If our child falls alseep in a forest...

We are quirky parents. We buried our son's umbilical cord in our front yard. We made stop motion animation books about our daughter rolling over. We forced our son to pose for pictures while suffering from a head trauma. And for nearly six and a half years, we've recorded every nap, diaper change and nursing episode that our children encountered.

But that is about to change.

With Owen going off the books long ago (back when he started at Peabody and we stopped getting information about if and for how long he napped during the day) and Nora now being completely potty-trained, there's not a lot to track. We agreed a while ago that when our subscription for the Trixie Tracker came up next, we would let it lapse. That day is today (which means that in at least one sense, the Mayans were right).

We've gotten a lot of grief over the years regarding our OCD tendencies concerning our children's more basic functions, but knowing that information was extremely helpful early on, and, well, later it just didn't seem like something really happened unless we recorded it for posterity. Personally, I'm going to miss it. And so it is with a somewhat heavy heart, I report the final stats as this phase of our lives ends:

Diapers Changed
Owen: 7,465
Nora: 7,139

Minutes Nursing/Bottle Equivalent
Owen: 31,824*
Nora: 24,292

Longest Single Sleep
Owen: 11 hours, 54 minutes (December 26, 2009)
Nora: 12 hours, 50 minutes (November 4, 2012)

Awake Longest During the Day
Owen: 16 hours, 33 minutes (July 3, 2010)
Nora: 15 hours, 24 minutes (August 24, 2012)

Awake the Least During the Day
Owen: 7 hours, 49 minutes (March 17, 2007)
Nora: 7 hours, 23 minutes (September 12, 2009)



(Please note: Owen's nursing stats are artificially high due to our attempts to convert bottle feedings to nursing equivalents. The underlying assumptions were revised downwards when Nora began nursing. However, we made no attempts to update Owen's nursing stats with the revised assumptions.)

2009 - The Year in Sleep

It's become customary on our blog to start the year with a look back at the previous year in something. Last year was a look back at 2008 - The Year in Phrases, the year before way 2007 - The Year in Language, and kicking it all off was 2006 - The Year in Sleep.

This year we could continue the recent language theme, but Owen talks far too much now to condense into a year end list. Alternatively, we could do the year in potty training, but that didn't really start until the very end of the year, and it wasn't until he went back to Classroom 9 starting on January 4 of this year that everything finally clicked with wearing underwear.

The best plan though is to focus on our beautiful baby girl and give her a Year in Sleep post of her very own. As you can see, Nora's wonderful sleeping patterns that emerged in her first month have continued. With Owen, we looked back on the year that was 2006 with a hopeful note because he finally slept for eight hours straight twice at the end of December. With Nora, our sleep has hardly been interrupted, as she's slept eight hours or more at least thirty times this year. As much as we'd like to take credit for her great sleeping patterns, it wasn't any skill on our part, all the credit belongs to our wonderful, sleepy, baby girl.

1000! & the Potty Train

We just changed Nora's 1,000th diaper! She reached 1,000 diapers a full 45 days faster than her big brother. Supposedly girls potty train earlier than boys, so Nora might still have a chance of staying under Owen's lifetime total. Speaking of which, Owen is over 7,000 diapers now (7,386 to be exact), but I don't think he'll reach 8,000. He likes to say that he's, "on the potty train," and he really is doing a great job with what we like to think is the more critical half of the engine. In the last 48 days he has only had 4 accidents pooping in his pull-up! He is quite proud to tell us that, "we don't poop in our pull-ups, we only poops in the potty." On the other hand, he also likes to say, "we can pee in our pull-ups, or in the potty." With the drive to Iowa and back coming up later this month, we're not in a huge rush to get him out of his pull-ups, but after we're back, it'll be time for the potty train to really leave the station.

One Month of Sleepy Nights

Nora is one month old, so it's time for an incredibly wonky post without any pictures, but with lots of data and charts! When Owen was one month old we did a post titled, "One Month of Sleepless Nights." Well we're still using the trixie tracker, and we're both still economists, so there really is no better way to show what a dramatically different baby Nora is than to delve into the data and examine how Nora has slept away her first month. Without further ado, here is Nora's first month of sleepy nights:



All the blue areas represent naps, the yellow areas show when she was awake, and the light blue is transition. Nora averaged a little over 15 hours of sleep a day for her first month, and slept completely through the night for the first time when she was four weeks old!

For comparison, below is Owen's sleep chart for his first month. Owen averaged about 13 hours of sleep a day and never came close to sleeping through the night in his first month (he didn't accomplish that feat until he was almost four months old).



We have all the data, so let's break this down a bit more. The chart below shows each of Nora and Owens naps with the start time on the X-axis and the length on the Y-axis. Let's focus on two areas, first the green ovals in the upper right of each chart: Nora fell asleep between roughly 10 pm and midnight and slept for over four hours 17 times in her first month with the longest being over 7 hours (note some of the dots are overlapping); Owen, on the other hand, did the same four times with the longest still well under 5 hours. In a related area of the chart, the red ovals in the bottom left show that Nora put us through the frustration of falling asleep in the middle of the night and waking up again in less than an hour only five times. Owen on the other hand treated us to these middle of the night cat naps 17 times in the first month.



One more way the trixie tracker lets us look at this data is a comparison to all the other trixie tracker users. The chart below shows Nora and Owen's average hours of sleep per week, along with the average for all trixie tracker babies, and the 95% confidence interval. Owen started out well below average and then ended up tracking close to but a hair under the average. Nora on the other hand has always been well above average for sleep time, and by her fourth week is near the top of the range!



