Mom’s Pace — Katia Blagireva

Introduction

A data art story about motherhood & sleep

Mom’s Pace is a personal data art project that visualises how becoming a mother reshapes the rhythm of rest.

Using 1,652 nights of Apple Watch sleep data — spanning two pregnancies, two postpartum periods, and everything in between — I built a series of interactive visualisations that reveal the invisible cost of motherhood on sleep.

The Racetrack

How to read

The centrepiece is the Racetrack: an arcade-style scroll where a pixel avatar runs through 4.5 years of my nights.

Each line is one night of sleep. Gaps are awakenings.

Night 1 of 1,652, pre-pregnancy: long unbroken teal bars and the runner at the start of the track — Start · June 2021. Sleep is long, unbroken, easy. You don’t think about it yet.

Postpartum #1: the track turns purple and the bars break into fragments — Baby #1 arrives. Sleep shatters into fragments. Every 2–3 hours, awake.

Toddler phase: the runner with a child, bars growing longer again — Sleep is finally getting better — 6 and 7 hour nights are becoming the norm.

Pregnancy #2: yellow bars and a tooltip listing the segments of one night — Hover any night to see its segments.

Finish line: night 1,652 of 1,652, the runner with two children — 1,652 nights. Still running. Still going.

What to notice

You watch sleep shatter when the babies arrive — and slowly rebuild.

Six avatars, one runner

Six pixel-art avatars in circles on a gradient: Pre-Pregnancy, Pregnancy #1, Postpartum #1, Toddler, Pregnancy #2, Postpartum #2

Still running

Avg sleep: 6.0h
Total hours: 9,965
Awakenings: 4,173
Longest night: 9.6h
Shortest night: 1.3h