iBaby

The Total Baby iphone application

With The Spaniard (my husband) already well known amongst friends as a huge Mac fan and general tech geek, when he bought me an iphone and installed an application for recording everything about the baby, friends and family declared that we were going to have an iBaby, with its life run through one mac tool or another.  It’s true that iweb, iphoto, itunes and the iphone feature prominently in his life, but even those who are only mac’ed up as far as an iphone, I think will find this application very useful and practical. It makes life easier, and that, after all, is what technology is supposed to be all about.

The application we’re using is Total Baby by Andesigned.  There are other similar applications and probably some are just as good but this is the first we tried and as we liked it, we’ve stuck with it.

The feature we use the most is just a basic timer to record the time and duration of your breast or bottle feeds.  Sure it doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but think about this:   At 5 am in the morning with 2 hours sleep under your belt, having just been woken by a crying baby, the crying ringing in your ears and pulling at your heart strings, half asleep and  trying to figure out if the baby is crying for hunger, wet nappy, wind or some other mysterious ailment, do you really want to be trying to remember the time you last fed?  Or looking for the scrap piece of paper you wrote it down on?  Do you want to be calculating what time you need to change breasts by adding 15 mins to 5:27am? After you’ve subtracted the 3 minute break for winding?  This is no time to be exercising your maths skills.  And actually, was it really 5:27 you started or was it 5:21?  And which breast was the last breast?  Being able to stop, start, pause and save for recording the duration of the feed on your phone, which is generally easier to locate than pen and paper, is super handy.

So enough rambling, here’s a summary of the useful features:

-          Feeds: Record and time breastfeeding or bottle feeding including time, amount, duration, type (formula, expressed milk) and left/right breast.

-          Nappy Changes. Keep track of number of wet or pooey nappies in a day. You also have the option to select from a list of colour and consistency options. Or add your own if your baby’s poo is particularly creative.

-          Sleep: Time and duration of sleeps.  Reach over and blearily stop the timer when you are rudely awoken.

-           Milestones: from weight, height and vaccinations to first steps, you can use a bunch of standard and personalized options to record key information.

-          Customized Timers: On top of the standard stuff, you can customize the timer for anything else – record when you’ve given medicine that needs to be given periodically for example.

It’s all very useful if you’re trying to figure out the baby’s routine or need to track the number of feeds and nappies each day to check if everything is going ok.

If you‘d like a summary (for instance to see if there is a routine emerging) then you can have all the information you’ve recorded emailed to you.  If you’re partial to a chart you can see certain information graphically.  The ibaby’s growth chart is my personal favourite.  Which, together with my penchant for matching dad and baby outfits, is what makes me really dorky.

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