Care and Feeding

Whenever we go see a medical professional about our (adorable) daughter, Celeste, they want to know how she’s eating and what’s up with her diapers. We had a decent sense, but hadn’t really had a good accurate count. Also, we want to make sure she gets enough to eat, and had sometimes been struggling to remember how much she’d eaten at the last few feedings. Emma looked at a few apps to do this, but we couldn’t quickly find anything that’d do what we wanted, so I built us a simple way to track this.

First, I created a note in the standard Notes app called “Celeste — care and feeding”, and shared that note with Emma. I then made three iOS Shortcuts: feeding, wet, and dirty. The first one prompts for a number of milliliters fed (defaulting to zero, for times we don’t know), then writes that with a time stamp to the shared note; the later two write 💦 or 💩, respectively, with a time stamp. I shared the above Shortcuts with Emma, and helped her install them on her phone. Now, whichever of us feeds or changes Celeste, we can run the shortcut and both have a full log to share with medical folks.

The only real requirement for the Shortcuts is that you have exactly one note with “care and feeding” in the title. Other than that, the Shortcut will ask for the permissions it needs, and you should be good to go.