Baby Apps

We're starting a new series of posts that track Mara's development milestones. This is made possible by the coolest baby app we've found, Baby Connect. We have it installed on both our phones and the tablet and it syncs across devices!



Here's what we loved about it:

• It easily tracks lots of regular baby related activities like breastfeeding, bottle feeding, diapers, sleep schedule, workouts and mood etc.
• You can set ongoing activities with simple "Start / Pause / Stop" buttons, and update them by the start/end time as well as the duration, which is useful because you don't always have time to pause the app if you have a fussy baby in your arms, and besides the baby should obviously take priority anyway. 
• It syncs across devices and accounts!! This part was the one that was bugging us most with the other apps we've tried. Just for this feature the app is totally worth the money.
• It lets you easily export the data by email or as a document in Google Drive, and you can filter the exported data by dates and type of entries; this particular feature is what we are using to gather up these development milestones.
• You can add personal notes to each entry, on top of the custom attributes that are suggested; we've been using this a lot to record cute things about how Mara went to sleep, what pose she was in or what sounds she was making during a diaper change etc. There is also some functionality of attaching photos to activity entries, we used it once and it seems to work fine but we are likely not going to make much use of it ourselves.
• It has growth charts so you can see what percentile your baby's weight/height falls in, plus some simple graphs of feedings/sleep/diapers entries over time.
• It also has a web interface where you can see the latest state and add new entries. Surprisingly, it doesn't let you easily review the older entries and filter them by category like on the mobile app, it's mostly focused on adding new entries. Yet the app on the mobile devices is awesome enough to not let this drawback bother you.
• Last but not least, it has nice graphics - pleasant pastel icons that are explicit enough to make it very clear.

The usability is quite high, except for some minor issues. If you try to subtract time from an activity after it's started it will delete it all, then set the counter to weirdly random values when you start to increment it again. You can add new attributes to each type of activity, e.g. "Mara slept in the Moby wrap that Emily and Eric got for us at the baby shower" (Thank you again for the Almond Blossom Moby, we love it!!) but you cannot edit/delete/reorder them afterward. Nothing too serious though, compared to how useful this app is to us.

All in all, the Baby Connect is a great app for new parents; we would highly recommend getting it! Not only it creates memories of your baby's early days, which you will likely need especially since sleep deprivation is shown to have strong degradation effects on your short term memory, but it is helpful in the pediatrician visits because you can check the feedings/diapers/sleep stats and answer accurately to their questions.

Breastfeeding App

Before this we had tried iBaby which is pretty good at the diaper tracking but terrible for feedings because it requires you to do the math between when a feeding started and when it ended :-/ granted that the start time is shown right next to your device's current time in the top right corner, so you can see them together and compute duration, but why?! unless you advertise it as a Train Your Brain to prevent early onset of Alzheimer by doing simple arithmetic 10 times / day, it's not worth the trouble. Otherwise it had some nice features for the diapers tracking, but the feedings issue was a deal breaker for us.

For a short time in the beginning we also tried this Breastfeeding app which has a widget that you can set on your home screen to trigger the feedings logging; it's very simple indeed but quite effective for what it does. It claims to have a way to export/import the data to move from one device to another, yet when we tried it the import did not work. It does no syncing across devices, and no other type of tracking except for the feedings.

So for now we are happily sticking with Baby Connect! You can check out the free trial version for two days before deciding to pay the $4.99, and note that you would have to buy it separate for each account (e.g. his and hers), but you can use multiple devices like a tablet and a phone on the same account without paying extra.