Create Time with a baby
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Need 5 minutes for some reason? Tummy time, they are going to cry because its hard, but its good exercise. While my Doctor of Physical Therapy wife would not exactly recommend leaving the room for some legal purpose… Your kid is probably going to be crying for 5 minutes during tummy time, you are going to hear silence if something is wrong. For a normal baby, you can start tummy time at 2 days old. My favorite process is: Baby is crying, put them in tummy time for 5 minutes while I get the bottle ready, feed them the bottle, put them to bed. (If someone wants to be famous, do a scientific study to see how 5 minutes of tummy time, 3x per day affects SIDS rates)
Baby proof an area. We fenced off our entire living room with a baby/pet fence for our first kid. This peace knowing there was nothing dangerous they could get into, gave us freedom to do work in the kitchen. We might have overpaid for our baby fence, but it was well worth it. At 3 kids, the entire home is already baby proofed, so we don’t use fences or gates too much.
Teach your baby to hold the bottle. If our baby was in daycare, they learned this quickly. Basically when the baby is strong and coordinated enough to play with the bottle, its time to start teaching them to hold the bottle. The type of bottle you use may impact this, some bottles are easier to hold than others. Put their hands on the bottle and let go. Do this for a few weeks during feedings and bottle feedings just became recreational rather than necessary. My wife and I can attest to how much fun it is to bottle feed before bed as our usually hyper baby passes out in our arms.
Don’t rock your baby to sleep (every time). That 10-20 minutes you spend rocking your baby to sleep is time that your baby could be learning to fall asleep by themselves. I recently received a text message from a friend that asked ‘at what age do kids sleep without rocking them?’ referring to their 2 year old. I start this when the baby is a few weeks old, especially if the baby is fed, changed, and burped.
Multitask
Do chores with the baby, especially when they are fussy. A baby carrier is best if you are planning on a long session, but even one handed chores are more productive than doing 0 chores. Moving around, I imagine your baby will no longer be fussy, plus you can hand them random objects to look at.
Exercise with the baby present. Stroller running is reasonable for a mile or so on pavement. You can hula hoop, jump rope, spin bike, and lift weights all a few feet from the playroom, depending on your setup. You can even stretch with your baby on top of you. I would lower your expectations for this workout, it should be considered a supplementary workout. Babies are unpredictable and might just start balling their eyes out causing you to stop halfway.
Have some breast feeding plans. My wife sent emails, checked facebook for freebies, did online shopping, listened to audiobooks, and of course endless social media scrolling. Point being, you can have quality multitasking time that are either enjoyable or productive or you can waste it. Have a plan.
Use Technology
Use baby monitors. Between our home security cameras and all of my laptops/tech devices, I can watch and communicate with the kids throughout the house from the toilet.
In disagreement with the non-scientific World Health Organization who used opinions to form their recommended 0 seconds of TV per day, I recommend letting your under 1 year olds watch phonics and count to 100 videos. By age 2, they will automatically associate letters with sounds and can begin learning to read, they will know numbers to 100 and be able to begin adding. I throw in a Periodic Table of Elements song and similar songs into the mix. Consider this is monumentally better use of screen time than showing your kids corporate mascots(Disney/Nintendo/etc…)
Use Manpower
The Kid’s Grandparents can be a good way to soak up a few hours. On a similar note, I have cousins that love babies and will give us an hour or so of freedom.
Siblings are going to be teammates for life, get them into it early. Most kids can attempt a ‘shake the rattle/be silly for the baby’ and confuse the baby into being calm for a moment. This only needs to work once before the bond is formed. The bond of course being the selfish relationship that ‘playing with baby = crying stops’. I think your goal as an efficient parent is to facilitate the kids enjoying each other so playing is automatic.
Baby Waste
Transportation Waste
Clothes, keep clothes close by rather than in closets in far away rooms. We have 4 (stylish) little bins per kid that hold shirts, pants, underwear, and socks and they fit under the tv stand in the living room.
Diaper changes are close by, preferably with everything from the changing mat to baby wipes out and accessible. The main diaper change station is about 3ft or 1m from the tv in our living room. We keep a small trash here. Depending on where you spend time, you may want additional/multiple diaper change areas with essentials only. We have a station in each kids room for bedtime. As a reminder, having to open drawers or cabinets is inefficient, we leave our diaper stuff out. Your baby will be a kid soon enough, I think its okay for a few months/years.
