To not understand why baby's weights are converted from kg to lbs by midwives and health visitors

[reallytired]

I was born in 1975 and decimelisation happened in 1974.

My daughter (who was born in 2009) is very small for her age. We have had the health visitor come out to weigh her because she is on 0.4th centile and I find it really hard to get to clinic.

I have a lovely health visitor who converts her weight (in kg that I understand) to lbs (which is gobbly gook to me!).

My health visitor is also concerned about my weight and asked me what I weighed. I told her that I was 169cm tall and weighed 54kg. Her next question was "What that in stone?" I had to go and get a calcuator to convert it for her.

My health visitor is very talented at job. I can't fault her in any way. It does seem weird that she uses imperial units for her job. Especially as she trained after decimelisation.

kg for weight, meters for distance, except room sizes which I do in feet, and driving distances which I do in miles. I do running distances in kilometers though.

I don't really have any idea what a stone is. I have no idea how hot or cold anything is in Fahrenheit - Celsius only for temperature (or Kelvin I suppose).

1 inch = approx 2.5 cm
1 kg = approx 1/2 a pound
1 mile = approx 1.6 km
1 meter = approx 3 foot.

When baking I use lbs and oz unless it's a new cookbook which only has gms in it then I have to use grams. I was taught to bake at home using lbs and oz, I have no recollection of what we worked in at school for cookery.

I use feet and inches when measuring myself and the children and stones and pounds when weighing them.

I measure in pints not litres and I drive miles not Km.

I was born in the 70's so must have been taught litres and cms etc at school but I really don't have any recollection of it.

I'm 'bimeasurable' :)

But I just cannot do babies in KG's - it doesn't give me a 'picture' in the same way a lb and oz does - call me old fashioned possum :)

Sadly, either KG, lbs or stones all give me a far too acurate picture of my weight :(

I am old enough to not only pre-date decimalisation but to still remember some of the jingles we were taught on BBC School's Radio in the weeks leading up to D-Day:

"On the 15th day of February 1971, there will be decimal currency with a hundred pennies in the pound"

At school I was taught metric for measurements, weights etc. but at home we used imperial.

I am reasonably comfortable with either but there are certain contexts where one comes more naturally than another. Weight of people is one of those - if someone told me their weight in kilos I would have to do a quick mental calculation to understand what they meant in stones and pounds.

But it is no big deal.

BTW - the aove jingle was sung more or less ro the tune of Partridge in a Pear Tree but you have to start with three french hens

I'm the opposite, I work in kgs and always have done.... I have to ask them to translate back to kgs for me as i haven't a clue about the lbs oz thing.

it's such a fiddly method of measurement i can't understand why it's still in place, kilos are so much easier.

I always asked what mine weighed in lbs and ozs, I was born in 1977 and use both metric and imperial for weighing food ect but for weight of a person I use stones and pounds, which is also what they use at ww (well the one I went to anyway)!

I was born in 1978 and can't get my head round metric at all. I have always used imperial - find it easier to conceptualise.

Ask them to not convert it I did that when i had my children having grown up in a metric system the stones and oz meant nothing to me.

or get them to write both down. And yes metric system in the UK in mid 90'x (I arrived in 1990) This is not helped when I get an example like above "we still use pints" err no you dont it has to be in liters they just decide to stick with the pint sizes and write stupid numbers if liters so no one has any clue what 1 liter is but still knows what pints looks like..

I was born in 1979 and think in lbs and oz, inches, etc.

Well I cant do kilos either-what was wrong with stones and pounds,yards feet and inches and pounds shillings and pence.Why do we have to be clones of everyone else?I was born in 1944 btw.

I'm 25 and do stones and pounds for cooking and for weighing myself. I've a vague sense of what kilos are for weighing people as DP uses them ... can't get on with American-style pounds at all!

The good thing about stones and pounds is it means you get very good at the arithmetic when you're a small child - three four-ounce weights make 12, once we get to 16 we need the big 1lb weight, and so on. Not quite so challenging in kilos!

I use a mix of measurements although born 1980, and can tell you my weight in pounds/stones+pounds/kg [show off emoticon] although there are definitely measurements that I'm more comfortable with, e.g. I know 140 pounds is 10 stone so i work from that basis rather than being able to judge how heavy 130 pounds is iyswim.

