Thanks A Lot, Rovio!

My 22-month-old son LOVES Angry Birds! And I've loved letting him play - it's been great for problem-solving. First he had to figure out how to navigate the app. Then he had to figure out how to make the birds go in the right direction - his first instinct, of course, was to swipe the way he wanted them to go. It took him weeks to figure out how to pull them back and let them go. Now he's starting to get excited every time he smashes a piggie, and I think soon he'll be working on actual strategy to aim the birds at the piggies. (Not quite there yet, but hey, he's not even two, cut him some slack!)

All of that came to an abrupt halt yesterday. Why? Well, Rovio pushed Angry Birds Toons onto every Angry Birds app on every platform. Now, next to the big Play button that takes you to the game, there's an equally-big Toons button. This basically takes you to a built-in TV station with Angry Birds cartoons to watch.

I don't think my son has played the actual game since. He just keeps turning it to the video channel and zombie-ing out.

I keep my toddler's TV time and iPad time separate, and for good reason. TV can be a very useful educational tool in limited quantities, but research has shown that at his age toddlers don't learn as effectively from TV as from the real world. Too much TV can actually hinder their language development, even if it's good shows like Sesame Street. When he watches TV (which is very limited, and entirely through Netflix or DVD), he becomes a lump. He stares vacantly, sits there, doesn't pay attention to what's happening around him.

When he plays games on the iPad, he's actively engaged. He's developing hand-eye coordination, he's solving problems, he's often even interacting with the rest of the world (his new favorite is to play Endless Alphabet and go find his foam letters to match the ones in the game). He still needs to spend lots of time playing with physical toys and running around and reading books, so obviously he's not on the iPad all day (and anyhow, it's my iPad damn it, I want to use it!), but I definitely allow him more iPad time than TV time.

But now Angry Birds has turned the iPad into another TV screen. He's glued to the videos the same way he's glued to Wonder Pets. And as far as I can tell (through both inspection of the game and Googling), there is no way to turn them off the way you can turn off power-ups!

It looks like I'm going to have to delete the game, or at least hide it away in a folder where only mommy and daddy can find it. Thanks a lot, Rovio. I'm sure I'm not the only parent who is annoyed by this.

Top Toddler Apps: Endless Alphabet

Since my 21-month-old son uses my iPad nearly as much as I do these days, it seems appropriate to review some of his favorite apps along with my faves.

I recently downloaded Endless Alphabet by Calloway Arts (designers of the terrific The Monster at the End of This Book), and it has quickly become a favorite. Two immediate advantages: it's free AND contains no ads, a rare combo these days. I don't mind ads on my apps, but too often they frustrate my son when he can't get them off the screen or gets taken to the App Store or web browser repeatedly when he accidentally hits them. So no ads is a big selling point in a toddler app. UPDATE: Ads have now started appearing, although they are rare. About once or twice a day one pops up, usually when he starts up the app. They aren't as bad as ads in many free toddler apps, but still a bit of an annoyance. I paid the 99 cents to make them go away.

The game here is simple enough, but keeps him engaged for a good long time. You pick a word out of the ever-changing lineup (the app downloads new words regularly - again, this is FREE!):



Then you get a straightforward puzzle, putting the letters into place. It's got enough of a margin of error that he rarely gets frustrated, and is smart enough to let him move two letters at once if he wants (another important toddler feature - letting them touch however they want).



When the puzzle is done, they are treated to a short animation about the word with a voiceover giving its definition.



And that's it - now you go to the next word or pick a new one! He can easily spend 15 minutes at this, which is as long as anything keeps his attention.

I think he's right at the perfect age for this app. A few months ago, his fine motor skills weren't quite good enough for this type of puzzle. By the time he can recognize all the letters on his own, simply slotting them into place won't capture his attention for very long. But it's perfectly designed for a two-year-old.

If I have one complaint, it's that the letters don't always say the right sound - an E will always say its short sound, even if its long sound is used in the word. But this is really a very minor in an outstanding (and did I mention FREE?) app.

Baby Loggers

If you don't have kids, you probably think the idea of a baby logger is at best obsessive and at worst pretty creepy. What is it? Just what it sounds like - an app that lets you track when your baby falls asleep, wakes up, has a diaper change and what was in that diaper, when he eats and either how long and which side if you're breastfeeding or how much if it's from a bottle. Some also let you track development, keep track of doctor's appointments, and more.

The thing is, when the baby is first born, the doctors want you to track this stuff. You need to make sure enough food is going in and coming out, and that the baby isn't sleeping too long between feedings, to make sure everything's working right. At first we wrote it all down on a paper they gave us at the hospital, but then I discovered apps that let you track it with one tap. More recently, it's been clear to us that E has never really slept as much as they claim newborns sleep, and we wanted to keep track so we could try and get his sleep patterns into more of a, well, pattern. With the help of a baby logger, we now know for sure that he sleeps an average of 11-12 hours a day instead of the usual 14-16, including only 2-3 hours of naps instead of 4-6. Now that we know what we're dealing with, and what a bad night looks like versus a good night, we can start to address the problem.