Trash is close by, especially for daily diapers. We keep our extra trashbags/grocery bags under the active trash bag inside the trash bin. Between taking tags off clothes, diapers, and daily living, a living room trashbin can reduce frequent walks across the house.
From 1st kid waking up to last kid loaded in the car for daycare/school, this process could be relatively similar enough to process flow it. Everyone needs to eat, get dressed, and have their backpacks ready for school. There may be some chaos with humans, but if you follow an efficient process, you will make up for chaos with process time savings.
Making Baby Formula should be fast. Bottles, formula, and hot water should all be located nearby.
Might seem obvious, but wherever you plan to do your baby bathing, keep your bath supplies close by.
Before the toys take over your house, it might be good to have a bin for the toys. This makes it easy to pick up the toys as you can carry the bin around. Once the toys take over your house, all walls are covered in facade bookshelves/organizers/bins/baskets to store toys. This makes it easy to clear the floor for company or vacuuming.
Movement Waste
When loading the car seat or do a diaper change: Count. This way you are always racing against yourself and holding yourself accountable for performance. The added benefit is that your kids will like to hear the numbers. While this isnt the same level of quality as recording the process and finding waste, its a 0 time cost alternative that will cause you and your kid to be attentive to the process. (Of course, you can always use process flow to save time as well)
Streamline regular processes(diaper changes) by having materials(diapers and wipes) and tools(diaper change pad) in consistent locations. By always knowing things are in the same location, you will be faster at your process and will avoid errors looking around. Consider other frequent and regular processes. Here are some multiple times per day processes that would be worth standardizing: Preparing a baby bottle, dealing with spitups, putting the baby down to sleep, and anything breastfeeding related. After you have those down, consider daily things like dressing, putting in a car seat/carrier, etc.. (This methodology is called Set In Order and is part of 5S.)
Overprocessing Waste(Working harder than you need to)
Rocking them to sleep is waste, they don’t need it. I understand situations where its the right thing to do, however this is a bigger strategy. Deal with a few minutes of fuss while the baby figures out how to fall asleep alone. (Bonus points for making their sleep occasionally uncomfortable, this will set them up for a life of being able to nap in loud areas, bad beds, bright lights, etc…)
Getting up before 6am is a waste. After they are 3 months old, I believe we are cleared for sleep training which up to me, should be done on that 3 month birthday for our own sleep’s sake.
Holding the bottle is a waste. You/Daycare will teach them to hold their own bottle.
Easy for me to say, but ‘Don’t care about clothes’. This means getting free/used clothes when possible or buying stuff as needed. The goal here is to save time, not have cool outfits.
Don’t buy Toys ever. I’d doubt we spent more than $50 on toys for our kids and our house is filled to the point we give toys away. No need to think about them either.
I don’t think you need a nightly bath. Circumstances like spaghetti night change everything, but a few times a week is plenty. Any reduction is savings. We have a shower time for kids that need help, it is during the time I need to shower a few times a week. I needed to soak for a few minutes anyway.
Do you need to interact with your kids? The Montessori method says no, if they are focused, let them be. Being focused on drawing is desired, being focused on Phonics videos is fine, being focused on baby shark is hedonistic waste.
Overproduction Waste
Make too much formula? It can be reheated later. This means not having to measure anything or scoop formula. Alternatively if I have 2oz of cold formula I might add 4oz of hot formula. This saves from having to wash a bottle.
Make too much food for your kid? Either save as leftovers or eat it.
Waiting
Unless you are spending quality time with your kids, are you just ‘watching’ them? Cook, do laundry, clean, play/teach the kids. Of course chaos stuff is going to happen, but deal with the problems as they come.
Driving them to daycare/school/sports? (Nonfiction) audiobooks. Get some ROI on your time driving, get the books you have been meaning to read. Pro-tip from an avid reader: If you aren’t interested within 1 hour of listening to the book, you can move on, its okay. If you are worried you are going to skip something, I’ve found that important things are repeated by different authors.
Inventory
Outside of baby shower gifts, it may be best to wait until you need something. Marketers are trying to push their products on you, you’d be surprised how little you need to buy to raise a baby.
Clothes should be bought on a need basis. Free clothes and hand-me-downs will reduce the need to buy clothes but season dependent weather may cause you to buy some anyway. Buy as needed, no need to buy ahead of time.
As mentioned elsewhere, toys will fill your home even if you don’t buy any.
Reevaluate if your kid plays with toys anymore, if your future kids will be playing with it, and decide if it can be put away or given away.
Defects
Forget to buy/pack something and need to make a special stop at the grocery store? You may be able to apply logistics to your diaper bag. Push method would be adding things before each trip, pull method would be making a note to replenish the inventory as you get low on materials. If this still becomes an issue, send me an email and it might be worth doing diaper stats to know how many diapers need to be packed.
Dirtied clothes. I’m not sure if I’ll ever learn the lesson myself, always use bibs for eating, you can get away with wearing the same clothes longer and with less washes. In a few cases when the shirt is already dirty, a bib can be forgotten.
Skill Waste
If you are able to work and make over ~$20,000/yr per kid in daycare, it makes sense to send your kid to daycare. I already included the buffer for taxes, consider that your experience with work will grow your resume.
If you have family that would love to spend time with the kids, it’s a form of free babysitting. This can reduce monetary costs or reduce workloads.
In-Control Bedtime: Save Time on your Bedtime routine, for you and your kids.
By taking a few measurements, you can get you (or your kids) bedtime ‘in-control’, saving you time and increasing the consistency of getting to bed on time.
Feel free to skip to the section labeled “Application” if you want the ‘too long didn’t read’ version. Things get somewhat technical in the Theory sections. Mrs. Efficiency says the theory sections are hard to read but the application section had good ideas.
(Theory) Out Of Control Processes Are Unnecessary
Being in-control or out-of-control is defined by you. You can choose to have a narrow band(1 standard deviation) that would increase your chance of a processes getting out-of-control, or you can have a wider band that guarantees(3 standard deviations) 99.7% of the time you would stay in-control. The purpose here is to identify non-random causes of variation quickly so you can eliminate them or compensate for them.
In a factory, you may have a customer specification to make a minimum of 50 parts per hour. This is not necessarily your Lower Control Limit, this is a lower Spec Limit. (Note: In this article our bed time specification and our control limit will be the same value.) Based on collected data, you have found your factory can produce 74 parts per hour on average with a standard deviation of 3 parts per hour. If you want to stay within the control limit 99.7% of the time, you’d set your Upper Control Limit to 83 parts per hour and Lower Control Limit to 64 Parts Per Hour. Now suppose a robot starts breaking more often and you only produced 30 parts. To get your process in control you might buy a redundant robot that could be turned on during a breakage. You might monitor the robot closely and do maintenance. You can even expand what you consider ‘in control’. This could be acceptable and you can opt to run the robot for 2 shifts instead of 1 shift.
Standard control chart:
Simplified control chart:
At home, you may set your spec limit and control limit to have dinner ready at 6pm, but an extra long recipe or surprise visit from a friend could cause dinner not to be ready until 6:30pm. For these, you may consider starting dinner earlier, coming up with a plan if you have a future surprise visit, or removing long recipes from your regular list.
The benefit of control limits are to catch when your variation is increasing, and most importantly figuring out root causes and solutions to major (non-random) variation.
(Theory) Signs of Process Getting Out Of Control
Some rules of thumbs that signal that a process is getting out of control:
Any time a process falls outside the control limit
If you had ~6 consecutive points that were trending in the same direction, your process might be becoming out of control. (Ex: 15,17,19,20,22,23)
Eight consecutive points on the same side of the average
Fourteen consecutive data points alternating up and down.
(Application) Get your process In Control
Your goal is to figure out what time you need to start your bedtime routine, to ensure you get to bed on-time. In this example I’m going to use my kid’s bedtime because they are highly variable compared to me and the wife. This can be used with your bedtime routine as well.
The first and most important step to getting a process in-control is to measure and record the important metric. Without any measurements, you can’t be sure if you are hitting your targets. You also can’t determine what is an acceptable amount of variation if you have no measurement history.
For a bed time routine its probably best to measure the ‘Time In Bed’ metric. I would start the kid’s bedtime routine at 7:45PM each night and only track of the finish time.
After 3-6 measurements, you can get a general idea of what kind of variation between nights can be expected. The important thing to me was making sure my kids were in bed before 8pm. Taking your average Finish Time plus Variation, you can reliably get to bed within your ‘Control Limit’. As I realized the kids were often in bed at 8:01PM, I pushed the start of the bedtime routine back to 7:40PM.
