The Trixie Update

As we approach the one year mark, it seems like a good time to look back over Trixie’s milk history. Our initial goal was to feed her breast milk until 6 months, then to get through winter, then 9 months and finally we pushed the quit date back to 12 months. From our perspective it couldn’t come a minute too soon.

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.

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That’s a lot of diapers. I’m still shocked when I step back and think about the total number she has gone through. It’s depressing.

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At the time of publication we are currently enjoying the longest stretch of uninterrupted, leak-free diaper usage in the history of Trixie’s life — 318 hours, approximately 13 days. It’s taken us a long time to get here and the road has not been a dry one.

As new parents quickly discover, new babies go through a lot of diapers. They can use up to 15 a day in the first couple of weeks. In Trixie’s case, we came home from the hospital on Saturday morning, and I was at the store buying our second 40-pack on Sunday afternoon. In that first month we went through 383 diapers. It’s a large number, but that’s not the shocking part. The real issue is the number of those diapers that leaked. And for that month it was 160. Put another way, two out of every five diapers leaked on us. Or in the bed. Or on the couch. Or the crib…

Sometimes leaks cannot be avoided. No matter how well you try to fit the diaper, it’s not going work optimally until your baby gets some booty. That’s right, new babies are very bony (editor’s note: upon reading the comments, it seems that this might only apply to some babies.) Without a butt to hold the diaper in place, the pee is free to shoot anywhere and everywhere. And it did.

Fortunately, after about a month or so, the baby fat gets distributed to the right places and diapers start to fit much better. We believe this single factor accounts for the 50% decrease in leaks during the second month. We also got much better at anticipating, intercepting and changing once we had a couple hundred changes under our belt. Further working to our advantage was the rapid decrease in the daily number of diapers from an average of over 12 a day in the first month to about 6 a day currently.

So we had experience, the daily diaper counts had decreased and Trixie had a butt. Why did we still have a 20%-plus leak rate through the third month? Well, there are 2 kinds of leaks: those that occur while the baby is wearing the diaper and accidents that happen on the changing table. Our problem had shifted to the latter.

I can really only blame myself for this. Early on I had read about the horrors of diaper rash. Babies scream enough as it is; I certainly didn’t want to get her any more ammunition. As a result, I always (even now) let Trixie air out during changes in order to stave off any rashes. Was this necessary? I don’t really know. Trixie has never had any, but who can say if it’s because of the diligent air-drying. So if you see a leak spring up on the accident record, you are probably seeing a breakdown in my reflexes. It’s Trixie taking advantage of my diaper-rash-o-phobia and her love of peeing “al fresco.”

But why have the Leak Record at all? It’s fun and it gives us something to shoot for. It’s like a real addictive video game and we’re always trying to get a new high score.

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As I have stated many times before on this site, sleep is really the only thing that new parents want. They want their baby to sleep and they want to be able to sleep themselves. And they want both to happen in big 8-10 hour chunks. (We still suffer from a sleep deficit stretching back 8 months.) In my quest to understand and try to crack Trixie’s sleep code, I introduce yet another way to quantify her sleep habits: The Sleep Probability Spectrum.

The Sleep Probability chart is simply an average of Trixie’s daily Sleep Maps for a given set of days. The averages are translated to a gray-scale spectrum. The stronger the contrast, and the larger the pattern, the more predictable her sleep habits for the time period examined. It’s designed to collapse a range of time into 10-minute increments on a 24 hour scale in order to figure out if there are any patterns developing.

The probability of Trixie being asleep at a particular time of day for the given range of days is expressed as a gray-scale value. Solid black represents a 100% probability that she was asleep. Solid white means a 100% probability that she was awake. The gray areas represent different degrees of uncertainty regarding her sleep schedule. 50% gray indicates a complete lack of schedule. It means there was an equal (or completely random) chance of her being awake or asleep.

What kind of predictive value do these Probability Spectrums have? Unfortunately not as much as I’d I hoped - or at least I haven’t figured out a way to apply them yet. But they are great for looking back at her progress over the past five months. Of course, when you start at the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.

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Trixie’s 6 month monthiversary wasn’t totally without observance. We did swing by the ole docs office to pick up another barrage of shots and the requisite measurements. She’s smack in the middle of the weight average and on the upper end of the height chart which makes for a skinny string bean. More importantly, her head circumference is right at the 50% percentile, which came as a relief to me because I’ve been afraid that she had a pea-head - at least relative to some of the giant headed babies I see when out and about. Reassured in the size of her cantaloupe, we moved to other areas. All and all, she is in pretty good shape. The most exciting development? A giant list of finger foods that we can now start feeding her.

