If you were a couch potato like me, then managing a human baby will leave you fatigued to say the least. And your fatigue is in no way comparable to all the range of changes that the mom is going through. Since we had your first child during an ongoing pandemic, shelter-at-home along with the high risk of exposing a newborn to people during these unprecedented times made it impossible for us to seek external help. However, we needed to track baby stuff like wet/mixed diapers, feeding durations, sleep duration, bath, etc. These are common areas that your baby’s primary care provider will ask you about when you visit. We needed something to track this for us. Tracking it in a book would have too easy but we found that keeping track of where the book was a pain. We needed something that we could use with our cell phones.
Why did we get this app?
a. We needed a way to track the feeding and pooping patterns. I needed to answer these questions during the doc visits and I found it way easier to tell my Google Home to record an event when it happened. The better half warmed up to the idea as well very soon.
b. Babies have a schedule of their own. The don’t follow the schedule that you wish they did or want them to follow. So it was insanely easy to ask Google Home when the baby was last fed or last pooped or any other Q.
c. There are other apps in the marketplace that do the exact same thing but we needed something that was available on Apple app store and integrated with our Google Home. This was probably my first reason that my techie side got convinced with but the previous two reasons are important enough as well.
We used to mainly use for tracking diapers and feeding. Now we have started using it for tracking bath, sleep and growth. The app allows you to add care providers so my wife and I have different profiles so that we know who added what to the app and it makes our lives lot easier without taking memory pills to remember all the different events that our little one has during the day. Keep in the mind that the percentiles represented in the app might not match what your primary care provider or pediatrician follows.
The app is available for both iPhone and Android users. For all you Apple users, the app works on the iPad as well. The app has a free version and premium version. We ended up buying the lifetime premium version ($15.99 one-time purchase) after about a week of using the app. This is one of the few paid apps on my phone.
One of the cool things about the premium version of the app is that it allows you to track timelines and stats of all the activities that you have recorded in it. We also use it for notifications for reminders for things like bath time and feeding. This keeps us sane and stops us from treating the other (and in these times the only person) in the house like a reminder app or an alarm clock.
Hooman Dad 