the world again! Phew, I was worried we were going to have to come up with a really good story to tell the store if we tried to return it.

While we were slowly going crazy when the monitor was still “broken”, my mom (G-Ma) mentioned how all she had for me was audio. She’d have to peak into the nursery any time she wanted to actually see me; crazy, huh?

Being able to hear your baby rustling around but unsure if they are just readjusting themselves or fully awake would drive me nuts! And what about before there were any monitors, how did parents do it?

Okay, I know monitors aren’t necessary, but I sure do feel spoiled after considering how little our parents and grandparents had when raising us. Now we can watch our babies through video on the internet and be on the other side of the world!

It was nice having our monitor with sound and video again, and I hope to never have to experience a time without the monitor when we’re home. Ha, I just realized we actually do this when we spend the night at G-Ma’s house! But that’s only a day, and we can still hear Avery from anywhere in the house, so I’m not counting then!

Have you ever been without a baby monitor or do you even use one?

If you do use one, any stories of a time when you couldn’t?