First Year with Bub

We were very excited when we were expecting our first born. We got lots of stories and advice (some unsolicited) from parents, friends, relatives. We were always left wondering what our day-to-day would look like like how many nappy changes would we need to do or how many times would our newborn need feeding?

We kept a log of every feed, wee, poo and vomit in response to Doctors request for this information every visit (we both work in data). After just over a year, the log contained 2,412 entries and we realised it answered many of our initial questions. Keeping in mind our data only represents one child here are the takeouts that suprised us and would like to share.

Nappy Changes!

Six nappy changes a day, on average. Most nappy changes coincided with a feed (except for the smelly ones). After the first month, it became second nature. After the second month we could get a nappy change done in the same time as an F1 pit stop.

Feeds, Wees, Poos and Vomit

Vomits were uncommon, contrary to what everyone told us. Vomits did usually result in a change of clothes for everyone involved. Vomits were usually clumped together (many in a day usually in response to vaccinations or introducing new foods) rather than one every once and awhile.

Having to deal with a smelly nappy was a more than once a day occurrence. Feeding and eating is very frequent and settled into a regular routine that wasn't hard to plan around.

Waking at Night

Many friends and family made us worried about having a baby that woke constantly at night. The graphs shows how many times we had to have a feed or change a nappy grouped into whether it occurred during the day, evening and night, on average. Bigger wedges represents more feeds or nappy changes.

Most nappy changes and feeds occurred during the day between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. The smallest amount were during 6 p.m. and midnight. Our bub liked an early bedtime and slept soundly during these hours.

The data is split at five months because our bub started sleeping longer and sometimes through the night. Normal development like not needing to eat so frequently probably explains why. We parents did start to get more sleep after the fist six months.

In the first five months our baby needed a feed or nappy change an average of 1.4 times between midnight and 6 a.m. This may appear quite low seems but keep in mind this is an average. In these first five months, we were up every night except for nine nights, twice for 59 nights (nearly two months!) and were up one night a total of four times. This doesn't include the times where our baby woke up or the times we sat staring at the baby monitor freaking out something bad was about to happen. After six months the number of feeds and nappy changes then falling to 0.9 times. Some nights we were all able to sleep through.

The number of nappy changes didn't fall over time for us in the first five months average feeds and nappy changes was 6.9 and increased to 7.2 from six months. The increase wasn't uniform. The average number of feeds and nappy changes between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m increased from 4.5 to 5.3 while decreasing from 1.4 to 0.9 between midnight and 6 a.m and no change between 6 p.m. and midnight. Our bub became increasingly active and awake from six months leading to an extra feed or nappy change throughout the day probably explains this result.

Our Bub

Our bub is very healthy and happy child that we love and adore. The hard and difficult moments of raising a newborn are easy to describe but the love, fun and excitement we share as a family is indescribable. We share this information to say using data that the day to day challenges are manageable. We value our bub's privacy and unfortunately cannot share any pics.

All code is for this site and data analysis is available on github.