The folks over at Philips Company contacted me to see if I would be interested in reviewing a new baby monitor that they were coming out with. Despite the fact that I already had a baby monitor in my possession, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to accept the offer and see what the differences were between my old monitor and the new one that they could send me. Seriously, how different could two baby monitors be? Don’t all monitors do the same thing? Don’t they just tell us if our little ones are crying?
I received the package in the mail and opened it up. Boy, was I ever wrong about baby monitors. My monitor must have been invented in the dark ages, or Phillips is ahead of the times because this monitor is AWESOME!
Let me begin with the design aspect because that was one of the coolest parts. This monitor looks like an iPod. It is white and bright yellow- not ugly nursery room colors. It is sleek and, much like a cordless phone, has a charger that you can charge it up, but no cords to be dragging it around. The first powering up happened overnight and then in the morning the monitor was fully charged. The receiver in the baby’s room can also be battery operated, but we decided to plug that one in.
I browsed through the handbook and my husband and I had a great time trying out all of the features. One thing that I have always wanted is to be able to talk back to my little girl when she is fussing. Being the super cool parents we are, my husband starts talking into it and we make up all these little scenarios that we are going to start saying into it to Emily. He leans into it, presses the button and goes, “YO, BABY! Stop your crying.” Laughter erupts and then we start acting like we are fifteen again. Can you figure out when our last date night was? This was probably the highlight of reading through the instructions.
The things that I absolutely loved about this monitor:
It has a little nightlight on it, which makes it visually interesting to our daughter
It plays lullabies for her. It has lots of lullabies on it, or you can make a “mix tape” of all of them for your baby. We tried it out while she was eating her dinner and she stopped eating and started smiling the biggest smile. They are not annoying lullabies and you can adjust the volume. You can also start the lullabies up from your own receiver and play them into the baby’s room without coming into their room to do it.
You can talk to your baby. This remote feature and the talk feature were so nice when I was taking a shower and she started to fuss. I cued up her music, told her she was fine, and hurried up and got out. I do feel like I am Oz or something. I am sure part of her stopping crying was her looking for where the heck I was? Whatever! It worked for us!
It has a cute carrying case so you can take it on trips with you. It is not a cheap pleather case either, it is well made and holds the units well.
It monitors the temperature in the baby’s room. At first, I thought this was a bit excessive because I am not one of those people that puts television monitors in our room to watch our baby or sound alarms on her mattress if movement is undetected. Despite thinking it was a little bit over the top, I actually began to realize just how brilliant this idea was. Should there ever be a fire in our home, I would know because the monitor would sound a warning beep and let us know if her room became too cold or too hot.
This monitor will not interfere with your neighbor’s monitor because it finds and searches through channels until it finds a channel that is not in use. I don’t fully understand this, but what I am getting from this is if I am talking about Mr. Wilson across the street and the fact that I think he has made his grandkids slaves to his perfectly-perfect lawn, he won’t be able to pick that up on their monitor at their house.
Because the design is not baby monitor ugly, you could actually use it later as an intercom in your home when you no longer need it for your baby. This way, instead of me yelling down the stairs that dinner is ready and to get their rears in gear if they want to eat, I can now just shout it into the monitor. That is going to be *so* nice!
The things I disliked about the monitor:
The lullabies sometimes end abruptly when you choose to play them all. It almost starts into replaying the first song again, and then switches after the first beat.
I wish this had white noise on it or the lullabies played continuously. It is listed as a feature that the lullabies automatically go off, but we are a white noise kind of family. My son has a white noise machine, we have a white noise machine, and our daughter has one. It kind of sounds like a thunderstorm in the Amazon among a trickling creek, should you venture upstairs while we are sleeping…which would be creepy and weird…so please don’t!
If you are interested in learning more about this super cool monitor, you can find out more at hearmybaby.com.
Thanks to Phillips for allowing me to test drive this! Our family greatly appreciated the opportunity and we think your monitor rocks!
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