My Lil Divas are 5 and almost 4 and I still turn on the baby monitor every single night!
The last 2 nights it has really interfered with my sleep - picking up the sounds of Lil Diva snoring. I am a horribly light sleeper and I am thinking it's time to shut it off but just thinking about it made me feel panicked.
What if they need me and I can't hear them calling for me? Our rooms are fairly close together and on the same floor of the house but we close all the bedroom doors at night because the hubby gets up at 5am to go to work and I do not want them waking up at that hour because they hear him moving around downstairs.
I know you are sitting there probably thinking to yourself - they are old enough to come get you if they really need you! That makes perfect sense, I am just not sure it would work for my Lil Divas. My oldest is afraid of the dark and still wakes up some nights calling for me. She WILL NOT get out of bed and make the walk to my room in a dark house. She will scream until someone comes - waking up her sister who sleeps in the same room and everyone else in the house. The monitor lets me hear her quickly so that I can keep her from bellowing loud enough to wake her sister (and the neighbors).
Her night screams do not happen often but they do still occur and it's the main reason I have kept the monitor on this long. The other reason -
What if they are sick? There have been times when I have been alerted by the monitor that something was wrong that I am almost sure I would not have heard otherwise. My youngest has allergies and asthma and has woken up coughing and having difficulty breathing in the middle of the night. I was able to get to her quickly because I heard it via the monitor.
Does anyone else have this co-dependent relationship with their baby monitor? I can sit here all day coming up with more scenarios and rationalizing my continued use of it without any babies in the house but really the bottom line is that I'm just scared. Scared that I will fall into such noise free blissful sleep for the first time in over 5 years that I will not hear them if they did need me. That worries me.
When I worry, I can't sleep! So actually if I turned it off - I probably still wouldn't be able to sleep. I'd be too busy fine tuning my super sonic mom hearing all night to be sure everything was ok to actually get any sleep, lol!
What if I promise to turn it off before they hit the teenage years? Then again, a hidden baby monitor in a teenage girls room might be pretty awesome! :)
So help me out here mommys& daddys - when did you turn off your baby monitors for good?
Am I just being an over-protective mom or is this normal? (Someone please tell me I'm not that crazy, lol!)
Bern