Track Your Baby’s Feeding Schedule

Grandparents are great for spoiling kids and showering them with affection…and gifts. The classic grandparent gift is a Baby Tracker, which helps you organize all the important baby papers that go along with a child’s birth. Things you might track over time are your baby’s weight, height, immunizations, illnesses (hopefully not too many), and milestones. We have the exact baby tracker shown in the picture and we love it; updating it almost every week, if not more often.

The one thing where we found the tracker to be lacking is in tracking your baby’s feeding. The tracker includes just a page or two to track the baby’s breastfeeding, but nothing to track the baby’s diet after a few days of age. Since I am such a numbers geek, I wanted to track my baby’s diet more closely, so I created the Daddy by Default Infant and Toddler Feeding Diary.

The feeding diary is just a single page PDF and tracks your baby’s diet in detail. You can record things like the time of your baby’s feedings, how much she ate, whether she at milk or formula, and how much spitup she had. The diary doesn’t stop there though. It also allows you to track when your baby’s diaper needs to be changed and whether she went #1 or #2, along with a column to track your breast feeding (or pumping) schedules and how much milk was produced. Finally, it has a notes column for you to add things like her personality for the day, what time she took naps, and whether she was generally fussy or happy.

Believe it or not, we’ve used one of these sheets every day since the birth of our daughter and have placed them all in a binder that rests on a book shelf near our baby tracker. It may seem like overkill at first, but the feeding diary has come in handy on more than one occasion.

Our daughter did not like breast feeding. She did not latch on well, and when she did get a hold she gulped wildly, took in too much air and ended up getting constant hiccups. She also spit up constantly, and we never knew how much food she was taking in. We were afraid she wasn’t getting enough to eat and thought her development might be stunted. After just a few days, we quit the breastfeeding and started her on the bottle exclusively. With the bottle, we knew exactly how much food she was getting and that information was entered into the diary. When it was time for her doctor appointments, we brought our sheets with us and this gave the doctor a detailed look into her nutrition.

Due to our daughter’s constant spitting up we thought we were going to have to put our her on medication, but with the feeding diary, our doctor could see spit-up patterns around certain feedings and was able to give us more detailed advice tailored to our daughters habits. That saved us from having to give our daughter harsh medication at such a young age.

For a brief moment, we had placed our daughter in day care and we gave them several sheets to track her nutrition like we did at home. The notes section was a great place for the day care workers to leave us comments about her diet that day, and if we needed to change up things at home we could do that easily.

The sheet really came in handy when it was time to train our daughter to sleep through the night. Our doctor recommended that she be eating at least 28-32 ounces of milk or formula each day before trying to get her on any type of overnight schedule. With the feeding diary we always knew exactly what she was eating, and knew when her average went above 30 ounces for the day. By the time she was four months old she began sleeping through the night and we started getting some shut eye too.

Now, we use the diary to track the solids she eats, which is important because you need to monitor that closely to make sure your child doesn’t develop any allergic reactions. We add one food every three days, and mark how much she eats clearly on the sheet. If any allergies show up, we know right away what caused it, and can immediately change her diet.

When we first starting using the diary we thought it would be a pain to keep track each day, but we were surprised at just how easy it was to write down her habits. We kept a stack of sheets (doubled sided to save paper) near her feeding station. After she ate and when she was playing, relaxing, or during her nap, we’d record information about that feeding on the sheet.

The feeding diary has been a lifesaver for us and we think it will help you too, which is why I’ve made it available for you to download…absolutely free. Simply click the link below and input your email address and we’ll send you the pdf file immediately.

Click here to download the Daddy by Default Infant and Toddler Feeding Diary.

If you have any questions on its use, just log a comment below. If you’re using the feeding diary now and like it – leave a note then too. Feel free to share the diary online or repost this article with your favorite social media pages.

Enjoy!

 

Image: federico stevanin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net