Baby Brain – there’s an app for that!
In those first few days in the hospital after Little Man was born, the nurses insisted that I track when Little Man fed and whether his nappies were wet or dirty. At first I used plain old pen and paper to track everything, but I found it awkward and I was guessing feed times and durations.
So when I got home, I started looking for a better way to track all of this information, and of course I discovered there’s a whole range of apps for precisely this purpose!
I chose one called Baby Brain because it allows you to run the breastfeeding timer while the app is minimised and you browse the net or check your mail. Within a few days, when sleep deprivation started to take hold, I found it invaluable. Each time a feed was due, I could just check to see which side I fed from last. Or when I last changed Little Man’s nappy! I could even check how long he slept for.
I’m sure a lot of people would think that tracking all of this information after the first few days is nuts! But I found it really reassuring to be able to check how many wet and dirty nappies he had, and how long he fed for. Whenever I started to worry that he wasn’t feeding enough, I’d check back over the previous 24 hours logs and see exactly what was happening with him. As the days and nights started to merge into one, I found it impossible to remember exactly what had happened in the previous few days, or when something had happened, so I really relied on those logs.
I used the Baby Brain app for four or five months, before I changed to a different app that would allow me to track solid food as well as breastfeeds and bottlefeeds. Now and again, I like to open it up and look back at the logs for each week to see how the reality of what was happening with Little Man matches up to my memory of it. (It rarely matches – it is amazing how quickly you forget! I have a tendency to think things happened – like feeds stretching out to three or four hours – in my memory that happened at about five weeks; in reality, it was twice that!)
