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A father knitted his baby’s first year of sleep pattern data into a blanket
- iamalva 7y agoThis is really impressive (I have two weeks baby)
- wil421 7y agoHe look at me sleeping for 6 house last night (6 week old). My wife has been tracking feedings, I could probably do something similar.
- mosburn 7y agoTaking up new skills that required little to no thought when my girls were young was the only way I survived mentally on those days you can barely get going due to their sleep/sick patterns. Some days it was slight progress on a long project that allowed me to not feel like I was trapped in Groundhog day getting nothing done.
- netfl0 7y agoAnyone with kids knows this would be a good source of entropy.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoBabies make great random number generators.
- kijin 7y agoI dunno, it looks like some three-letter agency compromised this baby around the middle of the year.
- adyer07 7y agoI love that he chose to turn it into a baby blanket - it resonates so much more than if it was just a print or digital image. As someone without kids, I also feel like I learned something about baby sleep by looking at it. Neat to see it turn from randomness into something ordered.
- mnw21cam 7y agoMy director of studies for my degree made a stochastic sweater. Using a published table of random numbers.
- elliekelly 7y agoAnd how jarring daylight saving time is to a tiny human’s sleep pattern. (Assuming that’s the big shift at the end/bottom.) Edit: Looking at the picture closer on twitter it seems like it’s ~28 stitches which would be almost 3 hours so not DST.
- chongli 7y agoAccording to the article, the shift was due to a cross-country trip to celebrate baby’s first birthday.
- dybber 7y agoIt’s mentioned in the article, that the shift was due to a trip to a different timezone.
- x1798DE 7y agoIn the thread he mentions it was a cross country trip and he didn't adjust the time zone to local time.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoOh crap, it's coming again, isn't it :(((
- Guthur 7y agoThough it wasn't the cause I'd still like to say I find time changing the most draconian and invasive practice, I absolutely hate it. I mostly try to ignore it when it comes to sleep, which I can fortunately more or less do. My kids are young enough that they can pretty much just maintain their existing schedule.
- RocketSyntax 7y agofirst few months look rough
- isoprophlex 7y agoYou sleep when the baby sleeps, that's how you survive. Unless you already have a kid that needs your attention, too. Then you really feel yourself wither away.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoMy daughter (first child) would not sleep on her back. So, after the third week of each of us getting about 45 minutes of sleep at a time, and against current best practices, we let her sleep on her stomach. She slept, we slept in shifts so she wouldn't die on us, and we're all still here 13 years later. My son (second child) slept from the start. Thankfully.
- zrail 7y agoWe tried to force the issue with both kids. Our first we kept in a rock'n'play (all of them recalled since then) for way too long, and then almost as soon as we put her in the crib she was on her belly. Our second we used a Snoo, which helped, but she didn't actually get solid sleep until the day we moved her to her crib. We didn't even try to back sleep her at that point, she wanted to be on her belly so she was. That kid sleep trained herself, which was amazing.
- xienze 7y ago> and against current best practices, we let her sleep on her stomach. The thing about "best practices" is they always change. My mom told me that when I was a baby the "best practice" was for a baby to sleep on its stomach -- otherwise it might aspirate vomit. Both approaches are honestly probably equally fine...
- scandox 7y agoSweet. Lovely side project. But. Is this is the HN equivalent of kitten makes friends with a Panda "human interest" story? I've been reading a lot of stories where the headline really says it all recently...
- jnty 7y agoI'd say this is a perfect example of the opposite. The title makes this sound quite odd, but when you actually see the finished result it's fascinating and beautiful.
- jedimastert 7y agoMeh. It's kinds of an interesting data visualization project, so I'll let it slide.
- laugable 7y agoI had no idea you were a moderator.
- cmpb 7y agoI think in this case, the picture of the blanket actually says a lot more than the title. Not much substance outside of those two things, however. Either way, HN often brings a lot of substance to the table in the comments for these type of articles.
- UserIsUnused 7y agoWait, you are telling me a kitten made friends with a panda?
- kelnos 7y agoEven as a non-parent, I found this really cute, and touching, and a novel use for data collection that I wouldn't have thought of. Hell, given a lot of the other stories we're subjected to -- even on HN -- daily, I welcome a nice nerdy human interest story every now and then.
- carrozo 7y agoThis reminded me of the quipu: A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization.[4] The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or thousands of cords.[5] The configuration of the quipus has been "compared to string mops."[6] Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps more sturdy, base to which the color-coded cords would be attached.[7] A relatively small number have survived. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
- tunnuz 7y agoAmazing!
- sealthedeal 7y agoI am currently in the random scattered spot, cant wait to get some normalcy around the sleeping patterns. Side note what a great idea, and did he actually knit this himself?