Babies are always pounds and ounces though, my niece was born in Oz and even there they recorded her weight in both on her little certificate think thus i now know that 9lb 2 is about 4.1kg

Fahrenheit and celsius is a strange one for me, when I lived in the states I'd class anything below 80 F as cold, whereas I don't think 25 C is cold in England!

Some things are loads more sensible in metric, e.g. a litre of water weighs a kilo but in day to day life I don't find it makes that much difference which I use.

I totally agree it's bewildering. My HV has given up noting down lbs and oz for dd2 after I always asked her for what dd1's weight was in 'real' kg for my family abroad. Now she just puts down kg and I finally worked out that kg x 2.2 gives me lbs... so I can tell my UK friends who want to know {just hope this calculation is right...
If find that for a newborn, the difference between eg 6 lbs 6 and 7 lbs sounds quite dramatic when really this is just a few hundred grams which is nothing really.
Oh, and I like people who use Celsius if it's cold (-10 last night!!!) but Fahrenheit when it's warm (in the 90's today!!!) only because it sound more dramatic that way

Wheres the OP fucked off to? And what has decimilisation got to do with imperial weight measures.

I do metric, and we drive in km/h here. My car only shows km, and I get very confused when I drive north and all the signs are in m/ph! I have no idea whether I'm speeding or not.

I am still here, I just had a really busy day with two small children.

I find it sad that people who have had their education in metric do not understand kilos.

It is one thing for a health professional to convert weight to lbs for the benefit of the patient, but should the patient have to convert kilos to pounds for the benefit of a highly qualifed masters level nurse?

Why is it more sensible to have baby weight in pounds. Its far easier to work out a percentage weight loss in kilos. It is easier to plot weight in kilos on a chart.

With adult weight its much easier to work out BMI in metric than imperial.

Agree with you again . I certainly have never considered myself to weigh whatever stones it would be in the Uk... . That really is totally confusing to anyone outside the Uk. What size stone should I use to weigh myself??

because the first thing your mum/ mil/ auntie/ next door neighbour asks is "what's that in real money?"
Myh mum still tells me the temp in fahrenheit

hmm, and why do people ask you how much your newborn weighs??? It's not a roast or turkey or something... Or do they just like the 'Ouch' factor if he/she weighs in at over 8 lbs
(There you go, I did it myself, using lbs... 18 years of conditioning in the UK...)

My poor kids learned metric in the UK, with a bit of imperial for cooking (many of my cook books are imperial only). Then when we moved to the States they had to learn imperial, which seemed very odd, as surely weights and measures at school are really as a foundation for science, which uses metric world wide. Math seemed to be much more about fractions than in the UK. Anyway, we now all know what a quart is, which could come in useful someday I guess! From cooking I also know that US pints are 4oz smaller than UK ones, so I now always have to double check as I have a few US cook books - generally they use volume rather than weight so that's less of an issue (so long as you have the right measures that is).

I agree that the HC should have been able to do the conversion.

reallytired, you find it sad that people can't easily move between metric and imperial?

Honestly, you need to get a life. Go and read Watership Down or watch The Notebook of something. They will make you really sad and you can stop thinking about this.

'I find it sad that people who have had their education in metric do not understand kilos. '

Um, It's nothing to do with understanding, is it? Any more than decimalization was to do with weights?

I understand kilos perfectly well, but still prefer to uses stones and pounds - there's no moral high ground to be derived from either choice, ffs!

Do you know that it was this arguement that caused the Mars Climate Orbiter to crash land on the planet?

Differant departments were in charge of differant elements off the mission, unfortunately while most of them were working in Si units (ie; metric) the engineers from Lockheed Martin who were inputting the data for the flight path took it into their heads to use imperial and failed to inform the rest of the teams... causing one of the most embarressing and costly failures in scientific history.

especially when they then get it wrong. My dd was 6ibs 4oz at birth which we were told was 2.91kg. That's what's in her book, but 6ibs 4oz isn't = to 2.91kg.

To this day I'm not sure what her birth weight was. As she looked really small I go with the imperial figure which I believe is about 2.85kg.

Perhaps not that much in it, but annoying when you're at that paranoid stage of watching how much weight they put on. Particularly as dd wouldn't eat for the first few weeks so every oz just made me worry.