Archie's Food Log

Many of you might know that Kirsten and I have been keeping track of how much Archie eats. This is something the hospital makes you do after the birth, and we just decided to keep on doing it. I designed a couple of feeding logs that we used to keep track of different categories, like the amount of breastmilk, the amount of formula, and the amount of solid food. We kept this up for his entire first year.
What you may immediately notice is the apparent noisiness of the data. This is not due to precision errors. His total daily intake really did fluctuate this much from day to day, but it's really not noticeable at the time until you plot out the data like this. There are a couple spikes from growth spurts (most noticeably at Day 9) and dips from airplane travel. There's also a missing week of data because I can't seem to find that log sheet. Near the end of the year, you can see that formula intake drops as he starts eating more solid food. Although all of this data is presented in mL, it would probably be more informative if it was presented in calories. However, it would have taken too much effort to convert all the different solid foods into calorie measurements, so we decided not to pursue that line of data collection. Maybe next time!

We can also break down the data by hour to see how much Archie eats on average over the course of a day.
For the first three months, he is eating roughly every two hours, so the data is distributed around the clock. But for the rest of the year, his eating is concentrated around mealtimes, and we eventually stop feeding him at night altogether.

The color values in this plot are in mL, by the way. Now we can quickly see his constant mealtimes. Breakfast at 8 AM. Lunch at noon, but for a period of time fluctuating around 1 PM. We used to have dinner at 6 PM, but then we moved it up to 5:30 in order to get Archie to bed earlier. We also have a brief formula "top-off" right before bedtime, which has decreased in volume over time. The chaos of the first three months is washed out by the large feeding volumes in the rest of the year, so I made a plot focusing on that early time.
Archie quickly developed feeding cycles, but they changed often, sometimes for only a week, and we sometimes tweaked them as well (i.e. "reset" feeding at 10 PM). Around Week 13 we simply decided to stop feeding him at night, which definitely helped us get some sleep.