Jacob’s Family and Baby Insights
Dec 11 2007

To help illustrate how different people use Babble Soft web and mobile applications, we have created family user stories.   I am grateful to the families who are willing to share their time, pictures, and energy to write/edit these case studies with us! To see our other user stories please check out our Testimonial page or click on the user stories tag.

Jacob’s Family: (pdf)

jacob334x222.jpgMother:   Lea (Financial Reporting Manager)
Father:    Chris (Partner/Marketing Consultant)

Baby:   Jacob
Born:    September 2007
Place:   Newport Beach, CA

Browser Used: Mozilla Firefox v2.0.0.11
Website:  http://www.fullmixmarketing.com/



Situation

Jacob, Lea and Chris’s first child, was born via unplanned C-section after a long and arduous labor.  While in the hospital, Lea was asked to keep track of Jacob’s feeding and diaper activities using generic paper hospital forms.  She had planned on entering the information into Baby Insights, which she had already set-up prior to Jacob’s arrival.  Unfortunately the papers were lost in the shuffle between the hospital and home, so she started entering information into Baby Insights four days after Jacob was born.

Prior to leaving the hospital, Jacob’s pediatrician recommended formula supplementation as Lea was concerned about breastfeeding following the c-section.  Lea’s milk did not fully come in for over a week, and with breastfeeding, pumping and formula feeding, using Baby Insights was tremendously helpful in keeping track of Jacob’s feeding schedule and intake.  Baby Insights was also very helpful in tracking Jacob’s diaper activities.  A feature of Baby Insights that Lea wasn’t initially aware of, but came to use extensively, was medicine dose recording.  She was taking three separate pain medications to aid in her recovery from the C-section.

Lea’s Experience

The information I got from using Baby Insights was so helpful!  I really liked the fact that I could go to one place and see all of Jacob’s information at a glance. In hindsight, I wish I had bought a PDA or smart phone before Jacob was born to make entering the information easier!  Some of the benefits I gained from using Baby Insights are:

  • Since we were supplementing with formula, it helped to see how much formula versus breastfeeding time he was receiving.  It’s been fascinating to see how the two amounts have changed over time.  The Daily Summary report was beneficial as it calculated the total amount of milk we gave to Jacob.
  • It was great to see how much I was pumping to get an idea of how much he was getting at each feeding.  Knowing this helped me make decisions about how often and how much to supplement.
  • As a first time mom, managing my time throughout the day can be quite challenging.  Baby Insights helped me see how much time I was spending breastfeeding and pumping so I could better plan my day.
  • Tracking my pain medication using Baby Insights was particularly helpful during my recovery from the C-section. I was taking 3 different pain medications at varying times and being able to view my medication schedules became one of my favorite Baby Insights tools!

—End—

If you are interested in participating in your very own user story, please activate a FREE Babble Soft Account. If you find that Babble Soft applications work for you, you want to tell the world about your great experience, and you are interested in being a part of our media campaign, please email us at info at babblesoft dot com for more information and a hook-up!  🙂  We plan to do a family story every one to two months so please let us know as soon as possible if you are interested.

Author: | Filed under: babble soft, baby, baby care, baby insights, breastfeeding, breastfeeding schedule, pumping | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Ah the Joys of Software Testing
Nov 16 2007

In case you haven’t heard, I am not fond of software testing.  If you want proof, just check out the following posts I wrote the last time when I had to test software.

Software Testing – DOH!!

Speaking of Software Testing

So now I’m at it again because we are about to release a new feature for Baby Insights…which is very exciting because I’ve wanted to release one of these features pretty much since we began Babble Soft.  In fact the pain we experienced from this particular issue when our son was born 5 years ago was the single driving force for creating Baby Insights.  Hint: the lack of this much needed activity (or inactivity) in our lives was often used as a means of torture back in the day.

Erin (my husband who works full time elsewhere and couldn’t help me with this particular issue) strongly suggested we do this feature with an expert in the field.  I slowly realized that given that I’m wearing a gazillion different hats, finding an expert (who is super busy but would still somehow want to partner with an unknown company) was not going to happen.  So I figured I’d do it backasswards and build something and then let an expert discover us and tweak the feature later.  Doing this violates pretty much most of what I’ve studied, been told, and read about when starting a business which is “This ain’t the Field of Dreams honey…you can’t build things and they will come.”  To them I say “Um…well…we’ll see about that!