I've tried three baby loggers since E was born, and the one I've stuck with is Baby Geek. The interface takes a little exploring to figure out, but you'll have it mastered by the end of the day. I used this to track diapers and feedings for a few days, but have been tracking sleep with it for two months now, so that's the feature I'm most familiar with. Baby Geek gives you simple one-touch tracking, with the nice touch that if you go to change the time of an event, there is both a clock to adjust and buttons to automatically jump it back 5, 10, or 15 minutes. It has the best graphs of any of the loggers I tried - you can view totals of each type of event by day, or timelines with all or only one type of event shown, and it separates day and night sleep (at times you pick). You can email the entries and have the program sync across two devices, so both parents (or one Nd a childcare provider) can keep track. And probably a dozen other features I'm not thinking of because I only use the most basic one. And all this is only $.99.

The other two I tried are BabyBix and Baby Log. I liked Log better than Bix, but not well enough to shell out $4.99 for it once the free version ran out, which only took about a day.

Here is how the three stack up (Some are my subjective ratings 1-10, 10 highest):

	Baby Bix	Baby Log	Baby Geek	Winner
Price	Free	Free trial for a day or two, then $4.99	$0.99	Bix
Starting an event	Several taps	Two taps	One tap	Geek
Email reports	No	Yes	Yes	Log & Geek
Quality of graphs	5	8	8.5	Geek
Ease of use	3	8	9	Geek
Unique feature	Integrated message board	Bar and line graphs	Day vs night sleep shown on graph	Log or Geek
Unique annoyance	Crashes a lot	Past events must be entered by start time and duration, not start and end time	Only shows past two weeks' with of data	No one wins this!

This entry is cross-posted to Don't Call Me Crunchy.

iPad: Mommy's BFF

If a pregnant woman were to tell me she had a few hundred dollars to spend on something to make her life as a new mom easier, assuming she's already got all the standard baby stuff, my response would be: get an iPad, and no, I'm not joking.

Those first few weeks are tough. Not only aren't you sleeping much, but you're surgically attached to a growing, hungry baby for hours on end. Even when E wasn't actively eating, he was napping - but only so long as I held him and didn't move! The iPad quickly became my best friend and connection to the world. It's the perfect size to fit beside the baby in my lap - an actual laptop would be far too large and cumbersome. My case gives me several options for balancing the iPad with one or no hands free. And I have become a master of one-handed typing, which is FAR easier on the touchscreen than with a normal keyboard.

What have I been up to while baby E eats and sleeps?

- Reading parenting message boards
- Looking up breastfeeding advice
- Playing Pocket Frogs, Solitaire, Drop7, and Plants vs Zombies
- Posting to my blogs
- Shopping on Amazon
- Reading five million Cracked.com articles on FlipBoard
- Reading two million other articles on FlipBoard
- Watching Netflix (both on here and on the Wii, I admit)
- Using baby tracking apps to be sure he's eating and pooping enough
- Texting my sister for free
- IMing my husband at work
- Reading scholarly journal articles in Papers
- Reading Baby-Sitters Club books in Kindle
- Taking photos and videos of baby E
- Browsing for new apps
- Jailbreaking and tweaking my iPad
- And of course, figuring out how to work my diapers

You get the idea. He's nearly three months old now, and I'm spending a bit less of my day (and much less of my night, thankfully) sitting on the couch with him eating or sleeping on my lap. But it's still my main activity for several hours total out of each 24, and the iPad is still my best friend.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

iPad to the rescue!

This past Monday, I gave birth to a perfect little 7 lb baby boy, E. Obviously, blogging has not been a high priority since, but I wanted to share how the iPad saved the day (or night, rather).

It was around 2am, and while feeding E I realized it was time for a diaper change when he was done. Then I realized that he was wearing the last of the disposables we'd brought home from the hospital, meaning that it was time to try cloth for the first time.

Then I realized that I'd never gotten around to learning to fold a cloth diaper.

iPad to the rescue! While he finished eating, I grabbed it from the nightstand and found folding directions, which really weren't that hard.

So we headed to the changing table, where I confidently folded the diaper and placed it in the brightly-colored diaper cover. I wrapped it around E, only to once again be confronted by my own ignorance. These covers are made to fit babies of many sizes, and thus are positively covered in several thousand snaps for adjustability. I had absolutely no clue which to snap to which to make it wearable.

I did my best, with a ridiculous-looking result that I really should have gotten a photo of. Whatever I'd done, it was not correct, but the diaper and cover were attached to the baby for now, at least.

By this time, E had made it clear that he was still hungry. So we sat back down and once again I grabbed my iPad while he ate. This search took a while, but I eventually managed to find a YouTube video explaining exactly which snaps fasten where. When E was done again, we went back to try to emulate the video - success! After an hour of trying, my baby was properly cloth diapered for the first time.

Without the iPad, this would have been a far more annoying process. The desktop computer lives in the same room the dogs sleep in, so using it would lead to their insisting they go outside at 2am. A laptop would have been unwieldy to juggle while breastfeeding, but the iPad is perfect. I can prop it up on my pillow and do all sorts of things - even write this blog entry entirely one-handed - easily and comfortably. It certainly made that night go much more smoothly!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad