Why I Track Every Ounce (And You Might Want To)

I can tell you exactly how many ounces of formula Lily drank on December 12th of last year. It was around 22 ounces, spread across seven feeds, with the biggest feed at 4:15 PM (four ounces) and the smallest at 2:30 AM (barely an ounce and a half, she fell asleep halfway through and I couldn't wake her up no matter how many times I tickled her feet). I know this because I wrote it down. I wrote ALL of it down. Every feed, every ounce, every time, every note about spit-up or gas or "seemed extra hungry today" or "refused the last half-ounce, maybe teething?" I have notebooks. I have spreadsheets. I have an app on my phone that syncs to an app on Mark's phone so we can both track feeds in real time. I am, by any reasonable definition, a person who has lost her mind.

But here's the thing. I don't think I've lost my mind. I think I found something. Something that kept me sane during months that were decidedly not sane. Something that gave me a sense of control when everything else—the baby, my body, my sleep schedule, my ability to leave the house without formula stains on my shirt—felt completely out of control.

Let me back up.

When Lily first came home from the NICU, tracking wasn't optional. It was required. The discharge paperwork included a feeding log—a photocopied sheet with columns for time, ounces, and notes—and the nurses told us to fill it out for every feed and bring it to every follow-up appointment. Preemie babies are watched closely. Every ounce matters. Every gram of weight gain is scrutinized. You don't get to be casual about feeding when your baby started life in an isolette with tubes and monitors and a team of neonatologists who rounded every morning at 6 AM sharp.

So I tracked. At first because I had to, and then because I was too anxious not to. Lily's feeding was the one thing I could measure, the one data point in the chaos of new motherhood that gave me concrete information. Is she getting enough? The log says 2four ounces today, which is within the target range. Is she gaining weight? The log shows consistent intake over the past week, which correlates with the upward curve on the growth chart. Is something wrong? The log shows she's been taking less at her afternoon feeds for three days straight, which might mean nothing or might mean the beginning of an ear infection—but at least I have the data to bring to the pediatrician.

I want to tell you about a patient I saw during Lily's first year. Her name was Tara, she was 33, and she came to my office with her four-month-old son, Caleb. Tara was an engineer—a software engineer at one of the big tech companies out in Hillsboro, the kind of person who thinks in systems and processes and data—and she was struggling with breastfeeding. Low supply. Painful latch. A baby who wasn't gaining weight. She'd switched to exclusive formula feeding two weeks before our appointment, and she was a mess. Not because of the formula—Caleb was thriving on formula, gaining weight beautifully, sleeping better, all the things—but because she'd lost her data.

"I tracked every breastfeeding session," she said, pulling out a notebook that was even more detailed than mine. "Time on each side, duration, which breast, how long he actively nursed vs. comfort sucked, output, everything. It was the only way I knew if he was getting enough. And now I'm just... mixing bottles. Pouring formula. I don't know how many ounces he's actually drinking. I don't know if he's getting the right amount. I feel like I'm flying blind."

Tara wasn't anxious about formula feeding. She was anxious about the loss of information. The breastfeeding data had been her anchor, the thing that made her feel like she understood what was happening inside her baby's body. Without it, she felt unmoored. She'd been staring at the empty feeding log pages, unsure what to write, unsure if tracking formula was even necessary.

"Track it," I told her. "Track every ounce. Write down every feed, every time, every amount. You don't have to do it forever. But right now, while you're building confidence, while you're learning to trust that formula is working—track it. The data will tell you what you need to know."

She looked so relieved. Like I'd given her permission to do something she already wanted to do but felt was maybe obsessive or unnecessary or proof that she couldn't just relax and trust the process. I told her what I'm telling you now: tracking isn't obsession. Tracking is information. And information is power when you feel powerless.

Tara started tracking formula feeds the next day. She emailed me two weeks later. "I know exactly how much he's eating now," she wrote. "Yesterday was almost 30 ounces. The day before was just under 28. He's right on target. I can sleep at night again."

That's the thing about tracking. It doesn't just tell you what's happening—it tells you what's NOT happening. It tells you that your baby is eating enough, that the scary scenarios your brain generates at 2 AM are just scenarios, that the data points to safety even when your anxiety points to disaster.

