A new dad got the fright of his life when he went to check on his daughter via their baby cam.
When Thomas Weir from Oxfordshire in the U.K. was woken by an unusual noise one night earlier this month, his first thought was to check on his 11-month-old.
Opening up the app linked to the camera in his room, Weir was immediately greeted by an alarming sight: his daughter’s cot, seemingly empty. “I heard a bang around 1 a.m. so immediately checked the camera,” Weir told Newsweek. “I couldn’t see her so thought maybe she’d learnt to pull herself up and fallen out.”
However, the more he thought about it, the less likely that seemed. Weir said that while his daughter is nearly one, she was born five weeks premature and has not quite got to the point where she has started crawling or pulling herself up.
As the minutes went by and his daughter was nowhere to be seen, Weir began to get worried. “Once I woke up a bit I realized I couldn’t see her at all when moving the camera so ran in to go check on her,” he said.
Disrupted sleep is part and parcel of life for new parents and they should be under no illusions about how long it will go on for.
In 2019, a study published in the journal Sleep saw researchers track the sleep patterns of 2,500 new moms and nearly 2,200 new dads revealed sleep deprivation can go on for as long as six years after the birth of a child.
Weir was certainly left wide awake by his daughter’s antics on this particular night, fearing she had been snatched or was stuck. Thankfully, when he dashed off to check, he quickly discovered she was completely fine, and had simply rolled over into the corner of the cot, just out of view of the camera.
A video posted to Weir’s TikTok @thomasweir82 shows her eventually wiggling back into view, much to her dad’s relief. “She’s never done this before but she’s becoming more and more mobile so rolling into all corners of the bed at night!” he said. “This time was different as she tucked herself up in a ball like she was actually trying to hide!”
The video of what happened has proven popular on social media, racking up over 500,000 views. “OMG this happens to me a lot,” one fellow parent wrote, with another agreeing: “they just love to keep us on our toes” A third added: “My girl does this all the time.”
Though it was alarming at the time, Weir can definitely see the funny side in what happened, though he’s mainly just “extremely relieved” everything was okay. “You almost don’t believe it at first then all sorts of bad scenarios run through your head,” he said.
The new dad has now taken extra precautions to prevent a repeat and ensure he gets as much sleep as possible. “I’ve unscrewed the camera out of the wall and moved it. It’s now at a better angle to cover the whole cot,” he said.
Now if he could just get his daughter sleeping through the night as soon as possible, everything would be perfect.
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