As most readers know, The Trixie Update isn’t as prolific as it used to be. This time last year we were a spry, young blog with lots of energy and boundless enthusiasm. Here we are a year later, which is about 29 years in internet time, and blogsteoporosis has set in. It’s hard to remember how we got here.

When Trixie was a few weeks old, we posted a few pictures, and a couple of stories about the miseries of sleep deprivation. At three months we had Telemetry up and running, and stories started rolling off the assembly line. At six months, we had collected so much data, the stories were writing themselves. That was our golden age.

By 12 months, having blown through a year of milk, we turned off Bottle Telemetry. By 18 months, Diaper Telemetry was discontinued. Here at 2 years all we have left is Sleep. It’s going to shut down some day too, but not yet. And until it does, we will dutifully present the data we have collected on the ever improving sleep habits of a 2-year human child.

The chart on the left right details 4,388 points of sleep data collected over the last 616 days. I wish I had data for the first few months, because that’s where the real painful stuff happened, but when it comes to raising children you just have to do the best you can and hope they turn out all right.

Sleep data is not enough to keep The Trixie Update running forever. But that’s where TPOD’s come in. I’m also still hoping to post more once Trixie Tracker launches. Thanks for sticking with us for almost two years!

Update: Want to create sleep charts for your baby or toddler?

Now you can! Give Trixie Tracker a try and discover your own amazing sleep patterns.

Some of the house favorites from the last 2 years:

The Cheerio Syndrome

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What do you think about…

Mealtime Atlas (images)

We’re all Mammals (images)

Still Mammals

Teeth (images)

Clik. clik. clik-click… clik

Paper Shredder (images)

And you thought metric was hard

Beware Toddlers Bearing Gifts

Two Nap Minimum (images)

Want more charts? Visit Metrics.

I haven’t been sick the entire time. At the end of last week, things were looking much better. By Friday, I felt like eating again. By Saturday, I declared myself well. But apparently the virus was only incubating, growing stronger. On Sunday I caught it all over again, and it put me out of commission for a good 3 days. I can honestly say I’ve never been so sick in my whole life as I have the last month and a half.

Trixie, on the other hand, spent one day vomiting and basically recovered. She was cranky for a couple of days afterwards, but it’s impossible to tell whether that was because she was a recovering sicko or just stressed from the new daycare environment (or some combination of the two.) Matter of fact, there were so many adverse events during the weeks following Trixie’s entry to daycare — from vomiting to separation anxiety to a morning nap relapse — that it’s hard to get a handle on how out of whack life has been around here. Here’s a short summary to help explain the daycare* transition:

*Trixie is in part-time daycare (mornings) Monday-Friday. She started at 18 months.

It’s my guess that if you ask any parent of a young toddler what the best time of the day is, the answer will be nap time. Previously it may have been happy hour, or when Must-See-TV starts, or that second coffee break, but that was before they had kids.

Four months ago, when Trixie was 14 months old, I could usually count on her to take a nap by about 10am, but I wasn’t real particular. If she acted tired, I would let her take a nap, even if it was 8 o’clock in the morning. As far as I was concerned, it was never too early for a nap. Not being a morning person, I needed Trixie’s first nap to shower, get dressed, and generally wake-up. If I was having a good day, I might even get a little work done, but that was usually left for the afternoon nap. She didn’t always take an afternoon nap, but it regular enough for me to believe that it existed. (See A)

Things began to change around 15 1/2 months (B). I still let Trixie go to sleep in the morning when she wanted to, but it became increasingly difficult to get her to take a second nap. We had horrible days where she took a short morning nap, and then spent the whole afternoon in a cranky, frustrated stupor, unwilling or unable to take a second one.

We wrestled with this for a month until we decided enough was enough. We decided to push her to stay up until nap time (1:00) and the payoff was immediate. (C) The following nine days were the most consistent sleep schedule Trixie ever had. Her schedule has fluctuated since then, but one the one-nap-a-day rule remains in effect.

So, now our only sleep problem is trying to get Trixie to stay in bed at bedtime. For instance, tonight it took over an hour of her jumping out of bed, running around her room in the dark, pulling out all her toys, banging into things and generally sounding like a raccoon going through the trash before we finally got her to sleep. Aside from reverting to the Pack’n'Play (which she still can’t climb out of) we don’t have a solution — unless going in there with a flashlight and banging on the garbage can lids would work.

Want to learn more about your child’s sleep patterns? Start today with Trixie Tracker sleep tracking software.

Other points of interest on this chart:
(D) First climbed out of her crib, just five days after we switched over to one nap a day.

(E) Christmas.

(F) After several weeks of successfully sleeping without the crib side, Trixie began rolling out of bed at night.

(G) Trixie was sick.

(H) Trixie wouldn’t stay in her crib when she was sick, so we switched her back to the Pack’n'Play for about a week and a half until she learned to stay in the crib again.

Thanks to dearsarah for reminding me to do this nap transition story

I was shocked when I first rendered this chart. It didn’t look anything like I expected, which is why I decided to turn it into a challenge. I was surprised because Jenn and I both thought Trixie was on a pretty good schedule. I imagined that one year of data would show clear improvement as the erratic chaos of a 4-month-old gave way to the regular overnight sleep habits of a 16-month-old. Instead, this chart shows that even though she’s sleeping through the night, her actual overnight sleep-time and nap schedule during the day isn’t stable. There’s been a small shift in the amount of awake-time per day, which is supposed to happen as your child grows, but the signal is buried in a lot of noise.

