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'If you are pulling air from outside, then you are pulling in all the pollutants and carbon monoxide from all the traffic. Studies show that recirculating your AC can cut down on the pollutants entering your vehicle by 20 per cent when stuck in traffic'.

And maybe if there were an app for outsourcing this anxiety, Online Writing 5th Grade Program I'd download that, tutoring services for children too. (Oh wait, looks like there is.)  We talk a lot these days about phone addiction and limiting screen time, and I worry often about how my brain is being rewired by my increasingly virtual existence. By some accounts, smartphone usage was trending up 20% the year my son was born, to an embarrassing 27% of waking hours.

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Facebook is an example of a social media site where different people share ideas opinions, and other discussions.

I became enamored with all the ways my phone could optimize and organize the disorienting experience of taking care of a newborn. The pressure to focus on my baby's needs to the detriment of everything else quickly came to feel Sisyphean, and my smartphone apps allowed me to outsource a lot of the mental load -- the guilt, the stress, the uncertainty.

Ron DeSantis played a shocking video at the start of his press conference on Wednesday containing sexually explicit content, illustrated and detailed in children's books at various Florida school libraries.

One of the first things I did after bringing my newborn home from the hospital two winters ago was download an app. Specifically, the appropriately named Baby Tracker app for iPhone and Android, which allows parents to log their baby's diaper changes, feedings and sleep (among many, many other things).

They added if your car has been 'baking in the sun'  its better to roll the windows down and turn recirculate off for the first minute or so to get rid of the super hot air inside the car before turning the recirculate on.

(We still sing before bed every night, but my son has since become more of a Lou Reed fan.) And I wouldn't have completed my 2020 Goodreads challenge without Kindle and Libby, which allowed me to read in the dark while waiting for the baby to drift off, too scared of waking him with a creaking door to sneak out. Spotify ended up superseding any of the white noise apps I tried, and it accompanied me during my nightly Norah Jones acoustic bedtime sets. Some of the best apps for the new-mom life were actually the ones I already had installed on my phone: My Fitbit app motivated me to take more stroller walks, though I had to push one-handed to get credit for my steps.

Here is where I discovered nursing tips, birth announcement ideas, frank discussions of postpartum depression, pros and cons of the infamous Snoo (with its own attendant smartphone app) and a rabbit hole of Instagram baby experts dispensing advice on baby sleep, baby food, baby milestones and baby sign language. The What to Expect app, my erstwhile go-to source for weekly "your baby now has earlobes!"-style pregnancy videos, became a veritable life raft postpartum when I joined the message board for other parents of February babies.

Soon, I was downloading BabySparks and Huckleberry and White Noise Baby Sleep Sounds, apps that promised to help my son reach his developmental milestones, suggest optimal nap schedules and "wake windows," and simulate the soothing ambiance of a running hair dryer, respectively.

I didn't need it anymore, because after going all the way around the sun -- now twice -- with this little boy (who now has his own cellphone made by Fisher-Price), I know a thing or two about how to take care of him. After a full year of tracking every diaper, every ounce of every bottle, every minute of every nap, I said goodbye to the beloved Baby Tracker app. My son is now 2 years old, and I've slowly shed the many trappings of new-parenthood.

My cousin messaged me: She was up with a baby and scrolling through Instagram, too. One night, 10 days after I gave birth, I was up feeding my son, idly scrolling through Instagram and wondering when I'd ever sleep again. She'd shared a post with me, a drawing by artist Paula Kuka of a woman nursing a baby, looking out a window at darkness. 

But then I think of what a lifeline smartphones have become for new parents -- especially new mothers -- in the dark loneliness of those 3 a.m. feedings, the isolation of a pandemic-era maternity leave, the utter tumult of those first few unstructured days. I would have felt so much more adrift.