Diane, what an interesting point.
I know that in my own mind I have been thinking of "day 2" as meaning
"between 1 and 2 days of age" ("1 day old") but I have certainly not
checked to see what the nurses in our birthing center are thinking, nor
have I discussed this potential source of confusion with mothers. None of
our doctors pays that much attention to exactly what is happening on what
day with the diapers, and neither do the nurses, as long as the baby voids
by 12 hours or so and is stooling some.
As I wrote to you in more detail off-list, "in her 90th year" was normal
usage on 18th and 19th century gravestones and would mean someone who had
died after her 89th birthday and before her 90th birthday (and of course,
"18th century" gravestones were made in the 1700s -- same problem you have
brought up!).
There are two competing ways of reckoning time involved here. Our
point-oriented statements of age ("1 day old") don't give us a tool for
talking about the first 24 hours, so we have to use another method, talking
about spans of time ("in the first day"), which happens to match the way
old gravestones -- like the obit you read -- often gave people's ages.
>I just changed my "First Week Breastfeeding Log" from "Day 1",
>"Day 2", etc to "Day 1 (before baby is 1 day old)", "Day 2 (baby
>is 1 day old)", and so on, up through "Day 7 (baby is 6 days old)."
You surely didn't bring this up in order to get quibbles about wording, but
it's a risk you ran :-)
I find the phrasing "Day 2 (baby is 1 day old)" a bit confusing since
actually I would think of the baby as "1 day old" from, say, 19 or 20 hours
to maybe around 30 hours postpartum... to me it means somewhere around that
1-day point on the timeline, not the whole span between the 1-day mark and
the 2-day mark. I don't know how many other parents would have the same
trouble with the new wording. (SSDAS [Someone Should Do A Study] Give a
bunch of people a timeline with the hours of the first week labeled on it,
and have them indicate on the timeline what period they feel is meant by
different wordings. Maybe someone *has* done such a study... can the
anthropologists in the house tell us that?)
What about saying:
First 24 hours (till baby is 1 day old)
Second 24 hours (till baby is 2 days old)
Third 24 hours (till baby is 3 days old)
and so on up through
Seventh 24 hours (till baby is 7 days old)?
Here's my reasoning: our current way of giving ages uses cardinal numbers,
often written with a numeral (not spelled out), and it uses days: "this
baby is 2 days old". So in order to differentiate as sharply as possible
between the two time-reckoning systems for purposes of charting diapers in
the first week, it might be helpful to use ordinal numbers, to spell them
out ("first" instead of "1st"), and to use hours instead of days. If that
seems too cumbersome, maybe just "first day" and "second day" etc.
(Of course, it's so nice to just say "one on day 1, two on day 2"...sigh.)
Using the phrasing "till baby is 3 days old" focuses on the point the baby
is about to reach and the numbers therefore match up (third 24 hours is up
to 3 days old) whereas when you are talking about the milestone the baby
has already reached, the numbers are one step off, as you've pointed out
(on the third day the baby is 2 days old).
What a can of worms.
Have fun!
Elise
LLLL, IBCLC
Bath, NH, USA
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