Baby Bump Kick Counter App

So, I’m sort of nuts.  This has been well-established.  I’m a worrier, particularly during the pregnancy stages when there’s almost nothing I can do to control what’s happening.  To try and balance that out a little bit, I track as much as I can.

Kick counts are something that I track pretty religiously.  When I was pregnant with the Pickle, I had an early Android phone, which had no apps available at the time for kick counts.  I purchased and downloaded an app for my iPod Touch, however – the Baby Bump app.  (LINK)  

At the time, it was about $5.  It looks to be free currently – I’m not 100% sure, as I just re-downloaded the already-purchased app onto my iPhone.  The app is currently more robust than it was when I originally had used it – it’s got a kick counter, contraction counter, links to a pregnancy forum and daily updates about your baby’s development, info on names, and more.

I have used the kick counter extensively.  It’s pretty simple – you just go into the application, and you select to do the kick counter.  You start a new session, and this screen comes up:

You simply tap the button at the top whenever you feel a kick.  It will keep that session active until you reach ten kicks – or, I believe, two hours, whichever is first.  We’ve never gone beyond about four minutes, so I’m not 100% sure on that, but I believe that the app explains that you have not hit the expectation of ten kicks in two hours.  

You can then go out to the screen where it has recorded all of your previous kick counts for this pregnancy.

You can then, in this screen, use the pencil icon in the lower right to send all of your recorded kick counts via email.  This is nice if you want to keep track of this info, or if your OB maybe requests it.  

OR, if you’re extra insane, you can create a spreadsheet into which you can copy all of this info, such as the one shown below, and then graph the results.  I will not verify whether or not this is our little dude’s info from last week:

Since we had a scheduled C-section with Pickle, and I had contractions from 16 weeks on,  I didn’t use the contraction counter.  It seems to work similarly, however, you simply click start whenever you’re having one, and then it calculates your frequency.  It seems like it’s about as handy as a stopwatch, but you’re much more likely to have a phone on-hand than a stopwatch (unless you’re a track coach or something).

I really have enjoyed using this application.  It’s an easy way to do kick counts without losing track of how many times he’s kicked, when I started, and so on.  I also love that it keeps the log for additional security.  And, assuming it actually is free, you will definitely get more out of it than you put in.