Track Your Baby's Feeds and Diapers Without a Baby App

Somewhere in the first week, almost every new parent goes looking for a baby tracker. It is a reasonable instinct. The midwife asks about feeds and diapers, your memory is gone, and you want something that remembers for you.

What you actually need in those weeks is small. You need to answer three questions at any hour: which side was last, how long ago was the last feed, and how many wet diapers there have been today. That is a log, and a log does not need a dedicated baby app, an account, or a subscription.

Why it is worth keeping this log on your own phone

A newborn log is a detailed health record of a person who cannot agree to anything: feeding times, stool color, medicine, illness, sleep. It starts on day one and can follow the child for years.

Kept on your phone, it stays with you. There is no account to create at 3 a.m., nothing to sync, and no copy of your child's first weeks on a server somewhere. For your own coffee count, where the data lives hardly matters. For your child it is worth a minute's thought.

The same answers with a few tags

Menikki is a tag diary, not a baby app. It keeps everything on your phone, with no account and no server. The newborn questions map onto it surprisingly well. The short version of the setup:

• One group per child. All the baby tags in one place, separate from anything you track for yourself. Twins get two groups.
• Breastfeed left and Breastfeed right as duration tags, so the side is part of the entry.
• Bottle as a quantified tag in ml or oz.
• Wet diaper and Dirty diaper as simple tags, with a two-word note on the dirty ones when the color matters.
• Sleep, Drops or medicine, Bath: add them when you notice yourself guessing, not before.

Switch on Mark as habit for each, and they sit on the Home screen, one tap from opening the app. A Since timer widget on the dashboard answers "how long since the last feed?" without a single tap.

The full walkthroughs are in two earlier guides: tracking breastfeeding and diapers with tags, including what the diaper colors mean, and the newborn baby log for tired parents, which covers everything around the feeds.

What it costs

Menikki is free on iPhone and Android, and the free version covers this setup: up to 5 groups and 30 tags, which fits one or two children with room to spare, plus up to four dashboard widgets.

Premium removes those limits and adds two things that matter here: export, so you can keep the log as a file or hand it to someone, and smart reminders that nudge you when a tag has not been logged for a number of days, useful for baths or nail trimming rather than feeds.

What Menikki does not do

Better to know this before the first night than halfway through it:

• No sync between phones. If both parents log on their own phones, you get two separate logs. Agree on one phone as the baby log, for example the one that stays by the changing table at night, or split the tasks between you.
• No running stopwatch. A duration tag is entered after the feed, not timed while it runs. A rounded number is enough for what anyone will do with it.
• No growth charts. Menikki does not plot weight and length against percentile curves. Your pediatrician does that at every check-up.

Keep it simple

Data on one phone is private, and it is also only on that phone. If you want to keep the log beyond the newborn weeks, or hand it to someone, use the export.

You do not need a baby app for the first weeks. A handful of tags and the habit of tapping them right after the feed gets you the timeline, the counts, and something concrete to show the midwife.

Menikki is a memory aid, not a medical app. If something about feeding, weight or a diaper worries you, call your midwife or pediatrician, and bring the log.

Menikki is free, needs no account, and keeps everything on your phone. Available for iPhone and Android.