Trixie Tracker second anniversary

Today marks the end of our second full year of using Trixie Tracker to chart our baby-related data. We started using the program back in March 2006 when Isaac was six months old, and he'll be two and a half years old tomorrow. Here is my post celebrating our first Trixie Tracker anniversary in March 2007, and most of what I said still applies, except that we now only track sleep (which is open to the public to view on our Izzy Info site) and nursing. (Oh, and medicine, too -- he has never taken any prescription medicine, but it's actually pretty useful to know how recently we've given him Tylenol.)

I've always enjoyed the Sleep Probability graphs. They use a gray scale to graphically depict the likelihood of the child being asleep at any given moment in a 24-hour period -- white means they are always awake at that time, black means they are always asleep, and medium gray means there's a 50/50 chance. Pure colors, hard lines, and very little gradation means that the child has a solid and predictable schedule. Obviously the schedules of young babies are not like this, so the early months ended up looking like a continuous hazy blur of medium gray. Even as his daytime schedule got more predictable, Isaac used to wake up at random times during the night, so there are lots of pale stripes within the black of his nights.

You can see all two years' worth of Isaac's Sleep Probability graphs on one page right here, much nicer than I'll be able to lay out using Blogger, but just for fun, here are a few at six-month increments ranging from six months to 29 months of age. You can watch his daytime naps solidify (the graph at one year has blurry daytime naps because he was transitioning from two naps to one), his night-wakings lessen (although not disappear completely), and his bedtime gradually creep later and later.