Being not near enough to smell your baby drives panic through your reptilian brain, especially if you’re a new parent.  An app that has helped us cope with being out of sniff range has been Cloud Baby Monitor.

Easy to set up and use.  The first and only baby tech solution we have used that hasn’t impeded our already frantic sense of helicopter parenting. We have it running on three iphones, 2 5s’s and an iphone 6, as well as an ipad mini ( one more ipad and this should be a winning combination in poker).

The best thing about it after the ease of set up is the white noise playlist. Our kid will forever be unable to keep awake in the rain thanks to this nifty bit of convenience. Even better is that it plays the sound on the child unit side but leaves the parent unit ‘rain-free’. Freeing up the microphone to transmit the truly important things like baby farts and sleep babble.

The one negative surprise is that when you navigate away from the app it sends a, what is probably a calm, alarm to tell you to pay attention to the app in case you miss your progeny suddenly doing something important.  Would have been nice if it can work in the background with just sound transmitting so you can (finally) read in peace.

Worth the $4 price tag on mobile, although we have not found a need to install it on the macs for an additional $7. Just make sure to get some kind of stand for your mobile so that you can constantly watch your little one snooze.

Next time: “Cut all the Foods – aka Why My Kitchen Accessories are Smarter than Me”.