A Breastfeeding Journey by Louise Shorten

Background:
My breastfeeding journey on my first born was extremely challenging and I had to overcome many hurdles. I went on to feed her for a year and found it to be a very rewarding experience. Data collection would have been the last thing on my mind during those early days of feeding! When my second child came along, I was determined to record the data and I used the Baby Tracker app to note the time spent feeding on each side at different times during the day and night. I did this for 6 months and it was always my intention to create a visualisation using the data. At that time I also knew I wanted to create something aesthetically pleasing, a visualisation that would last as a keep-sake or momento of the connection I had with my baby and all the time I'd spent feeding. When I explored the data, a lot of the standard charts didn't seem to do the data and our journey justice. I read blogs (by https://www.flerlagetwins.com/ mainly) and learned how to create the radial charts. I published a visualisation in 2020 and the work I'm submitting now is heavily inspired by that first iteration.

Submission
The data I've used here consists of breastfeeding data from my third son and this time I recorded data for approximately 11 months. I've recently been reading about colour theory and the palette here is inspired by the idea of the colour wheel, where the two ends of the colour spectrum meet. I thought this would be a good way to represent the different months and reflect the full spectrum of emotions I've felt on each of my breastfeeding journeys.