Having a baby is the greatest joy I’ve ever known. And hearing them wake up at 2 a.m., and again at 2:30 a.m., and again at 2:45 a.m., is the greatest pain. The first month in particular is a blurry-eyed trend line leading toward a certain insanity. That is until one day when, miraculously, they sleep through the night.
It’s a fuzzy memory visualized perfectly by IT specialist Seung Lee, who knitted this blanket depicting his son’s first year of sleep. Each row is a day. And each stitch depicts six minutes of time spent awake or asleep. He collected the data with the help of the app BabyConnect, taking a series of technical steps to output the data into a legible data visualization—before then spending three months knitting the actual gift for his son.
The blanket tells a very clear story once you know how to read it. The top end shows erratic patterns of sleeping (blue) and wakefulness (beige). In these early days, the concept of sleep is but a dotted line spanning 24 hours at a time. About a month and a half in, and you can tell Lee’s son began a more dependable sleep pattern (though you can still see some unexpected long nights here and there!). Then roughly five months in, the baby sleeps through the night, with three, and then two, naps a day (nice job, mom and dad!).
