Baby Related Apps

بِسْم الله الرحمن الرحيم

I don’t know about you, but I am a technology lover ❤

I find it great that I entered the world of motherhood during the technology era, in particular, during the smart phone age. It makes the access to information much easier for us. It is a tap away on my phone’s screen. How cool is that? الحمدلله

I can imagine back in the days when my mum was a new mum, along with everyone else in her generation. They relied on books for information, along with family and friends and the physical network only (not the virtual one through the Internet which we also have today). الحمدلله

I am sure that the amount of information access we have today is much bigger than in the past. الحمدلله

Beside researching and Googling today, I find those Apps very useful. Many are quicker access to information; many others offer useful features like record keeping and update feature.

In this post, I would like to share very few of my current favorite baby related apps which I use and love.

Side Note: I also used other baby related apps in the past 9+ months, including pregnancy apps, but those were useful at that time, while I stopped using the other baby related apps because I no longer found them useful for me.

I’m the type of person who needs to research, read and learn about the unknown to me. Babies are fascinating to learn about, especially when you have one. At some point of baby AZ’s life with us (at around 12-15 weeks),  i noticed him changing. I noticed that he was extra fussy, barely was sleeping and cried mostly. I was getting exhausted and didn’t know what was happening that made him behave differently. I turned to one of the baby related forums in the “www” and asked what could be up with my baby boy. Most responses said:that it was around the “Wonder Week” which could be the reason behind his behaviour at that time. That was the first time I heard about this term. The Wonder Weeks app was suggested by some. Appearently, there were more leaps to come going forward, I thought, so I downloaded this app.

Here is where baby AZ is currently at. One thing to point out, the leaps are counted from the baby’s due date (not birthday). Baby AZ came 3 weeks earlier than his due date. We are currently in leap 6. This is the information the app shares for leap6.

I love that it helps with ideas of how to help your baby during a leap, what to expect from a baby to master, know and recognise after a certain leap..etc. I find it very useful especially for new parents (like myself). It helps me understand my baby boy more. Much more. Therefore, it gives me a piece of mind, knowing that during these periods that he behaves in an extra fussy and unusual way, it is totally normal.
More info about this app can be read here: More info about this app

It is the only baby related app I paid for by the way. If I remember correctly, I paid around 7 dhs for it.

The next app I have and absolutely love is Baby Sprout. It is a free app that you use to document your baby’s milestones and “First”s, with their photos. I do have a baby book/album, but honestly speaking, I didn’t get the chance to fill it up. Not even with a single photo or word. I snap the photos with my camera, but I didn’t get around to printing , organising and documenting them in that album.’In today’s digital days, I find myself snapping majority of the photos with my phone. With this app, I managed to document the day and month of his first bath, first smile, first time he discovered his hands and feet, first time he sat unassisted, first time he crawled, first giggle, first tooth…etc WITH the photos I took of each. I love it.

The third app I will write about here which I LOVE is Baby Nursing. It is another free app. It was one of the first baby apps I downloaded after giving birth to baby AZ. It is another free app that helps you track many things like the number of wet diapers, the number of hours your baby sleep, your baby’s development. the last time he/she had a bottle (if bottle fed), vaccinations, keeping track of solids, and most importantly, the time and duration of his/her breastfeeding session (AND from which breast too). Being a new mommy with a newborn, I could barely keep track of these sort of info. On the other hand, I found that keeping a log that was very easy / quick to access was very helpful to me.

I don’t know why but before giving birth, one of my worries was breastfeeding. I wanted to do it for my boy, but anyone I asked around made it sound like the most challenging task a woman was given. It didn’t make sense to me because I thought that women in the past used to do it far more a lot than women nowadays. Almost everyone I asked around me didn’t make it sound like something easy to manage. I felt that the lack of knowledge was one of the reasons some quit or give up the idea all together. The lack of support was another reason women give up is what I thought. I also came across an article on The National Newspaper that confirmed what I thought.
I don’t have anything against formula feeding (hey, I was a formula fed baby back on those days 😉 ). However, breastfeeding was something I wanted to do.
بعد توفيق من رب العباد
The above app helped me a lot in documenting the feeding sessions. Finding a good lactation consultant in Dubai was another good thing that helped me along with the app. When we had a bump in our breastfeeding road (mind you, we had quite the bumps – many of them – at some point … or at many points…. I was so close to giving up… but I am thankful that I didn’t), the feeding session log which I used to document in the app above was one of the helpful tools that gave me a more clear picture of how things were going. I used to give my lactation consultant the log’s summary easily when she had question about our feeding patterns. That app is one that I highly recommend for whoever want to breastfeed, especially the new ones.

There are a few other apps that I used/use which are baby and mommy related, but I chose my current favourite three above. If you have good apps to recommend, feel free to share them in the comment section below 😀