Obviously the first thing to say is that if you're worried about your baby then find someone qualified to talk to. What follows is just a personal experience.
As a new parent with Emma I was never quite sure if she was drinking the right amount. The advice you often hear is "they'll drink as much as they need" - and that's been perfectly valid for both of our little darlings. However, it's nice to get a feeling for what's normal so you can tell if an abberation is important.
With Emma we used to write down how much she'd drunk. We'd just use the space on the Dilbert calendar to record the time and the amount. This helped us know what the other parent had administered even when they were asleep. You've probably heard that the first few weeks with a new baby are a bit of a haze, it's very true. You may not even be able to add up eight numbers reliably, but it's OK, as long as you get it roughly right you'll know where you stand. In general you'll know how your baby is doing, but if you are taking shifts or you're really hazy it may come as a surprise to find your little one has only dunk half the amount today that they did yesterday.
When Cameron was born I was more organised. I'd setup a website where we could record the amount he'd drunk. Seeing as our house is rather over-connected it was easy to access it somehow in any room and update the site. On silly occasions I even updated it using my mobile phone. It's this data that I used to create the information that follows. The only thing that didn't really go as planned is that I was hoping to use the stats to show how the amount drunk dropped off a bit when the baby got ill. We were really lucky, and Cameron didn't get ill, so I'm afraid that scenario isn't covered.
We started recording the amount drunk when he got home from the hospital and we stopped after a couple of months because we found it wasn't helping us. When Emma was a babe she was up and down all over the place, but Cameron is much more relaxed and seems to just cruise along without a worry (long may it continue). Bear in mind that every baby is different, yours may be much more variable. Cameron was 4Kg when he was born and his weight was between the 75th and 90th percentile during this time. He was fed on SMA gold.
Here's the actual data if you want to do your own analysis.
So there are obviously all sorts of caveats with the data:
One nice thing to come out of this is that I could see the stats when I was at work so I could tell what sort of day Carey was having.
If you are interested in how to do this yourself then feel free to get in touch and have a chat. I used a Python script running under Apache.
