Baby development apps are big business these days. I can remember logging into an app practically every day throughout my pregnancy last year to track my growing bumps progress.
You’d be told what fruit or veg your baby was the size of; everything from a tiny grape up to a melon! You’d be told things such as ‘this week your baby will grow fingernails or he can start to perceive daylight.’ I found it absolutely fascinating.
But the app genius doesn’t stop there. When your baby arrives, there’s a whole host of new apps that will track their weekly and monthly development. These aren’t quite as fun as the benign fruit and veg comparisons, because these apps like to let you in on when your little one might become the meltdown king or queen and challenge even the most patient of saints.
I tend to take these apps with a pinch of salt most of the time… they often read like vague horoscopes. You know the sort of drivel I’m talking about -
‘You’ll come into good fortune this month, while Pluto moving into Uranus signals that a problem you’ve been working on will soon be resolved.
Then you mysteriously find 1 euro on the path and remember where you left the TV remote the other night and hey presto Mystic Maggie was right all along.
Well these baby apps are very much like that. For example I use the Wonder Weeks app and most of the time I don’t pay much heed to it. Having said that, this morning when my baby boy had about 5 huge, mega- tears and snot, arching the back, lying down on the floor style tantrums in a row, over a crumb of briquette he found on the ground and wanted to eat, I thought it might be worth checking the app.
Sure enough there it was.
’27 days until the end of leap 8. You’ll see the following signals going through this leap’
1. ‘Throws spontaneous temper tantrums! It’s annoying but clever!’ You can say that again chief!
2. ‘You child knows when he is not allowed to do something that he really wants.’ In this case eat a crumb of briquette off the floor.
3. ‘This frustrates your child,' not to mention the mother! 'So he throws a temper tantrum.’
Excellent, according to the app, I can expect 27 more days of irrational behaviour then!
In all honesty though, you’ve got to wonder about these apps. How on earth did my parents survive without them? Or my grandparents? I guess, they just got on with things and realised that babies go through phases of behaviour that can leave you questioning your very sanity… I sometimes think I’d prefer to go back to not knowing just how long of a stretch of tantrums I’m in for, but like those pesky horoscopes I just can't stop reading these leap facts!