Baby monitor blues

Lucas's Aunt Cool Urban Woman bought us a top-of-the-line baby monitor before Luke was born. It's so sensitive it can tell us whether or not Lucas is breathing. Since Luke now squirms off the motion-sensor pad that comes with the monitor, we just use the sound sensors. I keep one speaker in my home office so I can listen for Lucas's stirrings while I work. Because Mr. Trillwing goes to bed early and we share a room with Luke, while I work I can hear (a) the fan Mr. Trillwing uses as white noise, (b) Mr. Trillwing's impressive repertoire of snores, and (c) Luke's little vocalizations as he rolls over in his sleep.

Things I can't hear: neighbors' phone conversations. This is somewhat of a disappointment, as I know nothing about my neighbors and I'm not above some "accidental" baby monitor spying.

See, back in the late 1980s, Grandma Wonderful often cared for my Aunt Olympian's son, so she kept a baby monitor for when infant Cousin Mute Teen Boy was napping. During that time period, Aunt Highly Educated was in the process of divorcing Highly Unstable Husband, who still lived next door to Grandma Wonderful, and Grandma frequently picked up Highly Unstable's cordless phone conversations on the baby monitor. That's how we learned, as we hung out in the kitchen during the final phases of Thanksgiving dinner prep, that Highly Unstable may have contracted herpes from a new girlfriend.*

Anyway, I guess my baby monitor isn't on the same frequency as today's cordless phones. Bummer!


*But then again, Thanksgiving at Grandma Wonderful's always brought interesting revelations. At his last Thanksgiving, while carving the turkey Grandpa Wonderful told us that his first "rescue" as a young lifeguard was a "floater" (a corpse). The next year, also over a turkey dinner, Aunt Highly Educated talked about how, during her own training as a young lifeguard, she had learned to search for bodies that had sunk below the surface of the water. Is it any wonder I'm vegetarian?