I don’t know about you, but when I had my first, I spent a lot of time diligently recording shit. Like, literally, I had a book where I recorded every time my baby took a dump, peed, ate, from what side, for how long… It was exhausting, and overall didn’t paint a very clear picture.
A new mom and dad recently took this to new heights by meticulously recording their baby’s newborn sleep patterns, and then graphed it for a super clear look at how their baby spent her time from 3 months to 17 months of age.
Reddit user jitney86 explains they were tired of the unpredictability that often comes with a newborn’s feeding and sleeping patterns, and started tracking what information they had in an Excel spreadsheet.
The resulting graph is a real lightbulb moment for anyone who has survived the newborn stage, and knows that newborn sleep is unpredictable as hell.
For those who have spent more time thinking about sleep than actually sleeping recently, here’s what you’re looking at:
The left side, or the Y-axis if you’re fancy like that, represents time of day. It’s tracked in military time, so the top represents midnight, and the day progresses as you move down the axis. Age is tracked along the bottom (the X-axis), ranging from 3 months (on the left) to 17 months (on the right). The blue represents time their baby was sleeping, the green represents time their baby was breastfeeding, and white is other (awake, pooping, plotting how to take over the world).
To sum it up
Basically, the graph confirms that the beginning is a goddamn unpredictable shit show, but eventually, kids learn to sleep in consolidated chunks, with fewer feeds each night.
In other words, there is hope!
How cool is that?
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