Getting Started with Bear Days: Your Complete Setup Guide
New to Bear Days? This guide walks you through setting up the app, adding a child, logging your first records, and getting the most out of Bear Days from day one.
Introduction
Bear Days is a baby and child care tracking app built around one core idea: capturing the details of your baby's day should be fast, easy, and private. Whether you're tracking a newborn's every feed and diaper or recording a toddler's milestones and health observations, Bear Days keeps everything in one place — on your device, in your control.
This guide walks you through everything you need to get started: adding your child, logging your first records, and discovering the features that make Bear Days a care partner you'll reach for dozens of times a day.
Step 1: Download and Install
Bear Days is available on the App Store for iPhone. Download the app, and you're ready to go — no account required, no email signup, no subscription needed to start tracking.
Your official care records live on your device from the first moment. Bear Days is local-first: records are stored locally, and Chat cannot save anything to the care timeline until you review and save it.
Step 2: Add Your Child
When you open Bear Days for the first time, you'll be prompted to add a child. Provide:
- Name: Your baby's name (or nickname — you can change this later)
- Birthday: Used to calculate age-appropriate context for milestones, sleep norms, and feeding guidance
- Optional details: Gender, birth weight, and other details you'd like to include
You can add multiple children — useful for families with more than one child to track, or for caregivers managing records for multiple babies.
Step 3: Log Your First Record
Bear Days supports several record types, each accessible from the main screen:
Feeding: Log completed nursing sessions with left/right duration, bottle feeds with amount and milk type, or solid food.
Sleep: Enter the start and end time for a completed sleep record. Bear Days handles the duration math.
Diaper: Log wet, dirty, or both — with optional notes on color and consistency. The daily count updates automatically.
Milestone: Browse app-curated milestones and mark the ones your child has reached. Every completion gets a date and optional note.
Health: Log temperature, medications (with dose and time), symptoms, vaccines, and growth measurements.
The Chat Feature
Bear Days includes a Chat feature that converts natural language into reviewable draft records. Instead of tapping through a form at 3 AM, you can type or speak: "Nursed for 15 minutes on the left, then she fell asleep," and Bear Days can suggest draft cards for the feeding and sleep records. Nothing is saved until you review and save it.
Chat is especially useful for:
- Night logging when you'd rather type than navigate
- Capturing multiple events at once ("woke up, changed a wet diaper, fed 4 oz formula, now sleeping")
- Adding notes about context or observations alongside records
Understanding the Timeline
The main timeline in Bear Days shows all your baby's records in chronological order. You can see the full day at a glance — when they fed, how long they slept, how many diapers they had — and navigate back through previous days.
The timeline view helps you spot patterns: the afternoon that's consistently fussy before a feed, the correlation between a great nap day and a better night, the diaper count that's been lower than normal since Tuesday.
Using Records for Handoffs
If you co-parent or have a caregiver, grandparent, or nanny involved in your child's care, Bear Days gives you a local timeline you can review during handoff.
Bear Days does not offer family accounts or role management today. The useful workflow is simpler: keep accurate local records, then use the timeline when you hand off care or need to show a doctor what happened.
Understanding Your Data Over Time
As records accumulate, patterns become visible. Bear Days shows you daily summaries (how many feeds, total sleep, diaper count), and trends across days and weeks. You'll see your baby's feeding frequency naturally decrease as they grow, nap counts drop as they mature, and sleep consolidate — all in your own data, reflecting your own baby's unique path.
Bear Days Plus
Bear Days offers a free tier that covers the core tracking categories. Bear Days Plus raises practical limits: more child profiles, more active checklists, more attachments per supported record, and more monthly Chat credits.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Bear Days free to use?
Yes. Bear Days is free to download and use for core tracking. Bear Days Plus raises limits for child profiles, active checklists, attachments, and Chat credits.
Do I need to create an account to use Bear Days?
No. Bear Days works entirely without an account. Your data stays on your device from the first launch.
Can I track multiple children in Bear Days?
Yes. You can add multiple children and switch between them at any time.
Is my baby's data private in Bear Days?
Care records are stored on your device by default. Bear Days does not offer caregiver cloud sync today, so your baby's records stay under your control.
What does the Chat feature do?
Chat lets you describe care in natural language ("fed 4 oz formula, now sleeping") and review draft record cards before anything is saved.
Track with Bear Days
Getting started with Bear Days takes less than two minutes. Download the app, add your child, and log your first feed. The rest — the patterns, the insights, the care log that spans years of your child's life — builds itself from there, one tap at a time.
Bear Days grows with your family, from newborn tracking to toddler milestones and beyond. Your baby's story, in your hands.