iPad apps we love!

Life with a baby has been made much easier through these two apps for iPad!


Baby Connect - $4.99

We were struggling to find a free app to manage feeding, sleeping and diapers and landed initially on the free Similac Baby Journal app for iPhone (though we used it on our iPad).  This app had great tracking and graphing capabilities but unfortunately when our iPad screen died and we swapped out for a new one, the data did not transfer because it was not synced with any online service.  I sought out app recommendations from a few friends and kept getting referrals for Baby Connect. 

What I love...

• Baby Connect has an online component that lets you stay synced between devices and their online website (so I can track my data on our iPad and Kevin can keep an eye on my day online). 
• It's intuitive and easy to use and I love the visualization of the past 7 days' worth of activities, which has help me finally realize that Adam's day/night confusion has now been sorted out! 
• You can track an extensive list of items including temperature, moods and milestones, but we mainly use it to time nursing (and keep up with sides), types/counts of diapers, length of sleep, daily Vitamin D doses, tummy time and growth per doctor visits. 
• I like that while tracking one thing on a timer (like sleep or nursing) you can still enter in other information, like diaper changes.

Some things I would love to see...

• Averages - every time at the pediatrician they ask how many diapers, how long he was sleeping, etc. which makes this app fantastic.  However, to come up with the average answer you have to guess based on the graph visualization.  Having an averages feature in the graph would be great so that you could quickly see them a glance.
• Ability to click data in the daily graphs to see what that data is... for example, if Adam slept a really long stretch yesterday and I wanted to see how long that was for, I can't just click the giant length of sleep in the graph.  I have to scroll through the daily data to find it.
• Ability to add past data when a timer is on... for example, if Adam just went down for a nap but I forgot to enter in the previous nap, I have to cancel the current timer, enter the previous nap, then back-time the current nap.

If I had an iPhone I'd be able to easily keep this data with me on the go and have access to the timers, but when I'm out now I just make note of what time an event occurred and enter it into the app after the fact.  I hope to be off tracking in a few months, though one friend recommends keeping with the app through sleep training.  Another friend has her daycare enter in the details for when the kids are there so that she can stay tuned with what's tracked during the day. 

Overall, I'm extraordinarily pleased with this app and highly recommend it!


Relax Melodies - free, upgrade for $2.99
This is a free white noise app that offers 46 sounds to play around with.  What I like is that you're not limited to one particular sound at a time - you can create a custom mix of the various sounds (like monks + thunder + birds or whatever suits you).  There are also several pre-made mixes.  We love that there is a timer, so you can have it run for a pre-set amount of time and then shut off.  We have it run for 30 minutes on white noise and then shut off.

The downside to the free version is that the sounds only play when the app is open.  Considering we use this as part of our nighttime routine and we're also tracking nursing, diapers and sleep on Baby Connect, it would make sense for us to upgrade to the full version at $2.99 so that the sounds could run throughout our routine and not just when Relax Melodies is open.