JHENIFER PABILLANO

This one’s for all the seamstresses looking for scissor sharpening in Vancouver. Quality Saw and Knife at Quebec and 4th, yo!

Since I took the bus there, they kindly sharpened my fabric scissors while I waited with the baby. (I think typically you drop your scissors off and pick them up later.) And it only cost a cool $5.60!

The sharpening staff is there from 7am to 2pm, so they were able to squeeze my scissors in as long as I arrived during that time.

Where’d I find their name? From the Chowhound boards: here’s one post about knife sharpening, and another. I might try Sharpening House in Kerrisdale next time, but I’m not sure any of the the mobile services listed would come out for just one pair of fabric scissors. And I totally doubt the Santoku store would work on my old sharps (but prove me wrong, please!).

1. The Baby-sitters Club Series by Ann M. Martin
Goodbye club meetings! Stoneybrook parents won’t tolerate having just three half-hours a week to book a sitter by phone. Instead, Kristy creates online babysitter bookings and hires a Bangalore call centre to field any phone inquiries. Virtual assistants coordinate the sitters’ schedules in Google Calendar, and all club meetings would take place over Gchat. The babysitting diaries of course become a password-protected blog. Also: Kristy gets profiled in Inc., Jackie Rodowsky’s accidents become YouTube sensations, and Charlotte Johanssen gets cyberbullied (but learns a valuable lesson about online privacy and the nature of true friendship).

2. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
Chris, Cathy, and their younger twin siblings disappear, but astute friends notice a lack of Facebook updates, text messages and Gchat conversations. A concerned message gets quickly retweeted and reposted throughout the social world: “Do you know where the Dollanganger Four are?” Soon, a Metafilter thread examining the issue leads to several parties digging up the Dollangangers’ twisted family history via online genealogical resources, and local authorities are swiftly dispatched to Foxworth Hall to retrieve the kids. Olivia, Corrine, and Bart Winslow are arrested, and Cathy and Chris give an exclusive interview follows with Anderson Cooper, tying into their soon-to-be released tell-all book. All the brother-on-sister action still happens though.

3. Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
Living in the shadow of her beautiful twin Caroline, Louise Bradshaw takes to the internet and develops a devoted following by blogging about crabbing, cooking and rustic pursuits in Chesapeake Bay. Teen Vogue profiles her after she signs a book deal with HarperCollins: the article contains a small sidebar about her twin sister’s budding vocal career and jewelry line.

4. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Mostly the same except with more texting and Facebooking and the like. Also, Margaret spends a bunch of time discussing her conflicted search for religion in the message boards on the Teenage Softies website. A community manager dispenses ineffectual advice with lots of exclamation marks, and sends Margaret an online promo code to get a free trial pack of Softies, “for being such a great contributor!”

5. Ghostwriter - PBS TV show
Ghostwriter is totally obsolete: texting and instant messaging render his skills completely worthless. Lenni and Jamal still take to wearing pens on lanyards, however.

For L’s first Halloween, I tried to find a store bought costume and save myself some effort. But there were hardly any costumes out there, and the ones that did exist were like $60! I mean, $60 for a costume that she’d never ever wear again? Please.

So I sewed my own, and I’m super proud of how it turned out. Onesie, pants, spats, peanut shell, top hat: all made by mom!

As well, please note the monocle and walking stick to complete the outfit :) It’s the little things that count, you know?

Good work moot! That really captures a huge part of why identity is so wonky on the internet in these modern times. Judging from the web today, it really seems we have forgotten that there used to be a time where you could just live your life in its glorious cognitive dissonance. Now, we selectively broadcast things about yourself to cultivate a unified, ideal personality that you would rather people know instead.

Not that I am above such personal branding activity, to a certain extent. But I do find a lot of social media mentally exhausting, and I don’t feel a huge need to keep my personal life up on it all day every day. For better or worse, social media requires you to be continually self-conscious, more-than-a-little extroverted, and perpetually keeping one eye on the narrative that you are creating about yourself. And, hey, if you can do it, that is totally fine and no judgment here—-it’s just that not everyone can, and you know, that is really OK too. Not everybody is built to transfer their whole self comfortably into this social media world, and maybe it’s because social media isn’t crafted well enough to channel everybody in all their complexity. (Thus far, at least!) 