New Stats:
Weight: 15lbs 1oz
Height: 27 3/4 in
Head Cir: 42 1/2 cm

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The obligatory grainy ultrasound photo. This is the first visual evidence of what eventually became a Trixie.

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For an explanation of these images please see:
Sleep Cartography and
The Good, the Bad and the In-between

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(or How Random is Random?)

I’ll admit my bias as a visually oriented person. I am personally drawn to Trixie’s Sleep Maps for their intricate, cartographic patterns. However, while these charts are excellent at expressing disorder — a single glance reveals the unpredictable chaos of the last 7 weeks — they are not so good at revealing patterns, except in cases where the pattern is overwhelming, such as the vertical columns of the ideal sleep map.

The underlying problem is that unless a sleep map is awfully close to ideal, it’s always going to appear chaotic. These maps are good at revealing either perfect or imperfect situations; they have a hard time teasing out any middle ground.

Given this bias, how do you judge how bad a sleep map is? How do you decide what’s a little bit random and what’s a lot random? Even if part of the map stabilizes, such as Trixie’s overnight sleep habits did for the last week, how can you evaluate the rest of the chart?

This problem can be solved if the sleep data is converted into another format. When expressed as a scatterplot, all sorts of very specific patterns are revealed - including Trixie’s infamous ~38 minute cat naps - as well as more subtle trends and even anomalous incidents.

The Distribution Charts below reveal that there are more patterns at work here than previously thought:

The most prominent feature of the Sleep Distribution Chart is the almost solid black line near the bottom that runs from about 7 in the morning to 7 at night. This cluster of dots represents the infamous 38 minute (+/- 5 minutes) naps that are so infuriating to deal with. Fortunately there is a new trend developing directly above this area that represents longer, more substantive naps ranging from 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours. We look forward to this line darkening in. We also hope to see more plots in the upper right-hand corner which reflects Trixie going to bed between 9pm-midnight and sleeping for 7+ hours.

The Wakefulness Distribution Chart does not have as many defined regions. The chart could almost be described by a single arch stretching from early morning to late night that reaches it’s apex around 4:30pm. This reflects her tendency to stay awake progressively longer periods as the day progresses, and then shorter periods from late night to early morning. The main area of concern on this chart is the medium density region between midnight and 6am. These points indicate where she has woken up in the middle of the night, sometimes for 30 minutes or more.

We now understand a little more what we are dealing with. Yet the question remains - Are we any closer to cracking The Sleep Code?

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This horrible, random mess is a visual representation of the past 45 days of Trixie’s sleep cycle. As in the Sleep Log, yellow depicts awake periods and blue sleep. The format has been vertically compressed with higher contrast colors to emphasize any patterns (or lack thereof) creating a map of her sleep habits.

It’s obvious at a glance that there’s no strong pattern for the majority of this time period. To be fair, small clusters of order do exist representing minor successes, such as the middle left between the hours of about 1:00 am and 5:00 am, but they are simply overwhelmed by the surrounding chaos.

The lines marking 6:00 am and 9:00 pm represent the Blue Zone — the ideal overnight sleep period. In a perfect world, Trixie would be asleep by 9 and let us sleep until at LEAST 6:00 am. As you can see, this zone is regularly violated with impunity. We don’t fare much better outside the Blue Zone either; her morning and afternoon nap periods are maddeningly irregular. The most annoying habit, which she is slowly growing out of, is the 38 minute cat nap. These are the tiny blue dashes interspersed throughout the map. To her credit, she has been taking consistently longer naps over the past 2 weeks, and those tiny dashes appear less frequently.

But even when taking longer naps, there is still no predictable pattern. She should be taking 2-3 multi-hour naps a day, preferably at about the same time, and sleeping through the night. The goal is to slowly move her toward some kind of schedule. This doesn’t seem like too much to ask for, but we’re not seeing much progress. The pattern for the latest week doesn’t seem any less random than the pattern for the earliest one.

So what does the ideal sleep map look like? It actually wouldn’t look much like a map at all. The intricate, irregular geographies would give way to boring, but beautiful, vertical stripes stretching deep into the night.

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That’s when we changed Trixie’s 800th diaper. The good news is that her usage rate is slowly and steadily decreasing. The 2-week moving average now hovers just above 7 diapers per day.

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