It's 3 a.m. Isabella's crying. Alyssa asks me when she ate last and I've got nothing. One o'clock? Maybe midnight? We've both been awake for what feels like a week, and neither of us can hold onto a single thing that happened more than an hour ago.
That was pretty much our first two weeks.
Nobody warns you that the hard part of a newborn isn't the crying. It's the not-knowing. When did she eat. Which side. Did somebody already change her. How long was that nap. You're making call after call all night long on a brain running completely empty — and whoever tags in next, your wife, your mom, has no idea what happened on your shift.
Alyssa was recovering from a C-section. I was useless on no sleep. We tried a notepad. We tried texting each other from ten feet away. We tried one of those apps. Nothing stuck, because what we actually needed was for both of us to be looking at the same page, at the same time, without having to ask.
So I built one.
I make things for a living — photographs, furniture, lamps, the occasional website. I never planned on building a baby app. But I needed this thing to exist, and the ones out there weren't made for two exhausted people sharing one baby. So I made the one I wished I'd had at 3 a.m.
It's simple. You tap when you feed her, change her, put her down. Alyssa sees it on her phone the second I tap it. I see hers. Every entry says who did it. That's the whole thing — we stopped asking each other “did you feed her?” because the answer was already sitting right there.
We named it Milk Monster. Half the family's on it now.
Here's what I keep coming back to. Everything I've ever made started the same way: I needed something to exist, so I made it. A photo of a moment I didn't want to lose. A table out of wood somebody set on the curb. This was no different. It just showed up at 3 a.m. — seven pounds, thirteen ounces of it.
I didn't build it to start a company. I built it so my wife and I could stop guessing and get back to actually being with her.
She's asleep on my chest as I write this. Last feed was 1:40. I know, because I tapped it.