One more thing: I think it’s interesting how Chris Poole and everyone always point out that kids need to make mistakes, and that’s a good argument for preserving anonymity and multiple identities online, so you can be an idiot and learn from those dumb things that you do in a (reasonably) pressure-free environment. But I’d like to add this: adults need to make mistakes too! Who says you stop evolving once you hit 18 or 21 or somesuch? Failure and mistakes are how we learn throughout our lives, though it’s something we try to do less of as we grow older. The capacity to experiment and do unusual things isn’t just a domain of the young. Have we learned nothing from Cocoon?

TV theme songs/openings I skip every time
5. Entourage (for that matter, I’ve skipped the last 4 seasons)
4. Game of Thrones (let’s get to the show already, although the maps are nice)
3. The West Wing (SO LONG)
2. The Wire (hear each variation once and then NEVER AGAIN)
1. Community (though I love it so)

TV theme songs/openings I always let play through
5. Burn Notice (My name is Michael Westen…)
4. Who’s the Boss
3. Gilmore Girls
2. 30 Rock
1. Parks and Recreation

I’ve now had two months of experience with Baby Connect, which has given me a markedly less positive view of the app than in my initial review. Begin the first-world whining!

• It’s sooo slow! When I switch to the app to enter some data, too often have I encountered the startup screen, which takes its sweet time loading all the data before I can get to the entry part. Is this my fault for entering too much data in the app? If so, why allow us to enter so much data into the app? Speed is totally a crucial issue when you’re a mom—sometimes you have only a few seconds to stop a timer or enter a piece of data before your baby will scream, or they’re screaming already and you feel like a dick for prolonging their agony and waiting for your dumb app to load so you can enter info that feels increasingly trivial.
• The super not-useful home screen that you’re forced to continually revisit. Virtually 90% of the buttons on the home screen are hardly used and barely any useful current data about your baby is displayed—-but you’re forced to go back to the home screen over and over again when you switch timers or enter other data. Why force us to keep on loading a page that doesn’t show anything useful? Why not just make the home screen display all the info in the “List” screen, which actually tells you when your baby was last changed/fed and the detailed chronology of what your baby was up to all day? The home screen for rival app Baby Log is far more intelligently designed (see a photo here), letting you access the timers you need while displaying all the current info about your kid right on the surface.
• Who cares if you can store so much data on activities if you can’t call it up later? Sure you can enter lots of activity data, but good luck retrieving it. For example, I faithfully log the times when I bathe my baby, but there’s no way to quickly look up when I last bathed her. In comparison, Baby Log had a bath button that let you access the bath data entry form, but also displayed the time elapsed since you last bathed your baby right on top of the button.
• Zooming in on the charts does not help you understand them better. The axes are eradicated as you zoom in so you have no idea what the zoomed-in bars mean.
• The sleep timer goes immediately to the home screen after being activated. A minor annoyance that gnaws on your patience over time, because often I just want the sleep timer to stay up so I can keep an eye on how long she’s slept while I’m holding her. None of the other timers do this: why does the sleep timer?

Hopefully this doesn’t sound vindictive but merely descriptive of my frustrations, as I know Baby Connect’s developer is very active in listening to the user base and I’m certainly grateful for what functionality is there. My experience over the past months has just made me prefer Baby Log’s more efficient interface: if it weren’t for Baby Connect’s superior timers, its ability to sync across devices and its online access, and responsive development team, I probably would have switched back already. I feel like Baby Connect allows you to log a ton of data, but it doesn’t consistently do a good job of surfacing key data or ensuring a pleasurable user experience over a long period of time.

(Again, my biases: I have a baby who is 8 weeks old, I like efficiency, and I like being able to analyze accumulated data to improve my understanding of my baby’s behaviour. If you’re using the app for reasons other than this, you probably won’t have the same issues.)

