Itzbeen too long since my last post, or cereal at 2 a.m. and dinner before noon

Itzbeen 10 days since I last slept 3 consecutive hours

Apologies to readers and fellow Datachondrians for my lack of posts last month. I have a great excuse.

Over on my wife’s blog you’ll find a review of Itzbeen, a gadget that over the last 10 days has become vital to our sanity.

It’s basically four non-lapping mm:hh stopwatches kluged together with a backlight & nightlight. There’s a L/R breastfeeding switch at the bottom that’s not connected to anything electronic, basically a binary abacus. That feature doesn’t get used because wifey’s got a solution she likes better. The display is as it appears. There’s no counter. You’re not accumulating hours slept or counting poops: you’re just gauging the chronological distance from now back to the last occurrence of event X.

Change a diaper: punch the diaper button to reset that clock. Feeding: punch the bottle. Etc. The wildcard “*” button worked well for timing doses of post c-section pain meds.

Couldn’t be simpler. Lost the manual minutes after unboxing.

When you’re sleep-deprived and not yet attuned to the signs your baby’s giving you for his various needs (there aren’t many, but what baby wants he wants very much and very soon) you have a hard time remembering much of anything, let alone when the last time was that you successfully satisfied any of your offspring’s needs. These needs are steadily recurrent, which is nice, but then not remembering the most recent time you guessed right means you also don’t know which need is likely the next one due for serving.

On top of that, if you’re stuck in a hospital you’re going to be talking to a lot of nurses just after your baby’s born and they’re going to want to know things like the last time he ate and how long he’s been wearing that diaper and even though that’s an unreasonable type of question to ask someone in your state you’re going to feel terrible if you don’t know.

Before I had a kid I could estimate the last time something happened reasonably well. If there was a technique to it, it went something like this: first I’d eliminate a third of the day because nothing could have happened while I was sleeping, then depending on what kind of thing you’re asking about I could narrow it down to a likely span of only a few hours.

When did you check the mail?

About 10. (It was before lunch but late enough that there would have been mail to take in.)

Brilliant. Chronological estimation by triangulation. That I ever had this skill now amazes me. And I’m in awe of you who now possess it.

This little device’s greatest value is the confidence it gives a new parent. When you’re sleeping 2 hours at a time all over the clock and eating whenever you’re hungry and able you literally lose your gut feel for time. And you can’t rely on higher faculties while you’re not getting enough sleep. But even a lab rat can punch a button to mark an event. With this thing you’re suddenly the sleep-deprived halfwit who knows to a minute’s precision how long baby’s been sleeping.

Yes, there’s an app for that. But the thing with babies is, usually there are at least 2 people who have to look after them. So one person gives up their main communications device so that diaper changes and feedings can be tracked? Does it sync with both of your phones, regardless of make? What if it’s docked for charging? What if you need to use the phone? What if it gets peed on?

Sometimes you really do want a device to do just one thing very simply and very well so you can free your mind to do other things. I’ll have a more properly Datachondrian post later on how we used Twitter to keep all interested parties up to date from the first labour pains. For now I wanted to give praise to this single-purpose device and single-purpose devices in general — scales, measuring cups, watches — that yield only the data you want exactly how you want it and in a way you can understand even when your capacity for understanding is stretched to its limit.