When the birth of our baby was approaching, we quickly realised we would need somewhere to note down the various comings and goings.
We tend to avoid apps and their overly prying eyes, so we decided to make a simple website ourselves. No app, just a webpage that let us input the basics and see some stats. We also didn't want to be navigating submenus at 3am; everything should be front and center. One click and it's all there to see or track. It was ugly, but it worked.
The questions changed as he grew
As our baby grew, the things we cared about started to change. Wet nappies were no longer much of a concern, but poops?
“When did he last poop? Yesterday? If he doesn't poop today, is that a concern?”
That led to the ability to hide tracking options we no longer cared about, so they did not clutter the screen.
Then we started tracking sleep, and you start to wonder: how long have they currently been asleep? That mental arithmetic adds up, so along came the Current sleep duration tracker.
What about patterns? Do they fall asleep at the same time each day? Do we put them to sleep at the same time, or are we being lazy with the routine? That led to the timeline view.
Then came solids
Six months rolled by and solids arrived. How many times had we introduced him to peanuts? What about the other common allergens? Again, we added the feature we needed: a straightforward allergen tracker.
One tracker, two children
Fast-forward a year and baby number two was on the way. We needed a way to track them too, which led to per-child tabs and settings for each child. Baby one no longer breastfeeds, but baby two will, so we need that option visible on one page but not the other.
It does the job, then gets out of the way
Ugly Baby Tracker grew organically from the needs of our family. It is not a pretty tracker. It does not have fun little slider widgets shaped like bottles to track pump amounts—just enter the number; trust us, it is easier. It does not offer AI or sleep prediction, but it also does not want access to your phone's photo album and mobile contacts. No alarms and alerting, no pretending to be a medical tool.
It just tracks the basics, displays the important information, and gets out of the way.