Technology is A-MA-ZING! I have a video baby monitor in my house. I don’t even have to get out of my bed to see if my baby is awake or asleep, with the press of one button I can look directly at her sweet little face. There is no creaking door or bumping into her bed in the dark to wake her up. It is FABULOUS!

Several weeks ago I put Sadie(3 mos) in the bed, wide awake (just like the books say) to go to sleep. I went to my bedroom, crawled into the bed with my book and turned the baby monitor on. My baby was GONE. My heart started racing, I broke out in a cold sweat and bile started to rise in the back of my throat…HOW could this be happening? I JUST walked out of her room….then I realized that not only was my baby gone, but her bed looked different and her bedding was gone. What the?

I ran into Sadie’s room to find her exactly where I had left her. Ahhhh, OK, so that was somebody else’s bed I was looking at…WAIT, if I can see into someone else’s house that means…they can see into mine. Oh crap. (Apparently one of my neighbors has the same baby monitor on the same channel and I was picking up their camera instead of my own!)

My mind raced back through the evening histronics of getting my 2 year old and my 4 year old into the bed. All the shouting, the screamed threats: “You’d better get in here RIGHT NOW and brush your teeth OR ELSE!” “If you touch her one more time I am going to spank you, do you hear me? Do you understand?” (Yes, we spank. I trust Dr Dobson, not Dr Phil. If you want to judge me I’ll be glad to take the day off and let YOU show me how it’s REALLY done!) “Quit acting like a snake and PUT YOUR PAJAMAS ON, NOW!”

Oh, no! No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Someone had heard all of this. SOMEONE in MY neighborhood had heard this. I froze as I realized that Zeb was outside in the garage as I got out of the shower that night, Sadie was crying and I walked into her room STRAIGHT out of the shower to pick her up. OH, crap.

My mind was racing and I was in a panic. I could just see Miss Perfect Mommy (you know her, she would never DREAM of spanking her kids, never has to tell them more than once to do anything, her kids pick up their toys without being told, eat all their vegetables and never have a cross word to say to their siblings…) watching her baby monitor in horror as I traipse around my house naked, swinging a wooden spoon at anything under 3 feet tall.

She’s already called DHR, I just know it. Where are they, I wonder? About to break down my door? Sitting in that unmarked car across the street waiting for my slightest misstep? I don’t know where Miss Perfect’s house is, so…Thank God, I sigh with relief, they don’t know where I am. LESSON LEARNED!

From that point on, anytime I pick my baby up out of the crib, the camera goes OFF! Yesterday I heard someone talking on the baby monitor. “Mm-hmm,” I thought to myself, “let’s just see how perfect you are…” I started to openly spy on this poor unsuspecting woman. She was changing her baby’s diaper and cooing to her, “Poooooor baby, hasn’t had a poopie diaper ALLLL day! Have you? HAVE YOU? NOOO, no you haven’t! ” “Honey, ” she says to her husband, “can you hand me a diaper and some wipes?”

I grinned with satisfaction as I turned the monitor off. Only a first time mom would actually waste a wipe on a wet diaper, which means she has NO idea the havoc that will be unleashed on her once that kid can walk and talk.

Perfect? Hmph! We’ll see who’s perfect! I give her 6 months before she’s knocking on my door asking for a wooden spoon and instructions on how to use it.

If sleep deprivation is a form of torture, the CIA needs to unleash my kids on all Al Qaeda suspects in captivity. They are pros. I’m pretty sure that they have a team meeting every morning while I’m sleeping for the 30 minutes they allot for me.

In my head it goes something like this:
Aubrey (4): I know we ran out of Cheerios yesterday so I’ll scream and cry for the first 2 hours for Cheerios. Emma, you just eat whatever she gives you. Sadie, cry until she feeds you.
Emma (2): I wore my favorite dress yesterday and got ketchup ALL over it, since Mom hasn’t done laundry in a week, I’ll refuse to wear anything but that.
Aubrey: Good thinking. Sadie (3 mos), you wait til we are ready to walk out the door to poop. You know how she loves having to come back inside once we’re almost all in the car.

They cover every aspect of the day, taking turns being the “good” one so that I don’t get suspicious. But I’m on to them…I just can’t find any evidence of premeditation.

During nap time today, I went back and forth from my bed to Emma’s getting the big girls settled in. After numerous threats, I finally got everyone including Sadie asleep. YES! I went to climb into my bed with Aubrey and realized she was smack dab in the center of MY “nest’o’pillows” asleep, the nerve. But whatever, I grabbed a couple of extra pillows and got in the bed on the other side…and woke her up.

“I’ll just close my eyes and she’ll go back to sleep,” I thought to myself. WRONG! She was AWAKE, and whining for juice. I dragged my butt out of the nice warm bed, got her juice and told her that nap time was NOT over and to go back to sleep. But it was pointless, I should have realized it then and there. She had taken a power nap…the bane of every mother’s existence.

For some unknown reason, maybe denial, I continued to lay in the bed and try to sleep. About every four minutes, just as my thoughts were getting cloudy and I was beginning to drift off, Aubrey would touch me. Just enough to wake me up. Torture. I rolled away from her and closed my eyes for the hundredth time, I was lying on a Polly Pocket but it was a small price to pay if I could just sleep for 30 minutes….OK, the Polly Pocket was REALLY hurting. (Torture, I’m telling you, they think of EVERYTHING.)

I rolled back towards Aubrey, but kept my eyes slammed shut. I didn’t want to give her any indication that I was awake…I could hear her moving around and knew she’d pounce at the slightest sign of weakness. All of a sudden I felt her lunge towards me and my nostrils were COVERED by her mouth as she took a DEEEEEP breath and blew her orange juice breath into my nostrils! I sat up, choking from the sudden and unexpected influx of air into my lungs.

WHAT was that? Did they talk about it at this morning’s meeting? Who was the mastermind of this new technique? As I got out of bed, defeated, I had another mental picture of their team meeting. Heads together with three tiny hands in a circle…”Ready….BREAK!” I could just see Emma and Sadie saluting their commander as they commenced to driving me right over the edge.