• Recorded the sound of myself shushing my kid, then played it back to her in an infinite loop (God bless the iPhone—and the sound really works to calm her)
• Watched Alien, Aliens, and sort of at random, two other highlights from the James Cameron oeuvre (Titanic, The Terminator)—there’s a lot of downtime while breastfeeding/rocking your kid to sleep
• Read so many long form articles it’s silly—again, there’s lots of downtime. My favourite links to read while killing time: Longreads, Give Me Something To Read, Longform, and Ask Metafilter; also, Instapaper is indispensable for making everything nice and readable on the iPhone.
• Slept for a luxurious five hours straight.
• Gone to see Super 8 at Movies For Mommies at the Rio. It was a real relief to know you can still see movies as a new parent—there’s change tables, stroller parking, and they turn down the volume on the noisy bits!
• Taken the baby quite successfully on buses, the Canada Line, and a ferry. Fodder for expansion in a future post!
• Discovered that the hair dryer is one of the most powerful tools in a parent’s arsenal of baby soothing tools.
• Taken approximately 8 billion photos and videos of one tiny human being.

And much more, of course, but this is a start :) Who knew so much media consumption was involved in raising a newborn?

Edit: I posted an update to this review after using the app for about 2 months. Read it here.

You should all know that I’m writing this review on my iPhone, as hey! It’s one of the few devices I can carry around and access one-handed while wrangling a baby! And boy, is it a lifesaver: how did moms do anything without smartphones, seriously? It’s a connection to the outside world, an entertainment device, a camera, and of course, a serious data collector.

Which brings me to my review of Baby Connect, the iPhone baby tracking app, as promised in the Baby Log review I posted earlier.

Baby Connect is $5 and well, it’s basically usurped the role of Baby Log on my phone. It provides the robust functionality I was looking for in an app—and to be specific about my situation: my baby is six weeks old, and I use the app mainly track feedings, sleep duration, and diaper changes. So parents of older children might be looking for different attributes, but that’s not what I’m looking for or rating the apps on.

But while Baby Connect is functionally good, it does lack in terms of presentation. Or put another way, while all the data you want is physically in there, it’s a real trial to find what you’re looking for sometimes. Here’s a few examples.

• The home screen feels overly complex. Most of the screen real estate is given to a bunch of static buttons showing you which activities you can enter, and the really useful stuff about when your kid last fed or last had a diaper changed is relegated to super-tiny-text on the bottom of the screen. You can go to a List view to see this data larger, but that’s two steps instead of one, isn’t it—and time can be of the essence when you’re managing a baby and trying to figure out when you last fed her!
• Editing prior entries takes a wee bit long. This is an example of some redundancy in the app. You can select entries you’ve made in the app and edit them, but the app always makes you go to an interim screen displaying the info about that entry before you get to the editing dialog—-where the info about that entry is also displayed as well. So why not eliminate that interim screen?
• All logged entries are just in one long, undifferentiated list. Which is fine if you’re looking for only a chronological approach when investigating your child’s actions. But sometimes you want to sort the entries by different criteria to see what’s going on and how things stack up! For example, in Baby Log, if you tap the Sleep button, you get a list of only all the past Sleep entries you’ve made, which can be very useful (Baby Log keeps its undifferentiated chronological list of actions on its home screen).
• Graphs are more useful, but still too small and imprecise to use for discerning patterns. There’s a lot of interesting charts here, but you still can’t zoom in and look at the data very specifically—your only option is to go to the .csv files and eyeball the raw numbers. Which is not the same as manipulating the charts visually! Seriously, I want to be able to look closely at the day-long chart of my baby’s actions and figure out if there’s common times when she feeds, sleeps, does poops, etc. Or I want to look at the chart of the common intervals for feedings and perhaps change the data that’s being graphed. If I’m doing all this terrific data collection, why not give me more visual tools to manipulate it with?

