Gametes In Love

Post by S

What happens when two data loving geeks have a baby? They start tracking stuff – feedings, diaper changes, naps. Maybe it gives us the false sense of control.

We started logging in the hospital. Initially we just logged diapers and nursing – something the nurses asked us to do. As soon as we got home from the hospital, A quickly updated the hospital tracking sheet to a much more detailed and structured Excel sheet. We used it for a few days before a Nestie recommended we check out Trixie Tracker. It’s a web app for doing just what we were doing, except it does a whole lot more and does it better.

After the 14 day trial, we quickly signed up for the Premium service and started down the path of collecting data on G.

Trixie is a robust app and the main developer/owner is super responsive to questions and suggestions. It seems to be a labor of love for him. And it turns out we’re not the only set of data loving parents! If you are interested, take the tour on the Trixie site. The Trixie site does a much better job of showing off the features than I can do.

It’s not just about collecting data, it really does make our lives easier. Any new parent knows your mind turns to jello – I can’t remember anything these days. So trying to remember when the last diaper change was or how long G slept last night or when we last fed wasn’t possible. Now we just check our Trixie page – which we have constantly open on a laptop in the nursery or we can pull up on our mobile phones. The Trixie site looks sweet on A’s new iPhone.

It’s pretty cool to see trends in sleep patterns (does that just scream geek?). There were times when we ‘thought’ G had napped more one day than he had done on a previous day — only to find out our guess was totally wrong. Trying to get an accurate assessment was fruitless. We just went to the Sleep Chart; here is a sample from our last week.

Having the log also helps in the middle of the night when one of us gets up. We can tell what’s happened while we were sleeping when the other got up with him. Knowing when he was fed, changed, and awake brings a level of sanity to an otherwise crazy life. And a side benefit is that I can check out Trixie from work and get a glimpse into how G’s day is going. We can also print out pages to take to the doc appointments if needed. Trixie allows you to track a lot of stuff but we’re only tracking: Diapers, Sleep, Bottles, Nursing, and Pumping.

I know this level of data collection isn’t for everyone, but you may be surprised how much it helps. Give it a try.

So what’s G’s data tells us? Here’s the diaper summary! 545 diapers since we started tracking! I’m glad we’re doing cloth otherwise I may feel the need to translate the diaper count to dollars.

Sleep: G’s about average on his total hours of sleep. You can see above that his night time sleep patterns aren’t too bad either and that we’ve tried to make his night bedtime a little earlier over the last week.

Before you freak out and think we let the data dictate what we do — don’t. We do the tracking and it helps with the hour to hour stuff. Then we occasionally step back and take a look at the charts to see if we can gain any perspective.

Sometimes it is just like looking at pictures – it’s hard to believe it’s been 3 months gone by and the charts from that time bring back memories (mostly of sleepless nights).

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Raising Baby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.