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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Total Baby iPhone App

Filed under:  Sleep Products, Blog Posts

Part of every sleep training consultation I do involves keeping track of sleeping and feeding. Prior to starting sleep training, this gives me a picture of how your little one spends his days and nights. My custom sleep plan will involve tweaking your existing schedule to help your little one sleep better during the day and at night.

Many parents opt to use the 'old fashioned' pen and paper, but if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can use an application called Total Baby to track your baby's day. The single application, which previously was several applications for nursing, sleeping, etc, allows you to log diapers, nursing, bottles, solids, sleeping and much more. You can even use the application to keep a diary, log milestones, growth and doctor visits.

There are five timers included in the application, showing you the amount of time (above) since the last timed start or end for all five timer options. If you're sleep deprived, the nursing timer also lets you record which side you last nursed on!

One of my clients put together her own Pro/Con list to share about the Total Baby application:

Pros

• Quick and easy recording of data.
• Calculates total times and durations between (very handy if you're sleep deprived and trying to remember when your baby last fed, slept, pooped etc.)
• Can do multiple kids for eg baby's sleep and pre-schoolers TV time.
• Records doctor visits, vaccinations, milestones.
• Can add photos.
• Can export data via email eg sleep record to sleep consultant.
• Easy to use and intuitive.
• Nicely formatted.
• Probably the best app around for this area.
• Easily worth $5

Cons

• Exported data needs some features added. Eg would be nice to choose sleep or other data only, not everything that happened that day, although you can edit the email after it's been exported.
• Exported data is not easy to read, eg. doesn't total sleep, or show duration between naps like in the actual app.

Update: as of verson 2.0, these cons are now resolved! Great update!

Another of my clients graciously offered a review of Total Baby as part of her experience with sleep and sleep training:

"It was only just a few years ago when my first son was born. As a first time mom, I had some initial difficulties with breastfeeding and our newborn lost over 10% of his body weight within the first 5 days. Our doctor recommended that we track his wet diapers and feedings on a daily basis to help us understand his progress. Eventually, he started to gain more weight and we were heading in the right direction.

One thing that I learnt early from this experience, was that tracking our newborns feeding habits, number of wet diapers and how much sleep he was getting on a daily basis really helped to reassure myself that our son was healthy, happy and thriving.

I tracked everything manually in a notebook, although tedious I found it very helpful to understand his daily ‘routine’

Almost three years later, my second son was born, but this time around, I had an iPhone and discovered a tracking app called Total Baby.

It’s a fantastic baby-tracking app that has definitely made my life easier. We use the App for tracking baby’s schedule. The app can track 5 main functions: Diapers, Feedings, Sleeping, Baths and other. The feeding function allows you to use a timer to track nursing with left/right side options or an entry option where you can enter the type of food (solids) eaten, the amount, date and time of the feed. Sleeping and bath functions also consist of a timer or a one-time entry to records naps/bedtimes and baths. With Total Baby you can track activities of one or multiple children. Not only does it track number of occurrences, but also keeps track of the amount of time since the last feeding, diapers, bath, ect. All of the day’s activities are organized on the main screen making a recap of the day’s events easy to view. It has numerous features and functions to list but have found the tool very useful including the ability to export the data to excel so that it can be shared with others.

Using Total Baby to track really helped when we consulted with Dawn for sleep training aswell. Having the ability to track every detail to the minute and being able to export the data was a valuable tool to help provide an accurate picture of our baby’s schedule for Dawn to see.

It is without a question that Dawnn has dramatically helped changed my life around for the better in only a few short weeks. Our son is sleeping 12hrs continuously through the night now and also his daytime naps are much more consistent. The iPhone app is a great tool that is easy and convenient for me to use. Dawnn was able to see what was going on with baby with a clear, consistent and detailed data export, and the tool also helped us stay on top of the schedule Dawnn had laid out for us to follow."

If you choose to keep your sleep diary going after your 'training' has finished, you will continue to spot patterns in your child's sleep as he gets older and goes through developmental milestones, teething, illness and more. This can help you a great deal in dealing with unexpected changes in your life and in getting your childs sleep patterns back to normal.

Posted by Cheeky Chops at 11:32AM

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