Taking 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.
I 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.
Though 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.
As someone with two tiny humans, "neat" doesn't really describe it :) That shift you see from mostly random to mostly predictable represents not only good healthy sleep for the kiddo, but also a return to good healthy sleep for the parents.
My 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.
We 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.
> 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...
The thing about SIDS is that it's basically a catch-all for every infant death that can't be explained otherwise. The relative risk is already very low and didn't really change after the back to sleep campaign started.[1]
If you look into the research there are a number of things that greatly elevate the relative risk of SIDS. Belly sleeping is, as far as I understand it, way down on the list but for parents that don't have any of the other risk factors going on it's really easy to point at and say "if you do this you will kill your baby because SIDS".
I don't think it's true that the relative risk didn't change. The Back-to-Sleep campaign cut down SIDS cases proper to something like a third, and the overall cases of unexpected infant death to almost half. (https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/13...)
The paper you cite seems consistent with that also: although the number of discrete risk factors was unchanged, the number of SIDS deaths per year fell to less than half after the BTS campaign, so probably not all the risk factors are equally risky...
I'm not convinced that BTS had anything to do with the drop in SIDS. The BTS campaign occurred at a time in the US when smoking rates started falling off a cliff. Between 1990 and 2018 smoking has dropped 42% [1]. Between 1992 and 2017 the rate of SUID (includes SIDS and a handful of other things that used to be commonly lumped in with SIDS) has dropped... 42% [2].
Yes, correlation does not equal causation. That said, by definition SIDS has no known cause and smoking has been identified as one of the biggest risk factors.
Edit to add: one other thing that I think is hard to track. As a parent that tried to sleep two kids on their backs, they slept terribly. In the middle of the night, in sleep deprivation fueled desperation, the two options we saw were to put them on their belly or bring them into bed with us. Cosleeping is a far greater risk factor of SUID than belly sleeping but people make that choice every day because of the shaming that doctors and nurses put on belly sleeping.
By 6 months the incidence of SIDS is almost nil. This is what we learned with our kids, so it helped us tremendously because our son also sleeps on his belly.
Sweet. 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...
I 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.
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.
I 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?
Our 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.
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.
That'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.
My 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 (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.)
The 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?
There 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..
I'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...)
Most 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.
During 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.
The 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.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadAs 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.
Edit: Looking at the picture closer on twitter it seems like it’s ~28 stitches which would be almost 3 hours so not DST.
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.
Unless you already have a kid that needs your attention, too. Then you really feel yourself wither away.
My son (second child) slept from the start. Thankfully.
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.
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...
If you look into the research there are a number of things that greatly elevate the relative risk of SIDS. Belly sleeping is, as far as I understand it, way down on the list but for parents that don't have any of the other risk factors going on it's really easy to point at and say "if you do this you will kill your baby because SIDS".
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3356149/
The paper you cite seems consistent with that also: although the number of discrete risk factors was unchanged, the number of SIDS deaths per year fell to less than half after the BTS campaign, so probably not all the risk factors are equally risky...
Yes, correlation does not equal causation. That said, by definition SIDS has no known cause and smoking has been identified as one of the biggest risk factors.
Edit to add: one other thing that I think is hard to track. As a parent that tried to sleep two kids on their backs, they slept terribly. In the middle of the night, in sleep deprivation fueled desperation, the two options we saw were to put them on their belly or bring them into bed with us. Cosleeping is a far greater risk factor of SUID than belly sleeping but people make that choice every day because of the shaming that doctors and nurses put on belly sleeping.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/07/26/poll-u...
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm
The title makes this sound quite odd, but when you actually see the finished result it's fascinating and beautiful.
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.
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
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.
Example of a dinosaur: 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.
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 (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.)
(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...)
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.
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.
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.
THAT WAY WE CAN SERVE YOU EVEN BETTER ADS.
SOUNDS GREAT. WHERE DO I SIGN UP?
2nd child: June-August 2021: I think Jayden slept pretty well that summer.
3rd child: 2024-2032: Braden was born and entered third grade.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram