How to find patterns in your baby’s behaviour

• Who is this post for? New parents
• What does it discuss? How to track your baby’s behaviour and find beneficial patterns
• How do you benefit? Peace of mind; decrease in stress; better communication with your partner

Last week I wrote about soothing your baby with technology. This week I’m going to take a look at ways of identifying patterns of behaviour that help you understand whether your baby is finding the holy grail for all parents – a routine!

We’ve all seen stats in the news – how babies who have regular sleep times, feed times etc. are better behaved, more balanced, and so on. But when you’re in the middle of the emotional whirlwhind that comes with having a new baby, dutifully remembering key information is…well…low on your list of priorities.

In the first year of her life (and especially those incredibly tiring first six months) my wife and I were keen to use an easy technical solution to give us a clear picture of how our daughter was progressing. We wanted to monitor sleep times, feed times (even what breast she had been suckling on), how many times a day she was pooping, bath times…I could go on.

Crucially, I also soon figured out the last thing my wife wanted on my return from work was for me to start grilling her on how many sleeps and feeds my daughter had had that day. She was tired and had been with our daughter all day and if she was going to engage in conversation at all, she wanted to talk about something else!  So I needed a solution that was cloud-based – where either of us could input simple information and wherever we were, we could both instantly see what was going on. This was great for me as I could see what kind of day my wife had had before I even got home – meaning I knew when to buy some chocolate or flowers before I walked in the door, and then just quietly put the TV on and went to make dinner!

We tried 3 or 4 different apps on our smartphones but settled on Total Baby, (yes, website is ugly but ignore that) available for your iPhone or your Android phone or tablet. It was AWESOME. We simply pressed a button when baby went to sleep or started feeding and pressed it again when baby stopped.  All the data was recorded and then presented to you in easy-to-read visual formats that made it very clear if we were starting to see a pattern develop or not. We didn’t have to remember a single thing and we never had to wonder about any aspect of baby’s behaviour at any point. It was all there, available at the touch of a button, wherever we were, without having to ask the other. There are even settings for recording activity of multiple children, just in case you happen to have twins or more!

In summary, very simple to use, easy to see impact, incredibly useful. What more do you want for £3.99?

Music as medicine

• Who is this post for? Everyone
• What does it discuss? A technology project for all that explores how music can benefit your mind and body
• How will you benefit? Better health, clearer focus, more thoughtful children…we could go on

The Sync Project is a initiative started and run by one of my old colleagues Marko Ahtisari.  Marko and his team believe that if music can reach us physically, then we can find a way of decoding what music does, and we could then use it to improve health.

The project itself centres around a platform that maps music characteristics to real-time biometrics gathered from an exploding variety of sensors. The team hope to understand and decode the personalized therapeutic effect of music.  Or in layman’s terms – they collect data from things like smartphones, wristbands and smartwatches to help us understand what happens to our brains and bodies when listening to music.

Read more about the purpose of the project here

Right now, I advise doing what I’ve done and simply sign up to see what happens. Up to this point I’ve been getting e-mail updates but I’ll certainly be a willing volunteer (as would my wife and daughter) when the project scales up and starts to have its desired positive impact on all our lives.

Calming the little one in your life

• Who is this post for?  Parents of infants
• What does it discuss?  Technology to help soothe your baby
• How will you benefit?  Decrease stress, Decrease tiredness

Our daughter is now 15 months old and she sleeps like a log in through the night and during her daytime nap. But it wasn’t always so, oh no!!

A common misconception among first-time parents is that babies need peace and quiet to sleep.  We were as guilty of this as anyone, making guests tip-toe around our flat, not allowing visitors to ring our doorbell, turning the microwave off just before it pinged…I could go on and on but all of it was wholly unnecessary!  Why so?

The best sounds for a baby to sleep by are sounds that closely emulate the “chaotic,” noisy sounds your baby heard while in the womb, which is not the soundless, silent bubble you might think it is. During its 9-month stay in the womb, your baby hears and gets used to a whole bunch of weird and wonderful sounds – the mother’s rhythmic heartbeat and steady whoosh sounds of her blood rushing through veins and arteries, not to mention her voice, burps, hiccups and other bodily noises.

That’s why it’s been shown that machine sounds such as a vacuum cleaner, hair dryer, clothes dryer or dishwasher, or the sound of water running in a sink or raining outside help soothe crying or fussy babies. These sounds are reminiscent of the sheltered, noisy yet comfortable world that they enjoyed before popping out and turning your world upside down.

Now, it’s easy enough to turn the vacuum cleaner on if you are at home but you can hardly carry one around with you in the car or show up at your friend’s house and ask them if they wouldn’t mind running their hoover whilst you have your Sunday lunch!  Fortunately help is at hand via your smartphone and a bunch of Apps that play all manner of ‘white noise’ sounds. The very best ones have timers and can even be activated by a baby’s crying should they happen to wake up in the middle of the night.

We certainly couldn’t have coped as well without our favourite App at the time, Sound Sleeper – which you can read about here.  It plays the sounds, can be voice activated, tracks and records your baby’s sleep patterns, and even allows you to record your own sounds. So if your baby happens to be soothed by your hummed rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody then you can save your vocal chords by just recording it once!  For £2.99 we thought it was one of the cheapest lifesavers we’d bought though there are some decent-looking free apps out there too.

Good luck with soothing your own bundle of joy to sleep and please let us know your own technology recommendations for coping with crying babies.