Newborn parenting software - part 4

About 4 years later, we’ve done it again! With kid #2, we’re older, wiser, more tired, and have a slightly different strategy. We still love tracking stuff, and BabyBuddy (a self-hosted baby tracking application) is still the best option. However, a couple of things have changed: First, the poo buttons have largely been replaced with a wall-mounted tablet displaying our HomeAssistant UI (which, indeed, has buttons for nappy recording). Secondly, and more significantly - kid #2 is breastfed.

One of the advantages of breastfeeding is that some moms can, in the middle of the night, feed a hungry baby while barely waking up themselves. Unfortunately, if mom is interested in tracking the breastfeeding, and needs to unlock the phone (multiple times) and perform additional taps, this doesn’t work, and she wakes up. Most interactive software is, perhaps unsurprisingly, designed for people who are wide awake.

So - home automation to the rescue! I already have a bunch of IKEA shortcut buttons which work nicely with HomeAssistant through a my ConnBee 2, and IKEA’s newer SOMRIG shortcut buttons provide 2-buttons-in-1. All I need is 3 options (provided by 2 such SOMRIG units) - “start timer”, “stop timer and mark that as a left-breast feeding”, and “stop timer and mark that as right-breast”.

These button devices are wonderfully compact and their batteries last pretty long. This has to do with the fact that they have no screen, so unfortunately no way of indicating whether they worked or not; and they don’t always work on the first click. Fortunately, I had an old IKEA desk-lamp with a Zigbee RGB lightbulb I hadn’t really found use for. This lamp has now become a floor-based night-light to indicate the status:

1. Dim blue when the timer is on (during feeding)
2. When feeding is done, green or orange for a few seconds (depending on the side)
3. …and back off.

Indeed, a few smart buttons and a literal lightbulb-moment of an idea are allowing my wife to go back to sleep much more quickly, without giving up on our shared tracking obsession. It’s amazing how much of a quality-of-life difference you can make with some straightforward home automation.