However, Baby Connect has taken over from Baby Log for a reason, and that’s because its features are super robust and intelligent beyond the presentation problems. Some favourites:

• Sync data across devices and online! Yes! Multiple caregivers can be assigned to the same child, so if your partner installs Baby Connect on his or her phone, entries you both make get merged into one data stream for the kid. Also, there’s automatic backups to a central server (baby-connect.com) and you can even enter info through the web interface. Fantastic!
• Intelligent timers. Say you’ve taken a few minutes to settle your kid into feeding, which means starting a feeding timer would actually be two minutes behind. With Baby Connect, you can just set the actual start time for the feed, and the app will add the extra time and continue the timer ongoing. The app is also very consistent about reporting when your baby last did an action—you can actually set it to count time since the start or the end of the last activity. As well, for past entries, you can just set start and end times and the app will automatically calculate duration for you, which Baby Log couldn’t do for some reason.
• Export is much better. Data comes in one big .csv package dump, and you can download it from the web interface too. Nice!

So in sum, Baby Connect is the clear winner thus far, though there are some things wanting. And I’ll keep you posted as my app adventures continue!

One thing you discover after you bring your new baby home is that there’s a lot of weird input you have to track. When did she last feed? (Turns out you have to feed babies roughly 15+ min every three to four hours or they get very sad!) How long is she sleeping every day? (They’ve got to sleep around 16-18h a day, and too much awake time drives them crazy!) And how many times is she pooing, and what colours are those poos? (Turns out there’s a right and wrong answer to this too!)

Well, to drag out the old cliche: there’s an app for that. Lots of apps, actually! And the one I’ve settled on so far is Baby Log. It’s $4.99 at the App Store, but it’s a small price to pay for tracking all this data consistently. (The free apps were all too skimpy on features and lacked graphical analysis and data exporting.)

So far, here’s what I like about it:

• You can track nursing (it knows which side you’ve fed the baby on last), pumping, bottle feeding, solids, diaper changes, sleep time, measurements (height/weight/head circumference), baths, milestones, doctor’s notes, and more.
• You don’t have to handwrite anything into those paper sheets they give you at the hospital! Just carry your iPhone around with you and hit a timer when your kid starts an activity. Or you can enter the data manually into the app. THE WORLD IS YOUR OYSTER.
• The timers keep on running in the background, so you can move around the app and edit other entries in the database, or move to other apps while you continue to time the baby’s nap or feeding etc.
• Exportable data in .csv format! Pretty graphs showing how your kid is doing across many measures!
• It’s incredibly stable. No crashes yet and I’ve been using it nonstop for 3 weeks!

Where it could get better:

• The nursing log assumes that you feed on both the left and the right breast during each session. This doesn’t really work if you’re only doing one breast per session. But logging time on each side as an individual session screws up the nursing graphing function for some reason—it won’t display any of the times the baby has fed on the right side.
• There’s an awesome graphical timeline of your baby’s day, showing when she’s sleeping, feeding, getting her diaper changed, etc. But it’s way too small and you can’t zoom in on it, which is annoying because you can’t tell at a glance exactly what time an activity started. (This is probably only annoying for those who like to really drill down in their data visualizations.)
• You have to manually back up your data to your computer via WiFi. I’d really prefer a central website where your data is automatically synced, so you don’t have to worry about data loss.
• You can export data to CSV, but you have to export each activity separately, (nursing/sleeping/diapers) rather than dump all the data in one big lump onto your computer.
• You also can’t automatically replicate the fancy iPhone app graphs on your computer with the exported CSV files. Lame! I didn’t spend $5 to dick around with spreadsheet formulas!

Of course, all these complaints are a bit moot: any app and any level of analysis is way better than tracking on paper. And also, I like to have a level of data tracking and visualization that probably far exceeds what a normal person cares about.

And, in the course of researching Baby Log and its associated competitors, I’ve discovered that there’s a decent alternative called BabyConnect that has a central syncing website and similar functionality! So I’m going to toss in the $4.99 and see how that one works out. Stay tuned!

As many of you know, I was expecting a baby in May—- and she finally arrived last week!

So world, please welcome my lovely daughter Linna. She is healthy and happy and just delightful. I suspect we’ll be having a lot of fun together this year.

(Yes, that’s just her hand for now—- I’m still wrestling with the idea of posting my kid’s picture online. The quandaries of the digital age!)