You can also find causes of variation. If you had a measurement that was an outlier, it would be worth analyzing it and seeing if there are ways to eliminate it or prepare for it. We had an issue with kids wanting misplaced stuffed animals in their bed, but since this caused minutes of looking for toys, we removed stuffed animals from their bed. We got into a habit of giving the kids ice water before bed so I could keep the Air Conditioning at a higher temperature, now they only get it if there is extra time or I prepared ahead of time. The amount of time they get listening to/reading a book before bed can vary depending on how long they take performing their other bedtime tasks – some nights they only get a page of a book and other nights they can easily finish a whole book. These Inputs, including Start Time, will determine the Finish Time.
Finally you can further improve by honing in your process. Process flow diagrams may be a bit too rigid, but as you eliminate variation, you will be more likely to find ways to streamline the process. Trying to hit our goal time, I found myself multitasking by doing one of the steps(going through phonics) while we are walking to the bathroom. Another way to streamline is to perform a task for two children at once. Read a book that two kids like together to reduce time spent doing the same task with each child.
(Optional) Calculating Upper Control Limits and Lower Control Limits
For my personal home application, I did write down the times, but I didn’t actually calculate the standard deviation. I used feelings. Want to use something other than feelings? Calculate it:
Take some data points, at least 3 points, more is better. For instance 17, 19, 14 minutes.
Take the average so you can center your chart. For instance 16.6 minutes
Take the standard deviation(use a calculator/excel/google sheets). Multiply that standard deviation by 3 if you only want 1 failure per every other year. Only multiply by 2 if you want ~8 failures per year. For instance, 2.5*3=7.5 minutes or 2.5*2= 5 minutes. (single tailed normal distribution)
Take the average and add the standard deviation you calculated. 16.6 minutes + 7.5 minutes= Start the bedtime process 24.1 minutes before bedtime. (or I’m less critical, and will use the 2 standard deviation, 16.6 minutes + 5 minutes = 21.6 minutes.)
Trying to get the kids to bed by 8pm? Start the process at 7:38pm. It will work 357 days per year.
Process changes
Don’t expect a process to be in control forever. In a factory its common for changes to occur. Maybe you got a faster robot, maybe your customer wants an additional piece of foam glued on. These would involve getting the process back in control.
At home, you might have gotten injured and decide to include a round of physical therapy exercises in your bedtime routine. After a few measurements you can decently decide what time you need to start your bed time routine to get to bed on time.
The big take away here is that by having your process in control you can quickly spot non-random variations and make adjustments.
Daycare or stay at home? There is a third way.
I recently saw someone say ‘We did the math and sending the kid to daycare would be break even’. When I inquired further, it turned out ‘break even’ meant they could have profited $12,000/year. Nothing wrong with being a stay at home parent, but a profit of $12k is not close to break even.
Disclaimer, we send our kids to daycare, expect pro-daycare bias.
If you are reading this and have an agenda, to prove that whatever you are currently doing is the best: Just do that. This article’s purpose is to be rational from a monetary perspective. If you are afraid daycare is going to teach your kid bad habits, money won’t change that feeling.
The options
Here are your options to consider
- Quit your job, become a stay at home parent
- Send your kids to daycare or pay for a nanny
- Watch kids in rotation with neighbors, family, and friends
While there is a monetary value to each option, there are some intangibles that should be considered.
Stay at home pros and cons
During coronavirus, I ‘lived the dream’. Me and my 1 year old spent every day together, I built bridges and towers with his megablocks, we went outside, and… quickly this wore off and his fuss drove me to putting on baby phonics and count to 100 videos.
We typically see our stay at home mom friends have a Disney movie on TV in the background of our snapchats.
Recently I got a taste of the stay at home life as I had coronavirus and I watched my kids all day. I think stay at home is fun in bursts, and it may be fun when the kids are a bit older and can play more independently or tell you what they need.
Pros:
- See all the milestones first hand
- Micromanage their education
- No concerns of child predators
Cons:
- Might get old
- You may use TV as a crutch. Otherwise spend lots of time planning activities.
- No growing your resume
- No profit or benefit to external society
- Less socialization for both you(coworkers) and your kids(other kids)
Daycare
I won’t put ‘daycare costs money’ as a con, because daycare allows me to work and make profit.
To calculate if daycare is profitable, find out the cost of daycare. 5 days a week is approx $15,000 per child per year in my area. Then find your after tax earnings (as an estimate take your yearly income and multiply by 0.7). Do yearly after tax income – cost of daycare. If your number is positive, daycare is not ‘break even’, it’s profitable. Consider that the experience you gain from working will pay dividends as well.
