How Has the Baby Affected Our Phone Usage?

I'd guessed we'd spend a lot more time talking to distant family after having the baby...

Looking at the graph above, it's clear that our text messaging has increased dramatically since his birth. Note in the graph that I've centered each monthly bar around the 15th of the month. Does this translate into more time talking on the phone also?

  

Perhaps curiously, it doesn't. It actually looks like the time spent in calls has gone down. In trying to figure out what's going on, I came up with several confounding factors and I think these are the major contributors:

• Texts went up because we send pictures of the baby often.
• Texts went up around the birth because group texts were a good way to update everyone asking how things were going at the hospital.
• Texts could be higher because my wife has started using Line regularly for texts with her family and those aren't included here.
• Phone calls went down because the highest percentage of our phone calls are from me to my wife when I'm on the way to and from work (~400 minutes/month). Since she's at home and sleeping odd hours currently, we haven't made those calls since he was born.
• Phone calls went down because we are awake at odd hours so we can't call people.
• Phone calls went down because we use skype in place of the phone more regularly now as people often want to see the baby while we're talking.

I don't have an easy way to mine the data needed to test all of these unfortunately. One I can test pretty easily is if I am taking pictures with my phone more often now that we have a baby. After checking that, I found that I've taken 184 pictures with my phone. 75 of those were taken in the two months since his birth. The other 109 were taken in the 13 months before his birth. Thus, my monthly rate went from ~8/month to ~37/month, so a greater than 4x increase.

For the first two bullets about phone calls, we should be able to test this again in the spring when she's been back at work for a while. If those two are factors, we should see the phone usage spike again.