Taking Care of Baby

My wife and I wrote a book a few years ago after our son was born. Well, it wasn’t a whole lot of writing, actually. My wife was very meticulous in tracking everything that we did with our son over the first several months, recording every poop, spit-up, giggle, etc.

When she went back to work, we left our son in the care of a wonderful nanny. But the end of each day was a bit rushed, and when my wife got home, she’d get a brief update about what they did and a general overview of how my son was during the day, but no details. One night when our son was sick, we called the night nurse. She asked us how many times he had a wet diaper that day, and how many times he had pooped. We had no idea.

So we went back and started using the charts that my wife had been keeping for the first few months, and asked our nanny to start using those while we were gone. She recorded every diaper change, and what they did, what they did when they got to the park, how he ate during the day, what his mood was, and more. And it wasn’t an onerous task. A check mark here, a quick note there, and we were much better informed about my son’s days, and we didn’t feel quite so out of touch.

Taking Care of Baby: The ultimate organizer for busy parents

We developed a small chart that we asked our nanny to use, and took it to a book publisher: Chronicle Books. They liked the idea enough to publish our book. We called it Taking Care of Baby. And that’s how we made our first million. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Those that liked the book seemed to really like it, but it wasn’t as well-received as we had hoped, and now the book is out of print and out of stock. We have a couple copies left that we’re holding on to for posterity. We used a few when our daughter was born. My wife decided to start working freelance work home, so we didn’t use a nanny for our little girl, and we kind of let the book slip away.

We started thinking about it, and realized that we shouldn’t let the idea die. We still think it’s a valuable idea. However, we can also see that the charts are a very personal experience. Some may use them for full diaries, in which case, there may not be enough room in the pages to record every detail. Some may use them as quick reference charts, in which case there’s a lot of wasted space.

What we would like to do here is create several different layouts for our pages and make them available for you to download for free. Seeing how well this works out, we may try to work with an on-demand publisher so you can upload images and create your own, personalized version of the book. There’s nothing posted yet, but we plan to post it soon.

Please feel free to use the commenting features on the site to give us suggestions and feedback on the book, charts, or site. More to come. Soon.