A father knitted his baby’s first year of sleep pattern data into a blanket
theverge.com
theverge.com
A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization.[4] The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or thousands of cords.[5] The configuration of the quipus has been "compared to string mops."[6] Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps more sturdy, base to which the color-coded cords would be attached.[7] A relatively small number have survived.
2nd child: June-August 2021: I think Jayden slept pretty well that summer.
3rd child: 2024-2032: Braden was born and entered third grade.
As someone without kids, I also feel like I learned something about baby sleep by looking at it. Neat to see it turn from randomness into something ordered.
Edit: Looking at the picture closer on twitter it seems like it’s ~28 stitches which would be almost 3 hours so not DST.
I mostly try to ignore it when it comes to sleep, which I can fortunately more or less do. My kids are young enough that they can pretty much just maintain their existing schedule.
Example of a dinosaur: https://lagomorpho.com/patterntracker/?pattern=patterns/chro...
This should be a product on its own. Take a photo, use some PyTorch and get a ready made page to help you. Don’t know how many times I have printed A4 paper or handed my wife the iPad with a zoomed version of the receipt she is knitting.
It had four colours of wool, and the knitting area was about a metre wide.
It was like this (video), but the program in the machine would automatically raise and lower the needles according to the wool colour required for each line.
The result is the first computer program I ever used, age 2 or so, was the knitting pattern editor. I think it was the simplest drawing/colouring program, since you just had a large grid with 4 colours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aEzZ6TdpcQ (I think this is a cheaper machine. My mum's could change the wool colour automatically: it would beep when this was required, and you dragged the thing (shuttle?) to the far side, where some mechanical clicking would happen and the wool in use would be swapped.)
(Then again, I usually use a sleep tracker, and aside from a quick glance in the morning, never ever look at the data again. But I figure baby tracking has a decent amount of overhead, and parents are already overworked and overtired enough as it is...)
Tracking is genuinely useful though when you’ve noticed something and are trying to gather evidence of a pattern to bring to a healthcare professional - for example around sleeping or feeding.
We kept logs in a shared Apple note. Looking back at it now, it reads more like a tale of two people’s slow descent into madness than something that could be turned into a knitting pattern.
That is, when he doesn't wake himself up by bumping his head on the side of the crib, or having a nightmare (I guess?), or just being a baby.
The ache can be cured with some massages in the tummy. It's not as easy as it looks. Ask the nurse in the hospital for help after you tried for 15 or 30 minutes. The nurses know how to make the massages, it's like magic.
Unless you already have a kid that needs your attention, too. Then you really feel yourself wither away.
My son (second child) slept from the start. Thankfully.
Our second we used a Snoo, which helped, but she didn't actually get solid sleep until the day we moved her to her crib. We didn't even try to back sleep her at that point, she wanted to be on her belly so she was. That kid sleep trained herself, which was amazing.
The thing about "best practices" is they always change. My mom told me that when I was a baby the "best practice" was for a baby to sleep on its stomach -- otherwise it might aspirate vomit. Both approaches are honestly probably equally fine...
If you look into the research there are a number of things that greatly elevate the relative risk of SIDS. Belly sleeping is, as far as I understand it, way down on the list but for parents that don't have any of the other risk factors going on it's really easy to point at and say "if you do this you will kill your baby because SIDS".
The paper you cite seems consistent with that also: although the number of discrete risk factors was unchanged, the number of SIDS deaths per year fell to less than half after the BTS campaign, so probably not all the risk factors are equally risky...
Yes, correlation does not equal causation. That said, by definition SIDS has no known cause and smoking has been identified as one of the biggest risk factors.
Edit to add: one other thing that I think is hard to track. As a parent that tried to sleep two kids on their backs, they slept terribly. In the middle of the night, in sleep deprivation fueled desperation, the two options we saw were to put them on their belly or bring them into bed with us. Cosleeping is a far greater risk factor of SUID than belly sleeping but people make that choice every day because of the shaming that doctors and nurses put on belly sleeping.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/07/26/poll-u...
The title makes this sound quite odd, but when you actually see the finished result it's fascinating and beautiful.
Hell, given a lot of the other stories we're subjected to -- even on HN -- daily, I welcome a nice nerdy human interest story every now and then.