When Kieran was first born, we had to track his eating and eliminating to see if he was getting enough to eat (turns out he wasn’t regardless of the diaper count… but I digress.)

We started using the white board in the hospital room to keep track of these details, but a few days after Kieran was born, Paul found a FANTASTIC Android app for our phones called BabyESP (eat, sleep, poop) that allowed us to time breastfeeding (on each boob no less!) and keep track of diapers, as well as when our little man slept. (Which back then was quite often.) Paul loaded this app onto my phone and we have managed to keep track of Kieran’s every activity since.

We LOVE this silly little application. It now syncs to both our phones (thanks to an update about a month ago) and we use it to track Kieran’s bottles (how much he eats, when he starts and stops eating, and notes about what type of formula it is, or if it’s his daily prune-y bottle) as well as his naps/sleeps and medicines. The medicines reminder feature has been a godsend to keep us on track with Kieran’s 3-times-a-day Zantac, which has all but eliminated his acid reflux symptoms. It was a HUGE help to us to keep track of diapers when we were battling constipation for a week. Plus, we have an accurate record of all the formulas we’ve tried and their varying results on the other end… (Not that we always make notes about Kieran’s diapers, but we can if we need to!)

Paul can look at his phone when he gets up with Kieran at 5:00am and see how the overnights went for us – without waking me up to ask! I can see at a glance how things are going for my boys while I’m at work. Being able to confirm that Kieran really is making the “OMG, I’m hungry!!” cry by seeing that it’s been 2 hours on the dot since he had his last bottle makes life a lot easier.

BabyESP even creates charts and graphs for things like average sleep amounts over a week or month (or formula consumption over a week or month) so we can make sure we’re trending in the right directions. Our pediatrician loves having this kind of data available.

I know it sounds all crazy Big Brother, but this has been such a help to us. As we’re trying to get a handle on Kieran’s sleeping schedule, having an accurate record of when he sleeps and for how long is the first step that all the books say to have when trying to create a schedule.

Oh, and the fact that the guy who is behind it all seems to be an actual nice guy who personally responds to tech support queries makes us feel good about supporting this app.

We live in the future. And it’s pretty cool.