The moment when using some technical assistance or gadgets helps the most are arguably those when the parents can’t stay around their kids. But do they really want to do that? Are they still good parents when they want to have fun and party into the night while their kids are fighting monsters beneath their beds? Just joking. Of course they don’t. But sometimes they just have to. And that’s where you need a nanny – a person or as in our case a device.

Again, same as with the watch, we wanted something simple. Something that would let us know when the boys make some noise and we would come. Not an easy requirement… To start, there are single purpose devices that all have two major inconveniences: they are expensive and working over radio band transmission that doesn’t allow you to go very far.

Then there are mobile applications. Even those that are paid are less expensive than any standalone device. However, most of them are monitors, meaning that instead of waiting for a trigger they are always active, having enormous requirements on battery and data consumption. So, can’t there be a simple free app that would just call you when the noise in the room exceeds a certain level? Luckily, yes. One. Baby monitor and it’s available for android only. The equally named closest match for iOS sends SMS and you have three of them for free.

How getting simple thing is becoming less simple

Once I will make a funny post about all the things I’ve lost in my life. The weeping is yet done and in most cases wasn’t necessary. But I would never want to lose one of my children, not even for a moment and I don’t even want to risk it. When we started to go out with my kids I wanted something to track them.

After a quick discussion with my wife, we excluded dog collars, metallic tattoos and injectable microchips. The kids must like it so it has to be wearable. There’s no other reliable network than the mobile, so there has to be a SIM card in it. Unfortunately, this leads to the category of smart watches.

I say unfortunately because the smart watches’ producers compete on the „for kids“ market the same way as on the adult one – the more features, the better. Why can’t we just track kids and show them time on a picture of a dinosaur? After some research we’ve chosen the one with least functionalities. And to our surprise, our three year old has already learnt to use most of them!

When was the last time you were searching for something simple and couldn’t find it? If you can relate to the story, put your guess on the age when our kids will become uncomfortable with being tracked by their parents in the chat. I will award one of the objects I’ve found to the best of you. ;-)