Example outputs, assuming 15k/child/yr, a tax burden of 30%. This doesn’t include daycare tax deductions, which were $8,000 per kid in 2021 and only $3,000 per kid in 2022.
1 kid x 15,000= 15,000, after tax income to profit $21,000
2 kids x 15,000= 30,000, after tax income to profit $42,000
3 kids x 15,000 = 45,000 , after tax income to profit $65,000
Enter your yearly cost of daycare:
Enter your yearly post-tax income:
Gain/Loss =
To add qualities, here are pros and cons:
Pros:
- We grow our resume, the extra experience is worth ~30% pay bump every 2-3 years.
- Socialization, me and the kids are probably deep down an introvert. Daycare has been a savior to our oldest
- I get a break from watching the kids, this way I see them 40 hours a week instead of 95 hours a week.
- Meet parents of people who can also afford daycare. Social club!
- Having a break from your kids makes you appreciate them more
Cons:
- You still need to drive to drop off and pick up your kids
- You don’t spend 24/7 with your kid. This is mentioned above as a Pro, your call.
The Third Way – Friends, Family, and Neighbors.
We use this to some extent, for 2 days a week, we have our parents watch the kids. There are pros and cons. Grandparents spoil the kids, but they get that 1 on 1 attention that they wouldn’t get from daycare. I also enjoy having our parents over, I like those days as much as the weekend. It also reduces our daycare bills slightly.
I’ve been offered support from friends and neighbors as well, mostly in the form of trading days of watching kids. This would require finessing around work schedules, so we end up using daycare instead. However, my job is flexible enough to do something like this. I’ve personally been impressed enough by my kid’s socialization at daycare that I don’t think I’d trade it for $20,000/yr… Hmm… when I put it that way, maybe I do need to consider ‘The Third Way’.
Conclusion
If you want to be a stay at home parent, why are you reading this article? You know in your heart what you want.
If you want to make profit and have 1 parent with a flexible schedule, you may be able to set up a system of friends, family, and neighbors to watch your kids.
If you want to make profit, do the math to figure out if daycare is a profitable choice. Even a slight profit will pay dividends with a stronger resume. On a similar note, make sure you are using rational decision making when choosing jobs, benefits disguise how low a job actually pays.
Baby Formula Per Dollar
Baby formula has lots of fancy labels, and its difficult to know if the different colors and words on the labels have a serious meaning.
Abstract- What do you want in baby formula?
All baby formula meets FDA nutrition requirements. Most baby formula has similar amounts of nutrients with 1 exception, the ‘premature’ type. The premature label has around ~20%-30% more nutrients.
Outside of that, the big ingredients are pretty similar from brand to brand, milk, oil, protein powder, corn syrup/sugar and various vitamins.
There are some brands that include probiotics, swap milk for soy, etc… if you wanted these qualities, you could compare oz/$ and look for those ingredients.
The goal of this study was to find the lowest cost baby formula, and ensure we were getting adequate nutrition. If individual ingredients are your style, you can check the data in .xlsx format which includes 13 samples with ingredients typed out.
Download baby-formula-data.xlsx
Data- Baby Formula Per Dollar
Rank is calculated as Sum of all(X Vitamin/ X Vitamin Max) divided by the total number of vitamins. A score of 1 is best, a score of 0 is worse. Any duplicates are various sizes.
Given the FDA has nutrition requirements and most stores provide the oz/$, you can essentially do this study at your local store with a quick glance. The only added benefit here is the comparison of nutrient amount. The nice part is that the data confirms nutrients are pretty similar.
Some casual commentary from the engineer that has been doing this research for years- I find it ‘funny’ that Walmart brand has the worst quality on the cheapest product(as shown in rank). In the dog food study, the Walmart versions had a number 1 ingredient of corn, while other stores had a number 1 ingredient of meat. The other Walmart brands performed better for quality, and even the lowest cost is competitive for quality. I wonder what is going on that causes brand name to be literally 2x more expensive.
Conclusions- Buy the cheapest? or second cheapest? Or whatever works for your kid.
We currently buy Parents Choice Gentle Infant Formula to supplement breast milk(which is the cheapest if you eat better than 200 calories per dollar).
With extra time, I’d research every ingredient, normalize for spelling/abbreviations, and see the commonalities/differences. From a quick glance, I am not concerned unless you really want probiotics/immune system stuff. At that point, its a simple comparison between the options that contain your desired ingredient.