Dear Janna,
The scale our practice has used at home visits for 18 years is small
enough to fit into a bag that's already bulging with all the other stuff
a visiting nurse needs to do postpartum home visits, only costs $60 new,
is not accurate enough for pre and post -feed wts, weighs babies up to 12
lbs, and is way more comfortable for the baby than most other scales.  It
is a brass hanging scale, just like the ones that salmon fisher-folk use
to tally up their catch.  You can order them from most of the suppliers
that home birth midwives use (try Moonflower, if you can't find a
catalog, email me at work <[log in to unmask]> and I'll get you
their info. ) .  these scales are used with colorful cloth slings that
the baby lies in while you weigh him/her, and the process is so appealing
to parents, they often say, wait a minute while I get my camera!
  On the other hand, nothing beats the $1000 electronic scale we have in
our office.  If you have a very accurate scale in your office, you can
calibrate your home visit scales to that one by weighing a couple of
phone books on the fancy scale, then put the phone books in the hanging
scale and adjust the hanging scale until you get the same wt.
  Home visits are what has kept me from going to graduate school.  I love
interacting with the families in their own environments, and I don't know
of any practice where nurse practitioners--or physicians-- get to make
house calls.
Martha Johnson RN IBCLC
Eugene,Oregon
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