When Good Monitors Go Bad

When I was first pregnant with M and registering for baby items, I was young and naive. I didn't have many close friends with babies, didn't follow any Mommy Blogs (or have my own yet) and didn't really do much research before I started clicking the "add to registry" button. It was out of this frustration of not knowing what I would really need for baby and myself once she arrived that this blog was born. I had asked all of those Mamas that I knew with babies (about 5 at the time) to fill out a 10 page questionnaire about everything from how many diapers you change on average to what kind of

DO NOT BUY THIS MONITOR!!!

nightlight do you have (or do you even have one)?

The majority of my friends recommended I register for a video baby monitor. Those that only had an audio wished they had the video, and those that had the video recommended nothing but Summer Infant brand. So of course I registered for a Summer Infant video monitor as I had to have what everyone else had. I didn't do any research, just clicked the "add to registry" button, received it from a very generous friend of my mother's at my shower and started using it the day we brought baby home.

That monitor lasted about 9 months. The battery began to not hold a charge, so we got a new battery. But then the screen stopped working. Instead of dealing with customer service, we did a little research this time and purchased a Lorex LW2003 video monitor, as it had pretty great reviews on Amazon.com, and had some interesting features - two way voice talk, ability to view 4 cameras at once, etc.. We liked it right from the start...

...until it broke about 8 months later. The screen went white and we were unable to see M, but we could still hear her. I searched on the Lorex website for a customer service number (not easy to find on their site at all) and gave them a call. 20 minutes later I was put in touch with someone who barely spoke English, and they told me they would email me something to fill out and send back. I never got the email. I called them again, and discovered they had my email wrong. I received the email, filled out the form....yada yada yada...after a week of back and forth I was approved for a refurbished monitor. That arrived in the mail 2 weeks later...

And it worked for about 7 months. This time the battery wouldn't hold a charge. We then purchased our third video monitor, another Lorex as we had already invested in multiple cameras for this LW2003. Fast forward to 6 months or so after this new one and it MOTHER EFFING BROKE AGAIN. So me, being the Maguyver of the household, took the receiver from the 2nd Lorex and used the battery from this latest one and re-linked the cameras and it worked like a charm...

...until today. This monitor is so poorly made on the inside that the USB-type port actually came loose and fell into the inside of the monitor (which is apparently a very common problem with this monitor I have since found out.

We loved this monitor, when it worked, but here we are 3 (and a half - if you count my rigged version) monitors later and we are shit out of luck. I actually did some research today and ended up purchasing a Motorola video monitor as it came highly recommended by Baby Gear Lab and a lot of friends on Facebook...so it must be good right?

We shall see...thanks to Amazon Prime and Local Express Delivery it will be on my doorstep in the morning.

Stay tuned for my review!