The Angelcare Movement and Sound Baby Monitor and How it May Have Saved Mara

It's time for another "things we love" post, as recently joined members of our family are looking for a baby monitor recommendation. And speaking of that, love to all of you!! ;-)

If you only care about the Angelcare Baby Movement&Sound Monitor you probably want to skip the first part on how we got it, and go straight to the review of the monitor's features that we liked and finally our story that made us really love this item!

Update: There was a recall issued for this monitor that would affect slightly older babies who are already able to grab and drag the pressure pads wire; all you need to do is call them to get a kit that locks the wires. The monitor is still pretty darn great :-)

How we got the Angelcare

This particular item was truly a team effort. First, we were given great advice when we were eight months pregnant by our wedding god-parents. +Alpa Jain told us to get the Angelcare baby monitor with pressure pads, because it was life saving for them when their sweet little baby Camea (a very sweet girl now!) was sick.

+Alexandru Erbiceanu and +Natalia Grib bought it for us five days before the birth, along with the flutter bug as a baby shower gift from across the Atlantic.

Amazon delivered by the time we returned home with our sweetest yet most terrifying little force of nature. I say terrifying because we spent her first week of life in sheer panic that some action or inaction of ours, or even pure outright uncontrollable coincidence would cause her harm. That, plus the love craze that took us over when we realized we are now a family, made us hold Mara onto one of us the entire time that week. It can be exhausting, but we hold her every chance we get.

But holding her all the time isn't very scalable, the time for the Co-sleeper crib was nigh. Yet sleep-deprived, oxytocin-high mommy and daddy were in no shape to set this monitor up to the point where we were trusting it with Mara's life.

Thus came Super Dean!! And we both mean that title to the fullest! Our awesome friend +Dean Proctor was luckily traveling again through town and was our very first visitor. He found us so happy to see him, yet so overwhelmed and ecstatic about Mara that he decided to do all the hard work and stop by multiple times with food and goodies.

Most importantly, he read everything in the Angelcare instructions and set it up, learning all its quirks and even testing out its range with respect to our house! We had Mara's first pediatrician visit and returned home to a very scientific perimeter-checking Dean, walking around the driveway and front sidewalk while checking for the receiver signal. Upon reentering the house he gave us an awesome crash course on how to use it complete with q&a! I should probably ask him to chip in on this post, I'm sure he still knows a ton more about it than I can remember.

What the Angelcare has to offer

This baby monitoring system is quite adequate in range, it covered the whole double story house and surroundings pretty well. Ours came with two receivers, and their battery lasts a few days of no-sound use and about two if you are broadcasting baby sounds. The receiver menu takes some getting used to - I am still confused sometimes, but once it's set up you don't mess with it much anyway.

The Angel base - it really does look like an angel - casts a blue light from its halo that you can use as night light, you will definitely need some ambient light in the baby room so you can check on them without disruption. For us, the light is quite bright so we ended up muffling it a bit with some cloth until we found that we can just turn the light off.

It also reads the temperature and beeps when too hot or too cold for the baby.

The battery for the base is quite bad though, it will only last a couple of minutes, so it's obviously meant to be plugged in. This is a bit tedious for us because we sometimes want to move the base downstairs where she naps and we have to carry the wired charger too.

Sound
You can adjust the volume individually from each receiver and both can be monitoring at the same time with different parents. The base is quite nice in detecting baby sounds rather than ambient noise, and pretty sensitive too. We even used it as a walkie-talkie, where I would whisper while next to the baby so that Greg could hear and bring me something from the kitchen.

Movement
Two pressure pads are set under the baby mattress in the crib, that will detect movement. They can be set so sensitive that you can even check for the baby's breathing! If no breathing (chest movement) is detected for 20 contiguous seconds it will sound a loud beep. This is both on the base and the receivers, so it will alert parents, but most importantly it most likely will wake the baby back into breathing! That's right, infants are known to have erratic breathing patterns and they may even fall asleep so deeply that they forget to do that "minor" life-maintaining oxygenating action! This is why skin-to-skin with the newborns is so important, it helps them learn how to regulate their breath. And this is why the pressure pads are the potentially life-saving feature of this baby monitor. If the startling sound does not work, then shortly afterward the alarm sounds, and this one is something you really cannot sleep through.
The only downside is that during nighttime nursing sessions I tend to sleepily forget to put the monitor on hold before picking up the baby, which triggers the beep and us scrambling for the receiver to make it stop.

How it may have saved Mara's life

For us, the Angelcare paid its price in full on our first night with fever, after the two month vaccines.

We had had a rough day with a first-time fussy baby and she got feverish in the evening. That night was rough because she basically cried until exhaustion and sleep took over. And in the early hours it happened.

The monitor beeped. Just once. Enough to wake me, yet Greg was still in tired, deep sleep. Enough to instill a shade of worry in my heart. The few seconds of complete silence afterward were mirrored in my breath, in my tense but 'frozen' arms. And then my worst fear became a vivid reality: the alarm started and threw my whole existence into an adrenaline-saturated ice-water lake.

The baby was not breathing.

I had often thought, as I was growing up, that in the face of danger I would remain panic-locked like a dear in headlights. I figured if a zombie attack really did happen, I'd probably freeze in disbelief and they'd get me in the first wave.

However, this was about Mara. There is no universe in which she stops breathing.

I was the calmest I have ever been in my entire conscious life. I picked her up from the crib's hard mattress with both hands and brought her into my arms. I held my feverish baby close to my heart to remind her what it's like to be alive, that it gives you warmth, and love, and a calming musical rhythm within. I rocked her and talked to her to wake her up. Greg had turned on the bright ceiling lights.

I glanced at him thankfully, as I felt Mara stirring from her deep slumber.

We were fine. We are fine. We will be fine.

So, yes, we love the monitor, although we are not using the pressure pads much lately ever since Mara started sharing her displeasure in sleeping in the crib by waking up immediately, and sleeps in bed with me on our large flat, firm mattress with no puffy blankets around. She is now able to move things off her face anyway. I'll probably go back to the pressure sensors if she gets sick and feverish again, or better yet I might just hold her and watch her the entire night. But the pads are the next best thing.

Thank you, ad-hoc team that brought the Angelcare monitor into our lives!