So anyone who has a baby, or knows someone who has a baby, knows that parents are obsessed with the behavior of their little ones: their wet diapers, poopy diapers, their naps and bottles and nursing habits.

For instance, when the baby was about five weeks old, we started supplementing his diet with a little formula. We started offering him two ounces after each nursing session. Sometimes he took all, sometimes none, sometimes just a little. I was curious how much formula he was actually getting, so I drew up a chart in Microsoft Word, printed out multiple copies, and put them on the fridge where we could quickly enter the basic data: time, length of nursing session, how many ounces of formula he took. Every day at 7:00 p.m. I added up how much formula he'd taken in the last 24 hours and made a note in the margin.

After a while I was curious about the trend. He seemed to be taking less but I wasn't sure; I wanted hard evidence. We had a stack of 8 1/2 x 11 inch pages I could leaf through, but they didn't really deliver the message like, say, a chart would. So I entered each 24-hour period's total formula into Excel and made a line chart showing his formula consumption over time.

Well, Internet, you can take my obsession and multiply it by about 1000, and you get the Trixie Tracker. It started as software created by a very geeky dad to track his daughter's bottles and diapers. Now it's a system that lets you enter data about sleep, diapers, bottles, solids, nursing, pumping and medicine, and see useful charts and graphs to help you better understand your baby's needs and habits.

Yes, I'm using it. I signed up for a two-week free trial, but so far I'm only using the Sleep tracker ... I don't know how anyone finds time to enter all that data.