- Freak_NL 7y agoHang in there. I think mine might have mostly figured out how to sleep from bedtime to 6:30 now at almost eight months. I hope. That is, when he doesn't wake himself up by bumping his head on the side of the crib, or having a nightmare (I guess?), or just being a baby.
- appwiz 7y agoOur baby slept for exactly 28 minute stretches day or night. Surprisingly, moving her sleep time to earlier (7pm) improved the situation. It took weeks to get her into an evening routine (dark room, changing, soft song, etc) but that helped flip her sleep bit. YMMV but hang in there.
- punnerud 7y agoWhat impressed me the most is that he made a webpage to help him do the knitting. Example of a dinosaur: https://lagomorpho.com/patterntracker/?pattern=patterns/chromedino-l.js https://lagomorpho.com/patterntracker/?pattern=patterns/chro... This should be a product on its own. Take a photo, use some PyTorch and get a ready made page to help you. Don’t know how many times I have printed A4 paper or handed my wife the iPad with a zoomed version of the receipt she is knitting.
- jgrahamc 7y agoThat's definitely a thing. The knitting world has been pixelating stuff forever and there have been knitting machines with everything from floppy disk interfaces to USB-C.
- Symbiote 7y agoMy mother had a knitting machine interfaced with a BBC Model B over a serial connection. It had four colours of wool, and the knitting area was about a metre wide. It was like this (video), but the program in the machine would automatically raise and lower the needles according to the wool colour required for each line. The result is the first computer program I ever used, age 2 or so, was the knitting pattern editor. I think it was the simplest drawing/colouring program, since you just had a large grid with 4 colours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aEzZ6TdpcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aEzZ6TdpcQ (I think this is a cheaper machine. My mum's could change the wool colour automatically: it would beep when this was required, and you dragged the thing (shuttle?) to the far side, where some mechanical clicking would happen and the wool in use would be swapped.)
- cperciva 7y agoThe thing I find most impressive about this isn't the blanket but rather the data acquisition: How do new parents manage to accurately and consistently record every time their baby wakes up or falls asleep?
- eirki 7y agoThere are a couple of apps out there! Although my experience was that I didn't really have a need for the data when all was said and done. Maybe I should have picked up knitting..
- kelnos 7y agoI'm not a parent, but my sister, and many of my friends, are of the life stage where they have kids under 5. The amount of tracking I see them do, especially in the first year of life, is insane. Is there a medical use for it? Do parents share the data with their pediatricians? If not, what's the point? Since all these apps are free, I assume it all just feeds some giant data science model that helps diaper companies advertise better, or something else utterly annoying like that. (Then again, I usually use a sleep tracker, and aside from a quick glance in the morning, never ever look at the data again. But I figure baby tracking has a decent amount of overhead, and parents are already overworked and overtired enough as it is...)
- mattkevan 7y agoMost tracking isn’t really necessary, though it’s a very uncertain time so it does make you feel like you’re doing something useful. Tracking is genuinely useful though when you’ve noticed something and are trying to gather evidence of a pattern to bring to a healthcare professional - for example around sleeping or feeding.
- mattkevan 7y agoDuring the first year, our child never slept more than about 20 mins in any one go. We kept logs in a shared Apple note. Looking back at it now, it reads more like a tale of two people’s slow descent into madness than something that could be turned into a knitting pattern.
- jolmg 7y agoIs it me or does it seem like the first 1 or 2 days there was no sleep at all... That top margin looks quite a bit wider than the bottom margin.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- s0rce 7y agoData was missing, he mentioned it on Twitter
- gus_massa 7y agoThe first two days (sometimes) the baby has stomach ache and s/he doesn't sleep too much and you sleep even less. Most of the times it's only one or two days, so be brave and try to survive. The ache can be cured with some massages in the tummy. It's not as easy as it looks. Ask the nurse in the hospital for help after you tried for 15 or 30 minutes. The nurses know how to make the massages, it's like magic.
- ADVERTISE_LOUD 7y agoHEY GUYS, WHY DON'T YOU START BUYING INTERNET-ENABLED SLEEP MONITORS? THAT WAY WE CAN SERVE YOU EVEN BETTER ADS. SOUNDS GREAT. WHERE DO I SIGN UP?
- shadowoflight 7y agoThis is the kind of content I’m pleasantly surprised by - it’s both technically impressive and adorable!
- acheron 7y ago1st child: September 15, 2019: here is exactly how long Aiden slept that night! 2nd child: June-August 2021: I think Jayden slept pretty well that summer. 3rd child: 2024-2032: Braden was born and entered third grade.
- mv4 7y agotrue.
- fovc 7y agoLooks like a bifurcation diagram! Order out of chaos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram
- throwawaymanbot 7y agoThis is HN Clickbait. It induced anxiety in Gen Z types who feel they should be doing something creative with their time.