My wife and I have just recently had our first child and I’m looking at getting a decent baby monitor (or security camera) setup.
Our place is not very big at all (think a studio with a separate bedroom/bathroom). I was given a cheap security camera to use for now but I want to start planning for when we move into a bigger apartment (security cameras) and a generally better system for monitoring our baby when we are in another room and cannot hear.
Should I invest in a baby monitor now or would it be better to invest in a decent security camera system instead?
I’m based in the EU and am quite tech-savvy so I don’t have a problem setting things up myself if it means a better system.
It’s hard to hear with the first baby, but YAGNI (“You aren’t going to need it”) applies.
Unless your baby was born with political enemies, (it’s fine to) get a simple rechargeable audio monitor.
Source: for my first kid I setup a secure wireless camera with night vision. For my latest kid I got a cheapo glorified walkie talkie. They’re both fine (the kids are both fine, and the solutions are both fine.)
We like having one because our little one does some funny stuff sometimes.
It has been useful before for telling what kind of crying he’s doing. You can tell a lot from audio, but audio/video has helped sometimes.
Yeah. That’s fair. I’ve had that kid, too.
Ironically, I don’t think I had the nice monitoring rig setup for that kid.
I’m not having another kid but if I did I would do my exact setup still. Audio to wake me up and video to see if a response is needed or if they need to cry it out.
For our first kid we got an audio monitor. After a couple of weeks we sort of stopped using it. With our second kid, we didn’t bother.