May 30, 2016

On tracking poop and sleep

The exact moment I realized parenthood had arrived was when I celebrated a really dirty diaper. And I have to confess how genuinely happy and relieved I was1.

We’re almost six months in with Robie, and tracking output and input have now taken second place to sleep time.

Tracking your baby’s business is important. At some point the tiredness and sleep depravation starts blurring the days together. If can’t rely on your memory to remember your computer password — it happened — for sure you won’t remember if he ate 2 or 4 hours ago… much less what the last diaper theme was.

After trying a few apps, I can safely recommend BabyTime. It does three things really well:

  1. Clear and good UI:
    There’s many eyesores in the app store. BabyTime is actually good looking and useful in how it displays information and how you enter information.

  2. Sync:
    While the sync isn’t lightning fast, it works, and we haven’t had any lost data. It’s very useful to be able to reliably see what your partner has tracked. I wish it allowed for handing off tasks — right now only the device that started the tracking can end it, but its a workable limitation.

  3. Responsive developer:
    There’s a lot of baby apps in the store that are abandoned. A few weeks back I emailed the support email wondering if I could get an export of the data, and within a few hours I had a reply with the data attached.

At $2.99 it’s a steal compared to some other apps and devices we tried. And although the app hasn’t been updated in over a year, it’s still delivers the best experience imho.


  1. Given the tonnage of the deposit, maybe Robie was a bit more relieved than me↩︎


Parenthood review


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