During the last few days my mother, Olga, and I were trying to figure out Maxim’s trends of sleep. He is not sleeping for 3 hours at a time every time, but he does have his own schedule. It’s just a little bit trickier.
One of the books on parenting that we have, advises parents to use baby charts. Baby chart is basically a time table with marks for everything a baby does. There aren’t that many things a baby can do – sleep, eat, bath, pee and crap. For every day of baby’s life, parents should just mark all appropriate activities on the time table.
We started the baby chart today. It should help us plan and schedule things in the future.
The problem with baby chart is media. The ideal way, of course, is to use a computer. But marking on the computer is not as easy as it may sound. Computer is not always around, not always started, or has the program closed. Paper and pen are better solution, since they are very mobile, small and quiet. On the other hand, paper has organizational problems. It is practically impossible to resize the cell, change the icon, or correct things without messing everything up.
For now we will keep our baby chart on paper. After a few days I will see how it works out and will write (or find on the web) a software solution. I suspect that it will be also a huge deal of fun to see changes in these charts in the long term. By long I mean periods of time that don’t fit on a single piece of paper.