Office improvisation: create a portable baby monitor in your office
One of the things I’ve learned about having your baby at work, besides it being a descent into madness, is that there are a lot of things that require two hands and babies fall asleep when you don’t expect it, and you don’t want to wake them at work.
Last week while I had Baby M with me, she was asleep and I needed to go to a couple of offices in the building and check on a phone, a computer, and talk to someone about some future IT needs. This left me with a conundrum as I did not want to wake the baby to haul her around, similarly I did not want to be on another floor unable to hear if she was screaming at the top of her lungs.
So I closed my office door, locked it with Baby M sleeping soundly in her baby fight pit, and improvised a portable baby monitor, and this is how you do it –
Steps to create a portable baby monitor
- Grab cell phone
- Call office phone
- Mute cell phone
- Put office phone on speakerphone mode
- Place near baby
You’ll now have a live audio feed of any noises that occur in your office and can wander around not worrying if your baby is crying or not.
Similarly, if you’ve got a deactivated cell phone and WiFi, you can do this.
And if you’re lucky enough to have a Bluetooth headset, you can just look pretty uncool while listening to your baby the entire time.
It’s pretty important to follow step 3 closely or you’ll be shrieking feedback and wake the baby up as you’re attempting to get out of your office.
One of the great advantages to this method are you can also unmute and tell your child you’ll be right back up and to hold on a second as that works for some kiddos I’m given to understand.
