Un-Monitored

I’m sure one or two of you may remember my story of the apnea monitor a while back. For those of you who don’t know what I’m referring to … read a little already … but anyway, the purpose of an apnea monitor is twofold.

First, should a baby stop breathing at night, it let’s off a loud alarm to hopefully wake the child up and startle them enough to start breathing again.

Second, once the monitor goes off at 2:00 AM, it’s supposed to be loud enough to alert emergency personnel that the father of such infant has had a heart attack and will need to be transported to the nearest medical facility.

The Monitor of course is designed only to alarm about the hour of 2:00 AM, just when you are in your deepest sleep (conversely I believe it also has a self timer to alarm a second time again at 4:00 AM) which is just enough time for your heart to stop pounding which allows you to fall into an even deeper sleep.

Now I’m a pretty heavy sleeper when I want to be, which is to say when I’m unconscious. It takes about 2 minutes and 10 hits of the snooze button to nudge my brain to wake up enough in order for me to rouse my body out of bed. I’ve told the wife that if an intruder breaks in, to wake me up when she wants me to drag the body outside and bury it.

Because of this fact, coupled by the timing of the alarm, you can imagine the keystone cops antics that have ensued at 2:00 AM as my body is off to the races while my mind is still dozing in LaLa land.

Well today marks the day that we are no longer using the monitor, which means that there are a few things that we are going to be doing without.

I can thank the monitor (or as I like to refer to it, the screaming box from H#ll) for the following:

8 bruises on the rib cages of puppies (what I call breathing speed bumps).
7 broken baby toys
5 dents in the wall, the result of daddy prying rawhide bones from beneath his feet and flinging them across the room
1 soiled carpet from a startled doggy
1 soiled mattress from a startled daddy
12 broken toes – all on the same foot (yes I’m in the Guinness book of world records)
18 trophies for the wife for the “Fastest to the room” award
1 Apology to the wife for tackling her in order to prevent buying the 19th trophy
3 broken alarm clocks (As it turns out, hitting the alarm clock snooze button with a hammer won’t affect the noise coming from the monitor at all)
32 bruised shins (I swear the wife re-arranges the furniture when I fall asleep just to see how many pieces I can run into on the way to the room)
And finally, more than one “performance evaluation” on the proper way to attach the monitor so that it doesn’t falsely go off …. Again.

I can’t exactly say that I’m sad to see the thing go, it was quite an adventure.

Farewell monitor, I hope you have a beeping good time somewhere else.