I stopped tracking Lily's feeds when she was about fourteen months old. She was fully on solids by then, eating mac and cheese and blueberries and the occasional fistful of dirt from the backyard, and the precise ounce counts didn't matter the way they used to. The transition away from tracking was gradual. I started by stopping the middle-of-the-night feeds—there were fewer of them anyway, and I was too tired to find my phone. Then I stopped logging the afternoon snacks. Then one day I realized I hadn't opened the tracking app in a week, and I didn't feel anxious about it. I felt... free. Not because tracking was a burden, but because I didn't need it anymore. I'd built enough confidence, enough trust in Lily's ability to tell me what she needed, enough faith in my own ability to read her cues.

But I kept the logs. All of them. The notebooks and the spreadsheets and the app data. They're stored in a folder on my computer, in a box in the closet, in the cloud somewhere. I don't look at them often. But sometimes, when I'm feeling nostalgic or when Lily is being particularly two years old and I need to remember that she was once a tiny preemie who couldn't finish a two-ounce bottle, I open the December file and scroll through the numbers. 2:30 AM, barely an ounce and a half. 4:15 PM, four ounces. 7:00 PM, 3 ounces, "fussy, maybe teeth." The data is a diary. The data is a love letter. The data is proof that I showed up, every feed, every ounce, every exhausted middle-of-the-night note scrawled in handwriting that got progressively messier as the months went on.

I don't think tracking is for everyone. Some people find it stressful, and if it makes you feel worse, you should absolutely put the notebook down and go stare at your baby instead. But for me, tracking helped. For Tara, it helped. And if you're the kind of person who lies awake at night wondering if your baby is eating enough, or if you have a preemie with feeding difficulties, or you're switching formulas and trying to correlate symptoms with intake, or you're just curious about whether there's any rhythm to the chaos—tracking might help you too.

But if tracking makes you feel worse—if you're using the data to beat yourself up, or if you're checking the app so compulsively that you're not looking at your actual baby—then it's not a tool anymore, it's a test you're failing. Put it down. Go stare at your baby. She'll tell you what she needs way better than any spreadsheet will.

I've been thinking about why tracking helped me so much, and I think it comes down to this: new motherhood is a void of uncertainty. You don't know what you're doing. You don't know if it's working. You don't know if the crying is hunger or gas or teething or just existential baby rage. Everything is guesswork. Everything is fog. The feeding log was my lighthouse. It was the one thing I could count on when everything else was shifting sand. This many ounces in, this many wet diapers out, this much weight gained over this many weeks. The math worked. The math always worked. And when the math didn't work—when Lily's intake dropped or her weight plateaued or something seemed off—the data caught it early, before it became a crisis, before my anxiety had time to build a whole catastrophe out of nothing.

I'm not saying everyone should track forever. Tara stopped tracking when Caleb was about ten months old, around the same time she went back to work and her brain was too full of code to also hold ounce counts. Jenna—my nurse friend from Randall Children's—tracked her first baby obsessively and didn't track her second at all, and both kids are fine. My mom didn't track a single thing in the 1980s, just made bottles when we cried and stopped when we fell asleep, and we survived. Tracking is not mandatory. It's not even necessarily recommended. It's just... a thing you can do, if you want to, if it helps.

It helped me. It helped Tara. It might help you.

Last week I was cleaning out the closet and I found the very first feeding log from Lily's NICU days. The photocopied sheet from the discharge packet, filled out in my sleep-deprived handwriting, the notes column crammed with observations like "fell asleep after 20 mL, tried tickling feet, wouldn't wake" and "finally finished bottle at 45 minutes!!" and "Mark did this feed, asked me to note that she burped twice." I sat on the floor of the closet and read the whole thing. Every entry. Every ounce. Every note. And I cried—not the ugly kitchen-floor crying from the empty formula can days, but the quiet, tender crying of someone looking back at a version of herself who was trying so hard, who was so scared, who had no idea if she was doing it right but showed up anyway, feed after feed, ounce after ounce, note after note.

The data is a diary. The data is a love letter. The data is proof that you were there, in the trenches, doing the work, measuring your love in ounces because you didn't know how else to measure it yet.

— Emily Hartwell