oh, the joys of home monitoring

well, keegan did have to come home on a monitor. it is a pain in the arse for several reasons. foremost, is that we truly believe he does not need to be on it. basically, it was described as a CYA thing. so here is how the day goes with a baby on a monitor. sometime just after you fall asleep from the early morning feeding (generally right when you really get into a deep sleep) the freaking machine starts dinging for some random reason - usually a loose lead (the part attached to k). and when i say dinging, think smoke detector loud - if you are standing right under the smoke detector that is. so you are startled out of bed and in this bleery eyed state need to figure out which lead is loose. mind you the baby is double swaddled and under the third blanket to keep him warm. after a few minutes of this mind numbing dinging you decide none of the leads are loose - so you turn the stupid monitor off. just turning the monitor off requires pressing a series of 3 buttons in the right order (not so easy to remember at 2 am!). then you strip the baby down, change all the leads - which involves pulling the old ones off (imagine ripping a bandaid off) and putting new cold ones on, turn the machine back on. if that didnt wake the baby up, then the monitors self test will- which involves more mind numbing dinging. then alas, things are working again. so you get back in bed, hope your three-year old is still sleeping through all this racket. and just when you fall asleep - the freaking thing decides to ding just once to let you know it thinks your child is having an apnea. so you are up again - looking at your child, who is happily breathing with no problem. so lights off, back to sleep. DING,DING - again, it thinks your child it not breathing. lights on - oh look, child still breathing! basically, it is set so that it doesnt register shallow breathing - which is sometimes how a sleeping baby breathes. anyway - you get the idea. we are tired of this machine. so we call the company, after about 10 false loose lead alarms yesterday morning alone and ask them to come download the information. jon had to practically beg the guy to come do a download - not to mention that it took 3 phone calls just to get the technician to call us back - unacceptable! they obviously want you on the machines as long as possible, since that is how they get paid. so monday they are coming to download - hopefully keegan will not have to be on this machine too much longer. fingers crossed we can turn this damn machine back in and never look back!