We apparently don’t know how to sit still.
If you’ve followed Apple & Rob for any amount of time, this probably isn’t terribly surprising. We have a habit of getting an idea, talking about it for a while, and then eventually saying, “Well… why don’t we just try it?”
This time, we made an app.
It’s called Awesome Sauce Baby Tracker.
Yes, that’s really what we named it.
This One Came From Experience
When Aurora was a baby, there were so many little things to keep track of.
When did she eat last?
How much did she drink?
How long did she nap?
When was her last diaper change?
And when you’re tired, days have started blending together, and two people are taking turns doing things, you’d be surprised how difficult those questions can be to answer.
“Didn’t you give her a bottle?”
“No, I thought you did.”
“Oh.”
Parenthood involves a surprising amount of detective work.
We used baby tracking apps, and they were genuinely helpful. Having somewhere to record everything meant we didn’t have to rely on our increasingly unreliable memories.
But having gone through that stage ourselves, we also had our own ideas about what we liked, what we didn’t, and what we’d want from a baby tracker.
Eventually, one of those conversations turned into:
“Why don’t we just make one?”
Famous last words around here.
So We Made Awesome Sauce
The biggest thing we wanted was actually pretty simple: we wanted it to be cloud-based.
When you’re sharing the care of a baby, everyone needs to know what’s going on. If one of us logged a feeding, a diaper change, a nap, or anything else, we wanted the other person to be able to open the app on their own phone and see it.
Because if I finally managed to get some sleep, the last thing I wanted was Rob waking me up to ask, “When did she eat last?”
Look at the app, Rob. 😂
But it wasn’t just the two of us. My mother babysat Aurora too, and we wanted her to be able to stay in the loop. She could see when Aurora last ate or slept before we dropped her off, and we could check the app later to see how things were going without having to text her every five minutes asking for an update.
That was really the idea behind Awesome Sauce: one shared place where the people caring for your baby can stay on the same page. No trying to remember who did what, no lengthy handoffs, and most importantly, no waking up the sleeping parent to ask a question the app can answer.
From there, we started thinking about everything else we’d want in a baby tracker and built Awesome Sauce around the things that would have made our own lives as new parents a little easier.
Why “Awesome Sauce”?
This was one of the more entertaining parts of making the app.
There are a lot of baby apps with very sweet, very polished, very baby-ish names.
And that’s perfectly fine.
But it isn’t particularly us.
We wanted ours to feel a little more fun and a little less serious.
Somewhere along the way, Awesome Sauce stuck.
And the more we said it, the more we liked it.
So Awesome Sauce it became.
Another Apple & Rob Adventure
This definitely isn’t where we thought Apple & Rob would take us when we started sharing our adventures online.
But then again, that’s kind of become the theme around here.
We’ve traveled. We’ve tried things. We’ve made things. We’ve started businesses. We’ve had some ideas that worked, some that absolutely did not, and quite a few that started with one of us saying:
“You know what would be cool?”
Awesome Sauce is the latest one.
We took something we had personal experience with, thought about how we’d do it ourselves, and decided to actually build it.
And now it’s real.
That’s still a little weird to say.
So if you’re a parent, or know one, currently living in the world of bottles, nursing sessions, pumping, diapers, naps, and trying to remember what happened at 2:17 this afternoon, Awesome Sauce Baby Tracker was made with you in mind.
Right now, Awesome Sauce is available exclusively for iPhone and iPad through the Apple App Store. We’d love to eventually bring it to more devices, but for now, we’re starting with Apple.
If you give it a try, we’d genuinely love to know what you think, especially if there’s something you wish it could do. This is one of those projects we can continue improving as we go, and hearing from other parents will help us figure out where to take it next.
We hope it makes at least one small part of your day easier. Let us know what you think!
And we’ll keep you posted on where this particular adventure takes us.
– Apple & Rob
