The Trixie Update

This site is about human babies. Specifically one named Trixie MacNeill. These pages contain tons of data regarding the sleep patterns, feeding schedules and diaper habits of a newborn baby. We also have a Trixie Picture of the Day for those who don’t like to think about human babies in exclusively clinical terms. And for the grandparents.

My name is Ben MacNeill. I’m Trixie’s dad. I chose to stay at home and take care of her. I started this blog a few weeks after she was born, which was July 31st, 2003. When we got home from the hospital, we kept track of her diapers for a couple of days to make sure she was drinking enough. The enormous number she went through was shocking and I continued collecting diaper data on little scraps of paper even after we were in the safe zone. I later built a web application* that automated the process and displayed the results on the site.

Jennifer Egan is Trixie’s mom. Jenn wrote one story on the site, and is responsible for editing almost every other. I can’t give her enough credit for her editorial role. What you decide NOT to post on a website is almost more important than what you do. Without discipline and focus, this site would just be a sleep-deprived stream of profanity about how I can’t get any work done.

This site is not about Jenn or me, but there are a few scraps of information scattered throughout various stories and comments. Here’s a short summary: We have different last names, but are married. We currently live Chapel Hill, NC. Prior to that we lived in the Bronx, Chicago and Raleigh. Jenn is a resident pathologist at UNC. She also has a degree in Physics from Georgia Tech. I went to the College of Design at NCSU. There’s some information about my background here.

If you’re looking for more information about the site, please read Trixie Update 101. It’s designed for new visitors, but long-time readers might also find it useful.

Contact Us

Thanks for wanting to contact us, but before you send an email, please follow the directions on this page so that your email doesn’t get lost.

If you have a question, please do a quick search on this site and see if the issue has been addressed in a story. There’s a good chance it has. If you have a question or comment that doesn’t exactly relate to a specific story, but that might benefit others, think about leaving a comment in Frequently Asked Questions. Otherwise you can email the Trixie Update at ttu@trixieupdate.com.

DON’T SEND AN EMAIL YET! There are two very important things you need to do first!

1) FIRST IMPORTANT THING: Please include the text “The Trixie Update” in the email subject line so that your email will not be tagged as spam.

2) SECOND IMPORTANT THING: I suspect some of my email replies might not be getting through because of aggressive email filtering. So if you write me, and you want to get a response, make sure your spam filtering isn’t keeping emails from trixieupdate.com from getting to your inbox. If you have already written me and think you didn’t get a response, it probably got blocked. Please re-send your email and I’ll re-send my reply.

If you follow the two rules above, I’ll get your email and you’ll get my reply. I am currently able to respond to every email that comes in — usually within a day or two, but sometimes much quicker. If anything changes (i.e. I start getting a ton of emails a day), then I probably won’t be able to respond to each email, but I will still read them all. (And I’ll note a change in the policy here.)

Thanks for following these rules, and as always, thanks for writing!