Fun with Excel

This chart (click chart for a full size version) compares the growth between Jake and yours truly from birth to 18 months (stay tuned for the 2 year update). It was actually much more difficult to put this together than I thought it would be. First, my baby book, containing all my growth charts (and amusing anecdotes) had gone missing for the past two years. We looked everywhere, but we weren't sure whether it was at our house or my parents house. Well, I got a fun surprise on my birthday when my Mom wrapped it up and gave it to me as a present. Apparently she'd finally found it at their house looking for something else, proving two Motherly Axioms about lost items:

1) You are least likely to find something when looking for it
2) You will always find something in the last place you look for it

The third Motherly Axiom about lost items, derived from the "Retracing Your Steps" Theorem, did not apply in this case.

Technically, this was trickier than I thought because Excel has a lousy web-export function that doesn't include standard notations that are required to make Excel graphs useful. I added the labels in Photoshop and smoothed out the lines which looked very chunky from the Excel export. Also, I couldn't find any easy way to resolve the time scale irregularity on the x axis. Excel treats each data point as equally distant from the previous data point, but the doctor visits are not on regular time intervals, decreasing in frequency as babies grow older.

Anyway, Jake has obviously grown faster in the first 18 months than I did. His height appears to be evening out a bit, but he still has a good 3 lb on where I was at 18 months. I must have been a skinny kid because Jake's always been right around the 50th percentile for weight.

Next month we'll have the exciting 2 year update to this chart!