Now for a couple of great comics from Blaugh which I discovered from a post written by Pelf on Pearl’s Interesting Observations blog.  The first is funny and it’s even funnier because I can’t fire myself for being honest about my distaste for software testing and my ‘build it they will come’ frowned upon strategy. 🙂 The second is funny (to me) because when you test software you are pretty much glued to your computer and dream about anything endorphin related!  But oddly enough, I don’t drink coffee.

Business Blogging Blunder

Endorphin Flow

Author: | Filed under: babble soft, baby insights, entrepreneurship, technology | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

She Went to School in a Pull-Up and Came Home Wearing Underwear
Sep 27 2007

We are in the midst of potty training our almost 2 ½ year old girl. Just last week, I sent her to pre-school wearing a Huggies Pull-Up (yes she likes the Cars ones) and 3 pairs of Happy Feet underwear that I got at Target. She came back wearing underwear and had no accidents that day. I was impressed. Unlike our son, who mastered the poo poo part first, she seems to be going for the pee pee part first, which makes for not-fun underwear clean-up. 🙁

Erin was stressed that we missed her sweet spot for training a while back because we tried a few weeks ago and she didn’t seem phased at all about soiling her underwear so we went quickly back to diapers for a little while, but I wasn’t worried. I knew she’d eventually get it…definitely before she was 13!  🙂

Some of the techniques we used on our son didn’t work for her.  Apparently we really lucked out with our son. I heard horror stories about how hard it was to train boys. Thankfully, our non-sleeping son (he’s 5 and he still wakes up at night) made the potty training part of his life fairly easy for us. He started going poo poo in the potty a few months after his 2nd birthday…which I’ve been told is unusual. I’ve heard that most kids get the pee pee part down before the poo poo part.

When he was 2 ½, I was about 8 months pregnant. He was going to pre-school so the teachers had a system of lining up all the kids against the wall and having them take turns going potty. The teachers then said “He’s ready. Send about 5 pairs of underwear and we’ll work with him.” I was thinking to myself “Well OK, I don’t know. I want to wait until after our daughter arrives to start training him because there’s no way I can make a mad dash to the bathroom while carrying him being 9 months pregnant!”

So I reluctantly agreed and took him to school in a diaper (because I didn’t want to be cleaning a car seat mess) and gave them some Spiderman underwear. He had a few accidents and then within days they even took off the Pull-Up during nap. I would pick him up and put a diaper on him for the 25-30 minute ride home because there was no-way I was going to clean up a car seat!  Erin dropped him off one day and the teacher asked him if we were putting our son in a diaper when we got home and he said “Well my wife is 9 months pregnant and she can’t…” and the teacher, who has helped train hundreds of kids, interrupted him and looked at him with a no BS look on her face and said “If you don’t go all the way right now, you will live to regret it.” You have to know the teacher…if she says something, you do it no questions asked, and I’m so glad we did.

It was a bit inconvenient at first but we muddled through it and he was trained before our daughter was born. Phew. It made life much easier for us. I think he had day-time one accident after she was born which was understandable given all the changes going on.

Important: When someone says their kid is potty-trained they usually mean during the day hours when they are awake. Before starting the process I kept thinking “Wow that kid is only 2 and she’s potty trained…even when she naps and sleeps?” In 90% (unscientific generalization on my part) they still wear a diaper or Pull-Up at night and/or nap. Our son was not night potty trained until just after he turned 4.  We put him in underwear the night of his 4th birthday.  A couple of accidents later, he was done and we haven’t looked back!

So our daughter looks like she might figure out the whole pee pee thing in a few weeks but we’re still working on the poo poo part. She just won’t tell us when it’s happening. You have to be right there and see the look on her face and rush her to the potty just in time. She’ll go when she’s there but she won’t tell us before hand. If she’s quiet for too long, I ran frantically around the house to find her to see if she’s in progress. 🙂

Also, she will just sit on the toilet to sit there, laugh, and pull the toilet paper out. Our son would sit there (and pull the toilet paper out) but 95% of the time something came out!  I actually purchased one potty book when we were training him and found the techniques the author presented to be very useful. In particular, we picked a book he liked to be his potty book (which happened to be Who Lives in the Pond – baby einstein book), and we read it when he sat on the toilet.  However, she wasn’t too into that book or others.  Although we bought one of those small potties, we barely used it because it’s not pleasant cleaning it up.  See link to the toilet training book below:

I hope our luck holds out with our daughter with regards to potty training. The process further goes to show that every child is different. If you have any ideas to share, please feel free to leave a comment.

Author: | Filed under: baby tips, toddler tips | Tags: , , | 4 Comments »