You know that moment when you realize you want to put your infant down for a nap but forgot the baby monitor? Here's a quick and easy solution.

Our video monitor works great when we are home, or when we are away and baby is home...but not so great when we are all away together.

We don't own a portable baby monitor. The solution we use at home stays at home. It's nice to check in on baby when we're away and he's home with a baby sitter, but makes life a bit more challenging when we all go on the road. Sometimes the place we're staying is small enough where we can hear baby in the adjacent room (which also means he can hear us...). Other times, he's out of ear shot. In those cases, our simple solution is to use Facetime (or your video chat service of choice).

As long as you have at least two devices you can make this work. Set up one near the baby and the other where you want to be, and start a video chat between them. Now you can view baby remotely.

A couple of tips to get this set up.

1) If you can, use wi-fi. If you can't use wi-fi, I'd recommend using Facetime Audio or simply making a phone call between the two devices.

2) Turn off all notifications on the device you are using on baby's end. You don't want him getting notified every time you get a message during his nap.

3) Mute the device you are using to receive the feed, so Baby doesn't hear everything you are doing!

That's it. We used this recently when we visited the in-laws. We took our camper because it gets crowded and we wanted our own space (Yes, I am aware of Uncle Eddie.) We were parked close enough to the house to use the wi-fi and it worked like a charm.

Watching baby sleep in the camper while I was in the main house.