What does all this mean? Probably not much in the long run, but for now we are all blissfully sleeping through the night, and my fears of feeling like a zombie from long and sleepless nights have proved completely unfounded.

100!

We just changed Nora's 100th diaper (and Owen had his 6,901st, although he keeps telling us that he's going to stop wearing diapers now that he's a big brother and in Ms. Courtney's classroom at daycare...and we keep telling ourselves we'll stop tracking him after he's potty trained at the latest...) For reference, Owen' had his 100th diaper way back on September 2nd 2006 and Nora is averaging 3 more diapers than Owen had at this age.

5000!

At noon today Owen went through his 5000th diaper. Yes, we're still tracking...

2000 Diapers!

We changed Owen's 2000th diaper today! (869 poopy diapers and 1131 wet diapers, with 124 leaky diapers and 84 open-air accidents.) The chart below shows more than you'd ever want to know...

1000!

We just changed Owen's 1000th diaper! (522 poopy diapers and 478 wet diapers, with 56 leaky diapers and 60 open-air accidents.) Thankfully it took a bit longer to get here than we predicted after number 100.

2006 - The Year in Sleep

New Year's Day, a time for parades, bowl games, and year in review articles. Here on our humble little baby blog, it's time to look back on one of the hot button topics of 2006: Owen's sleeping patterns.

Back in September we analyzed the first month of Owen's sleeping patterns. We've kept up the trixie tracking, and now we bring you 2006 - The Year in Sleep! As a refresher, each row in the graphic on the right is 24 hours worth of sleep patterns, starting at midnight, with more recent days at the top. The blue areas represent times when Owen was asleep, and yellow areas are periods of wakefulness.

So what's happened in the world of sleep since that first month of sleepless nights? A quick glance will tell you they've become a lot more restful. The almost random pattern of blue and yellow from the first month has separated into distinct days and nights. Owen's bedtime has marched steadily back from midnight to about nine o'clock, and hopefully the trend will continue for a bit longer. Those painful patches of yellow between 2 and 4 am have shrunk considerably. An ultra reliable 2 to 3 hour swing nap developed, and was only disrupted by travel and daycare. And, the blue stretches have on occasion lasted all through the night (9 h 8 min on Dec. 21st and 7 h 57 min on Dec. 28th).

Looking ahead to 2007, Owen will keep on sleeping, and we'll keep tracking, and with any luck our nights will be nothing but blue.

One Month of Sleepless Nights

One month ago today, Owen was born. It's a bit hard for us to believe that he's already a month old (and not one of those short months, but a full 31 days), but it's also hard to remember what life was like without him (of course that might be due to the memory loss associated with sleep deprivation). One hazy memory I do have from those days before Owen arrived were glorious nights sleeping for seven, eight, sometimes even nine hours in a row. Now for Elaine, those are even more distant memories as the pressure Owen put on her bladder prevented a full night's sleep long before his crying ever did.

In the months leading up to Owen's birth, the one part of being a new parent that terrified me the most was the lack of sleep associated with having a newborn. The prospect of mountains of diapers didn't particularly phase me, and the endless hours of breast feeding were and are a challenge that I am particularly unsuited to help with, but the idea of not getting my precious eight hours of sleep left me shaking in my shoes. Some of our friends with kids would tell us almost nonchalantly how little sleep they got the first few months, and I would wonder if their calmness about it all was a ploy to trick more people into joining them in the ranks of the breeders, or if the lack of sleep they experienced actually prevented them from forming any long term memories about just how bad it was.

Now that we're a month into this parenthood experience, it's time to face my fear, and look back on a month of sleepless nights. For various reasons, we've been a bit obsessive about tracking Owen's sleeping habits (when two economists have a baby, they're bound to collect some data;-). The chart below is a visual representation of Owen's sleep patterns to date. The blue areas represent periods of sleep, and the yellow areas are times when he is awake.


It looks like a lot of work, but thanks to a wonderful web application called the TrixieTracker (which grew out of great blog called the The Trixie Update), it's actually incredibly easy to keep track of Owen's every move. What have we learned from all this data? So far, mostly that Owen's sleep pattern looks pretty random, but there are a few encouraging bits of information buried in the data. He's been sleeping about 11 hours a day, and thankfully his naps last longer during the night than they do during the day. If we ignore all the really short naps that don't give us parents enough time to do anything, his real naps during the day average a little less than 90 minutes, and at night they tend to last a little over two hours. On eight separate blissful occasions, he's slept for about four hours in a single stretch at night; but there have been 31 times where he's fallen asleep at night and been back up within half an hour. Despite all of our attempts, we haven't yet been able find any ways to influence whether he'll sleep well at night or not.

How has reality stacked up against my initial fears? Well, I think I'm doing all right. The first few weeks were a little rough, but adrenaline and afternoon naps help out quite a bit. Now that I'm back at work, Elaine has been absolutely wonderful and taken over all the changing and calming duties in the middle of the night on work days. I try to return the favor on weekends changing him in the middle of the night and taking him downstairs early in the morning so Elaine can sleep in, but she still has to get up to nurse, so there is only so much I can do.

Hopefully, before too long we'll start to see some patterns develop in the data, and when we start to have some influence on when he goes to sleep, having the data will be great for managing transitions in bed times and nap times. In a few months we might start to see Owen sleeping through the night, and eventually developing a stable nap pattern. Until then, we'll keep on tracking, and dreaming of the night when we can dream again.

100!

We just changed Owen's 100th diaper! At this rate we'll hit number 1,000 by December 1st, and 1,310 by the end of the year. Keep on poop'n little guy!