With an app for just about everything, you can bet there are plenty out there to help new moms – from conception to postpartum! Here are some of my favorite baby apps just for you!
Free Menstrual Calendar
Period Tracker and Ovulation Calculator
This app is for more than just tracking your period. It is fantastic for when you are trying to conceive – or trying NOT to conceive – or just learning more about your cycle and how it works. There is a section for menstrual symptoms like weight, backaches, breast tenderness and mood swings. Not that any of us have mood swings. (*ahem) You can also track data specific to fertility: temperature, cervical fluid, days when you were intimate and days you took a pregnancy test.
FMC is an iPhone app. Fertility Friend is a similar app that is available for Android phones.
This is my favorite app for tracking daily meals. What I DON’T like is the emphasis on calorie counting, but so far I haven’t found a tracker that doesn’t! When taking stock of your diet, it can be helpful to track your calories on a normal day to get an idea of what your average intake is. It can sometimes be eye opening to see how all those little snacks add up! Otherwise, the main goal in tracking a diet is to make sure you are getting a good variety of real, whole foods.
The reason I love this app is that it has just about any food you could possibly eat already included in its massive food list. Prepackaged food can be scanned using your phone’s camera. You can save the foods you use most often for easier access. You can keep an eye on your protein intake (super important during pregnancy!), track your exercise, set goals for yourself and see how many steps you’ve taken during the day. There is also a social option for added motivation through accountability! Lose It is obviously designed for weight loss, but it can also be helpful to make sure you are eating enough during the stages of pregnancy when you don’t feel hungry.
Lose It! is available on Android, iOS, Nook, Kindle, and the Web.
Full Term
Contraction timer
There are TONS of contraction timer apps out there. They allow you to simply click ‘start’ when the contraction starts and ‘stop’ when it has completely gone away. The app does the rest! This particular one shows the duration and frequency of that contraction, the average for the last hour and for the last 6 hours. Although, I have to say… if you have been timing every contraction for the last 6 hours, it is time to put the phone down and focus on mom. M’kay? Just saying. 😉
One of the greatest things about this particular app is that you can delete or adjust the time of the most recent contraction. So, if you click the button by accident, it won’t throw off your hour average. ALSO, there are buttons at the bottom for a kick counter and a fantastic reference section that has really good, up to date information about labor, breastfeeding, nutrition and more!
Full Term is available for iPhone and Android.
Baby Feed Timer
Breastfeeding, Bottle Feeding & Baby log
This app does it all! You can track when your baby nursed, for how long and on which side (which is a life saver after many nights of little sleep!). My very favorite part is the reminders. You can set the app to send you a notification if a certain number of hours has gone by without feeding the baby (please reference those sleepless nights). I recommend this app a lot but especially to moms who have a toddler… or two… or more… to keep track of in addition to a new baby. The reminders can give you peace of mind that you won’t get distracted with a toddler crisis and let the peacefully sleeping baby snooze all day. (Hey, we can dream, right??)
If you pump and use bottles or supplement or exclusively formula feed, this app can do that, too! You know how the pediatrician or the lactation counselor always asks how many times a day baby eats and how many minutes or how many ounces? Well, now you can pull out your app, hit the “analyze” button and have all that information at your fingertips. Easy peasy!
Baby Feed Timer is available for iPhone and Android. They also have a number of other apps for babies and children that you can check out on their site.
Here’s one you probably didn’t expect to find on this list!! One of the hardest times for new moms – even happy, in-love-with-baby, and experienced moms! – is those middle of the night feedings. It is so hard to be woken up from the few, coveted moments of sleep you actually get just to sit alone, in the dark, feeding baby while everyone else in the house gets to sleep. It’s easy to start feeling frustrated, isolated, or overwhelmed. Having something fun to focus on can help to stop those negative thought cycles.
Since it’s difficult to hold a book or journal or other project while getting a newborn latched on, a movie is a great alternative. Here’s your excuse to binge watch all those shows you’ve been dying to see! You can keep the volume low or use the closed captioning if you’re worried about waking other people up. I worked my way through every episode of Columbo with baby #4. ;D
Netflix, of course, is available literally everywhere.
So, those are my favorites. If you have a favorite baby app that I haven’t mentioned here, please share it on my Facebook page so that other parents can try it out!!