Basically, this chart shows that no matter how hard we try, it’s difficult to get Trixie on a regular, predictable schedule. We have routines — dinner, bath, reading, lights out. We put her to bed at the same time almost every night (even though she doesn’t always fall asleep at the time.) But we just can’t control what time she wakes up in the morning. And when she inexplicably wakes up at 5:30am it throws off her schedule for the rest of the day. For example, do you try to keep a cranky Trixie awake until her regular nap time? Or do you just let her go to sleep once she lays down on the floor at 9am and starts sucking her thumb? It’s a tough call. And all these little variations add up to create massive sleep cycle swings over the course of several days.

Does this chart mean that it’s hopeless to get your toddler on a good schedule? No. There are small trends over the past year, and some of the more severe spikes do correspond to specific provoking events (like a road trip or being sick). But it basically means that there’s not a clean evolution.

If you didn’t choose the right answer to the challenge, take heart. About 75% of us expected to find a more predictable, ordered chart. Or maybe about 75% of us are just hoping to get a little more sleep.

Here’s the challenge. There are 4 graphs below. One of these represents Trixie’s actual awake time over the last year (from about age 3.5 months to 15.5 months). The rest were made with fake and intentionally misleading data. What we’re looking for here is the total awake time for each day. Doesn’t matter whether the day was broken up with naps or not. Just the total awake time.

To put this in context imagine what your own chart might look like. For example, I usually only get about 6-7 hours of sleep a night. So my chart would be a fairly straight line that bounced between 17 and 18 hours, and would look much nicer than most of the choices below.

So, ready to go? Pick out the real one and vote your answer (poll is to your left under Latest TTU Comments). Come back Monday to see if you got it right.

Update [Fri. 11pm]: Want a hint? Come back Saturday.

Trixie almost tripled her birth weight over the past year. That’s not something you or I would want to attempt. (It would put me at around 550 lbs.) And she increased her height by 50%, which worked out to almost an inch per month. Who hasn’t wanted to be an inch or two taller? But 10.25″? That’s pretty crazy.

All along she has been in the 50th percentile for weight and toward the top end (80%-95%) for height. Here’s a look at the numbers:

First, I want to say that as much as we’ve both come to hate breast-pumping and all the work it entails, we’re glad we did it for Trixie’s sake. That having been said, breast pumping sucks.

I still find the whole thing a little mind-boggling. We live in cities, drive around in cars, surf the internet, and talk on cell phones, but beneath it all, we’re still mammals. Nothing drives this point home like being aware of a mother providing sustenance to her baby.

I suspect that some of the information presented here can make people feel a little uncomfortable. I think most guys don’t like to think about women’s breasts in their capacity to produce upwards of two gallons of milk a week. It’s not the sort of thing you want to dwell on when you’re in a bar on Friday night — or ever. (Guys, you might want to stop reading here.) Similarly, I imagine most women who haven’t breastfed, or who are getting ready to have a baby, must be pretty freaked out when told they possess the capacity to supply a baby with hundreds of ounces of milk a week. (Don’t worry — it doesn’t all hit at once.) But lastly, those who have pumped or breastfed might find this data validating. You know how much work it was, you just never had solid numbers to back up your gut feeling. Now you do.

We began collecting bottle-feeding data October 13th 2003, when Trixie was around 12 weeks old. During this time Trixie got the majority of her milk from the bottle. She still nursed a little bit, but we were forced to start using bottles early on because Jenn was back at work at 5 weeks. Since I was the one staying home with Trixie, and since I don’t have boobs, she was going to have to drink Jenn’s pumped milk from a bottle.

Trixie drank about 30 ounces of milk a day for the majority of the period we collected data. 30 ounces a day doesn’t sound like much, but when you start to look at the total amount consumed (and produced) the numbers grow very quickly. Trixie drank hundreds of ounces of milk a week [see below]. Her peak was week 44 at 232 ounces. If 232 ounces is too abstract, think about it this way; it’s about 19 cans of Coke per week. That’s a lot of breast-pumping! And of course, these numbers don’t reveal the full story. They are only a record of what Trixie drank. When we take the left-over milk in the bottle into account, it turns out that in week 27, there was a combined total of 245 ounces. But this number still doesn’t account for milk that may have been put into freezer storage that week or any possible nursing that took place.

I think it’s still easier to look at the milk production/consumption in even broader stroke. In this chart we see how many gallons of milk Trixie was drinking a week.

But what’s the really big picture? Since we started keeping records, and as of 3:40 pm today, Jenn has pumped 8,009 ounces of milk. This is more than 62 gallons. Of these, Trixie drank 6,939 oz or about 54 gallons. All pumping moms out there will be sad to hear that since Oct 12th, 2003, 1,070 ounces of milk have expired in the bottle and had to be poured out.

But that isn’t everything either. In the 12 weeks prior to starting data collection Trixie probably got about 100 oz a week by nursing. Adding an extra 1,200 oz to the 8,009 gives us 9,209. Also there’s probably about 100 oz in the freezer now, and we lost about 100 when the power went out during the hurricane. Finally I have to confess that I’ve poured out milk when too much has built up in the milk line. Maybe another 50 oz, at least… sorry, Jenn.

All and all, I think 9,459 oz is a fair estimate of the milk Jenn has pumped since Trixie was born. This translates to about 74 gallons of milk over the past 10 1/2 months. We also estimate that she spends about 1.75 hours a day pumping which means she’s logged approximately 525 hours making food for Trixie. This is almost 22 straight days of pumping. Put another way, it’s more than thirteen 40-hour work weeks — and that’s on top of a full-time job. For my part I’ve been mostly responsible for washing the 2,880 feeding and storage bottles we’ve used over the past 8 months. I say mostly because despite all work Jenn does, there are times when she has done the bottle-washing for me. As much as I would have liked to, I’ve never been able to return the favor by helping with the pumping.