How to keep a newborn feeding and diaper log (that survives 3 AM)

• It answers your care team's questions with facts instead of guesses, which makes checkups shorter and more useful.
• It shows patterns you cannot see from inside a sleepless week: the evening cluster of feeds, the long stretch after a bath, the day the diapers changed.
• It makes handovers easy. The person taking the next shift can see when the baby last ate and what happened, without waking anyone.
• It settles the 'did they already have a bottle?' question before it becomes an argument.

A log is a memory aid, not a test. Missing an entry is fine. Estimating is fine. What matters is that the important things are written down most of the time.

Keep it to the few things your care team actually asks about. For each event, the start time is the most important field.

• Breastfeeding: the start time, which side you started on, and roughly how many minutes on each side. If you switch sides, note both.
• Bottle: the start time, the amount (ml or oz), and whether it was expressed breast milk or formula.
• Pumping: the time and the amount, if you are building a supply or tracking output.
• Diapers: the time and whether it was wet, dirty or both. Some parents also note the colour of dirty diapers in the first days, because care teams sometimes ask about it.
• Sleep: when the baby fell asleep and when they woke up. Approximate is fine.
• Notes: anything unusual — a lot of spit-up, a fever reading, a medicine or vitamin given and the time you gave it, a feed that was much shorter than usual.

Feeding intervals are usually counted from the start of one feed to the start of the next, which is why the start time matters more than the end time. If your care team asks 'how often is the baby feeding?', that is almost always what they mean.

Use one page per day, starting at whatever time your day 'resets' (midnight is easiest to count). Draw five columns:

1. 1Time — always the start time.
2. 2Feed — L or R with minutes (for example 'L 12, R 8'), or the bottle amount with BM for breast milk or F for formula.
3. 3Diaper — W for wet, D for dirty, WD for both.
4. 4Sleep — the time asleep and the time awake.
5. 5Notes — short words only.

At the bottom of the page, leave space for the day's totals: number of feeds, total bottle volume, number of wet and dirty diapers. Fill these in once a day, ideally during a calm moment, not at 3 AM.

Keep the sheet and a pen where you actually feed — next to the chair or the bed — with a small, dim light. If you have to get up to find the log, you will not use it.

• Write the start time when the feed begins, not at the end. If you forget, write your best estimate and move on.
• Use the clock on your phone or the wall, not your sense of time. Night feeds feel much longer than they are.
• One log for the household. Two separate notebooks drift apart within a day.
• Agree on abbreviations once, and write them at the top of the first page so a grandparent or nanny can read it too.
• Do not chase perfection. A log with a few gaps is still far better than none.
• Bring the last few days of the log, or a photo of it, to every appointment in the first weeks.

Most couples split the night: one parent takes the late feed, the other the early morning one. The log is what lets the second person pick up where the first left off.

On paper, that means the sheet stays in one place and both of you write on it. If you would rather use your phones, a shared note or a shared spreadsheet works, as long as you both write into the same document rather than texting each other updates. Messages get buried; a single log does not.

Before a shift change, glance at the last three lines: when did the baby last eat, which side or how much, and when was the last diaper? That is usually all the next person needs.

A log helps you describe what is happening; it does not tell you whether your baby is getting enough. Your doctor or midwife decides that, based on weight checks and an examination, and they will tell you which numbers to watch at your baby's age.

If something worries you — your baby is unusually sleepy and hard to wake for feeds, has far fewer wet diapers than before, has a fever, or just seems unwell — call your care team. Do not wait to finish a day's log first.

Baton is the same log, with less writing. Each kind of entry — breastfeeding, bottle, pumping, solids, sleep, diaper, growth and notes — is one large button in the bottom half of the screen, usable with one hand. Every save has a five-second Undo, and every time can be edited afterwards.

If you forgot to start the timer, you can start a feed or a nap 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes ago. Today's timeline shows the totals, a 7-day chart shows the week, and the full history can be exported to CSV for your care team.

Both parents can log into the same baby through their own iCloud accounts, so the 3 AM bottle shows up on the other phone without a message. The core features are free, and the log works offline.