The One Baby Product I Never Knew I Really "Needed."

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of VTech and MomItForward.

All opinions expressed are my own.

With each pregnancy, long before the baby was even born, I vowed to do things differently. I made these pacts with myself that I was going to teach them early on to self-soothe. That they wouldn't spend more than 6 weeks sleeping in our room and most certainly not in our bed. I told myself that I would encourage pacifiers, swaddle them at nap and bedtimes and as they got older, I would introduce straw cups over sippies and cultivate a food culture of baby-led weaning as opposed to making their own purees. 

With each pregnancy, despite these vows and pacts that I made with myself, my babies inevitably end up sleeping in our room and although they start out in a bedside bassinet, they most certainly end up in our beds sooner or later. My middle baby never once took a pacifier and my third baby is heading down that same road. None of my babies loved to be swaddled and I've come to accept that, despite how adorable tightly wrapped baby burritos look or how incredibly they may sleep. 

So maybe I haven't veered too far from my traditional pregnancy and child-rearing ways, no matter how many times I've said "but with the next one, I'm going to do it differently." One thing is for certain, however, that with each pregnancy and new baby, I have found different baby products that I don't know how I ever made it through a prior baby or pregnancy without. 

For instance, the video monitor. When I was pregnant with my first baby, a little under five years ago, you registered for the traditional audio monitor. I can't even remember if video monitors were available way back then and if they were, they certainly weren't a thing and they were probably a bajillion dollars. On the audio monitor there were no fancy bells or whistles, but for those not familiar with such menial technology, there was simply a baby unit that stayed near the baby and one or two parent units. For this brand new mom, it worked pretty darn good. 

Fast forward two very technologically advanced years and I found myself pregnant with my second baby debating whether or not I would need one of those fancy new video monitors that were all the rage both in store circulars and baby product blogs, which, by the way, were not nearly as popular as they were five years ago. 

In the end, I decided that no, it would be silly to buy one of those fairly expensive monitors to alert me that my baby was crying in the nursery when I had a very capable audio monitor available and two healthy legs to carry me up and down the stairs of my home when necessary.

And then I became pregnant with my third baby and laughed in the face of my formerly pregnant and naive self. Concurrently, my then-twenty-month-old decided that it was ripe time to start climbing from his crib and, in a show of death-defying acrobatics, fling himself from the crib rails onto the floor of the nursery. And when I said "pregnant with my third" I mean really hugely pregnant. Like so pregnant that using that set of healthy legs I was blessed with to huff myself up two flights of stairs at the sounds of whining and fussing and potential climbing was just not going to happen quickly, let alone at all and certainly not before he flung himself onto the ground breaking one or both of his arms. 

My solution, in a hormonal haze and the days before being admitted to the hospital to have our third baby, was to quickly move both boys into a shared Big Brothers Room and while doing so, transition my middle baby from his crib to a twin size big boy bed. My saving grace during this time? 

The fancy video monitor I swore I wouldn't need. 

The monitor that I didn't need that allowed me to witness every single moment my middle baby tried to escape from his bed during nap time. The one that allowed me to carefully and closely watch him as he stacked pillow on top of pillow and flung himself onto them from a standing place on his bed frame.

The monitor that allowed me, from a comfortable sitting position while nursing my newborn, to watch him sleep peacefully and at the same time, be alerted to when he was ready to come downstairs from a nap, before he was able to fling himself from the crib and precariously climb down a flight of stairs. 

It was the same video monitor that also let me in on the sweetest moments of sharing a room with his big brother. How his older brother would creep out of bed at night, long after we thought he was fast asleep, to plant a kiss on his little brother's sleeping head. 

How, during Quiet Hour, I could watch the two of them make up games to play together, my oldest somehow always being "the good guy" while my middle baby was "the bandwit." I watched them read books together, play blocks together and build the biggest cities from Legos that their tiny little eyes had ever seen. 

It's no secret that I can't be everywhere and everything to everyone, something that, as a new mom of three, I'm learning to accept. I'd like to think, that without a video monitor, specifically the VTech Safe and Sound Baby Monitor, I may have missed some of those sweet moments and even some of the crazier ones. 

With its ability to pan, tilt and zoom, I'm able to scan the room in its entirety which has been especially helpful during games of brotherly hide and seek. It can pan up to 270 degrees side by side and as many as 124 degrees up and down. The 2x zoom allows me to zoom in on their precious sleeping faces and with the ability to support up to 4 total cameras from one parent unit, I've been able to install a second camera in the baby's nursery and a third in the downstairs playroom. 

The full color screen is the clearest I've seen and I like to think that it's helping me to be "present" during the moments of motherhood that I may have otherwise missed. To see more from VTech, you can visit them on Pinterest, Google + and Twitter. To see the VTech Safe And Sound Baby Monitor in action, watch the video below!